Examination of Witnesses (Questions 14120
- 14139)
14120. My third point is Reading versus Maidenhead.
I will not labour this too strongly because I think you have heard
it many times before. The good news is that this week Reading
Station, which as you know is the second busiest rail interchange
outside of London, was announced as due for upgrading. Within
the priority list of network Rail's ten-year business plan this
will go before government next year and be considered for funding.
There is a partnership team, including Reading Borough Council,
working on those proposals and it is certainly good news that
the business case is going off to the DfT. I remain fairly confident
that we will have a positive response in due course. The original
Crossrail proposals boasted of "crossing the capital—Connecting
the UK". Without being rude to Maidenhead, which is a fine
place, you do not connect to anywhere from Maidenhead. From Reading,
trains runs to Brighton, Gatwick, Portsmouth, Southampton, Cornwall,
Devon, Bristol, Wales, Herefordshire, Birmingham, and then there
are cross-country services operated by Virgin which take us up
to Manchester and the North. Of course, the link between Birmingham,
the busiest rail interchange, and Reading is a direct route. If
you want to connect the service genuinely to the rest of the UK,
the Maidenhead case just does not stack up because it has been
put there on cost and cost alone.
14121. In my submission we have very strong
quotes arguing for a properly constituted and visionary Crossrail
scheme to come to Reading, by Geoff Poland, the President of the
Chamber of Commerce, by Richard Duggleby, the External Relations
Director of Yell, who have their HQ in the Reading area. I firmly
believe that the case for Reading as a western terminus for Crossrail
is overwhelming and that the Promoter has simply side-stepped
the issue in their response, citing the need for the upgrade of
Reading Station and cost issues, some of which are already in
the pipeline.
14122. In conclusion, I would suggest that the
original 1992 case that Crossrail should terminate in Reading
is still valid, but only if these issues can be resolved.
14123. I cannot emphasise too strongly that
it is not worth trying to extend Crossrail from, say, Ealing Broadway,
from the West of London, to a western terminus unless the job
is done properly, unless potential is realised. Finance may be
an issue. There may be a need to phase. But of course the Transport
and Works Act device gives us the opportunity, without going through
this process again, to build on a Crossrail project—that
is much needed by London, could be needed by Reading and by the
thriving and dynamic business communities and the local companies
to the West of London—but only if the job is done properly.
14124. My last point, Chairman, is that I have
serious concerns—and Mr Binley has quite rightly sought
to draw out these figures in his questions—about the figure
of £360 million or £36 million—it actually appears
as two different figures in the evidence—from the Promoter
about the additional costs of coming to Reading. As I understand
it, the re-signalling is already in Network Rail's forward plan
and I do believe the Committee might want to probe further some
of the top-of-the-head figures you have been given today and in
previous evidence sessions.
14125. Thank you.
14126. Kelvin Hopkins: Has any been estimate
made of the likely usage of Reading as a Heathrow flyer service,
in effect, should Crossrail be connected that far? The traffic
that would come by rail to Reading and then go to Heathrow from
Reading rather than going into London and using the Heathrow flyer
coming out, and, indeed, the people who might otherwise go by
car because they do not want to go into London, has any estimate
been made of the amount of traffic that might be generated in
that way?
14127. Martin Salter: As you can see,
I have done a fair bit of homework in presenting this submission
but that is the one set of figures I do not have. Obviously it
would be within your ability to get that. There are private car
hire companies who make their living almost solely transporting
the business community from Oracle, Microsoft, Yell and the major
companies in the Reading area to London Heathrow. There are contracts
that do no more than that. There is a horrendous amount of complaints
from the business community about, for example, having to leave
the Reading area at 5.55 in the morning in order to get a nine
o'clock flight from Heathrow, and having to hang around in Heathrow
for 90 minutes, in order to miss the peak-hour traffic. As you
know, the morning peak on the M4 is now backing up, sometimes
to junction 12 and even to junction 13 at Newbury, from as early
as quarter to eight in the morning. It becomes pretty ridiculous
to seek to drive to Heathrow from my part of the world at anything
approaching peak hours. I am not aware—and I do not think
the figures would be available—of the number of passengers
that would take, as I do now, the HST services from Reading into
London and then buy a ticket on the Heathrow Express, because
you are buying two separate tickets and you cannot buy a through-ticket.
Those figures are going to be difficult to apply for, but, take
it from me, it is a huge, huge issue for people in the area.
14128. I also want to put on record that I do
not mean in any way to denigrate the excellent service that RailAir
link provides, but you will know that the priority bus measures
kick in beyond the airport turnoff from the M4, so that if you
are going to catch the RailAir link bus you will sit in the same
traffic jam as you would if you were sitting in your own car.
That is hardly an incentive for people to use the bus to get into
Heathrow airport. John Prescott's bus lane starts beyond the airport,
into the Chiswick flyover, and therefore provides us with no advantage
at all.
14129. Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr Elvin.
14130. Mr Elvin: I will not tell you
about the couple of weeks Mr Taylor and I spent in Reading promoting
a new junction on the M4.
14131. Martin Salter: You need to raise
your game then.
14132. Mr Elvin: We need to speak to
the borough council about that one.
14133. I am going to call Mr Berryman because
I think it might be helpful for the Committee to hear a bit about
Heathrow. I am going to do that with this caveat: the instruction
which the Committee has had from the House does not extend to
covering an extension from Heathrow to Reading. The instruction
which the Commons has given to the Committee relates to Maidenhead
to Reading not Heathrow. The issue of Heathrow to Reading therefore
falls outside the scope of the instruction. Nonetheless, so that
at least you get the picture from outside, I am going to call
Mr Berryman to give you some further information on Heathrow.
