Examination of Witnesses (Questions 16840
- 16859)
16840. Greenwich—Committee Decision: The
major issue arising from Petitions in the Greenwich area was the
need for a station at Woolwich. We will refer to this issue in
detail in our report. At this time we wish to state that we have
carefully examined all the evidence put before us and we are clearly
convinced of the essential need for a Crossrail station in Woolwich,
an area which includes some of the poorest wards in the United
Kingdom. We noted that the Promoter's calculations of cost of
this station showed that it would provide exceptional value for
money and we require the Promoters to bring forward the necessary
additional provision to add this to the Bill. We would also ask
the Promoters to work with the local Council to ensure that the
Crossrail station is fully integrated into the local transport
infrastructure.
16841. Promoter's Response: The Promoter recognises
that a strong case has been made for a station at Woolwich. In
the light of the Committee's decision, the Promoter has looked
over the summer at the