Mr Keith Berryman, Recalled
Examined by Mr Elvin
14134. Mr Elvin: Mr Berryman, of course
is sworn and is well known to the Committee. Mr Berryman, can
I start by asking you what sort of thing you perceive as the benefits
of Crossrail, as proposed, to take it to Heathrow. What is it
going to do and why is it beneficial?
(Mr Berryman) The benefits
of Crossrail going to Heathrow are to provide a through link from
the airport into the city centre and to other parts in East London.
As the Petitioner said in his evidence, we are proposing to subsume
the existing Heathrow Connect service. Because we have to provide
an additional flyover at Heathrow in order to allow that service
to still run, because the layout presently is unsuitable for trains
going from relief lines into the airport, we are going to upgrade
that to four trains a day. This is by agreement with BAA who are
obviously very anxious about how people get to and from their
airport. We do know, however, that the number of passengers who
will use Crossrail to get from the airport to destinations beyond
the West End (in other words, to the City and to Canary Wharf)
is very small. It is a very noisy group of people. It is a group
of people who have constantly campaigned for Crossrail to go to
Heathrow. But when you do the traffic analysis the numbers are
very low and would not justify a service to Heathrow were it not
for the fact that we have to build this flyover in any event to
allow Crossrail services to run.
14135. Can I ask you about the number of Connect
services there are at the minute.
(Mr Berryman) There are two Connect services
an hour and there will be four Connect services an hour when we
start.
14136. So there will be an increase in service
in any event?
(Mr Berryman) There will
be an increase in service in any event, and the other thing is
that we will solve the problem which BAA have of how to serve
Terminal 4 after Terminal 5 opens because the intention is that
the Heathrow Express service will go to Terminal 5 and we will
link to Terminal 4. It may be conceivable in the future that we
will provide a service to Terminal 5, but that is not the intention
at the present time. We know that the overwhelming majority of
people who arrive and who use train services from airports, and
I know this from my experience, are actually arriving passengers,
so it is people who are distant originators who will use public
transport. They will tend, most of them, to be going to central
London of course. It is very difficult to attract people from
the hinterland of an airport to make their way to the airport
by public transport and the reason is that they tend to be rather
diffuse, they are spread over a wide area. Mr Salter's evidence
mentioned that there are 158,000 people who currently use the
RailAir service from Reading Station and that, I reckon, comes
to about 530 a day. That would be about 10 per train on the Crossrail
network. Even if we accept that those numbers would double or
quadruple, the numbers would still not be enough to justify the
construction of a dedicated loop for this route.
14137. Can I also ask you, Mr Berryman, whether
there are any technical issues with a western connection?
(Mr Berryman) There are
indeed. It is quite a complex area. You will be aware of the existence
of the M25 and M4 junction immediately to the west of Heathrow
Airport, and the Airtrack line is designed to swing to the south
to avoid that and avoid those roads and join up with South West
Trains' lines. To swing to the north, there are many more obstructions
and it is much more difficult. I would repeat my mantra, that
nothing is impossible in terms of engineering, but it would cost
a lot of money to do that.
14138. Mr Elvin: Thank you very much,
Mr Berryman.
Cross-examined by Martin Salter
14139. Martin Salter: I think, Mr Berryman,
you seem to have shot your own fox here. You are basically saying
you have a very small group of noisy passengers who would travel
onwards through London, who have obviously lobbied heavily for
this, to the City and the rest of it, so why are you prioritising
when we already have a very good Heathrow Express service which
you may, by your own admission, run in competition with because
you are talking about a time in the future running to Terminal
5? Why are you prioritising the eastern link into Heathrow, which
we already have, when in fact the gaping gap in the system is
the western link into Heathrow? Do you not think it is a rather
bold statement to actually say that the numbers are not sufficient
purely citing the RailAir service? I know perfectly well that
the RailAir link is inappropriate for business traffic. Do you
know better than the business community of Reading? Do you know
better than the chief executives of Microsoft or Yale? Do you
know better than the chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce
when the business community of Reading is crying out for a rail
link to the west into Heathrow Airport? We cannot base a case
or we cannot knock down a case purely on one method of transport.
We would have to look, as Kelvin implied in his questions, at
the number of passenger journeys that are coming into Reading
and then transferring on to the Heathrow Express to come back
out again, we have to look at the number of car parks and we have
to look at the capacity for the private hire trade that are providing
currently access to Heathrow before we start making very bold
statements like that.
(Mr Berryman) The fact of
the matter is that in any company the number of people who do
international travel tends to be confined to the senior executives
and very high-level people in the company, but their numbers tend
to be very small. I have not done any work at all on Reading in
this matter, but we have certainly done a lot of work in the City
and what we found out is that if I go to a meeting of bankers,
they will say to me that the most important thing is a link from
the City to Heathrow. When you actually dig into it, how many
of them would use it? It is penny packets, it is very, very small
numbers. Now, I accept that it is very inconvenient for people
to have to use private hire cars in these instances, but the fact
of the matter is that to justify a railway which has very expensive
capital works, you need to have a lot of passengers. I used the
RailAir figure merely as an illustration, but we are not talking
about huge numbers. Even if there was a tenfold increase, it still
would not be a significant amount of people in terms of a railway
operation.
|
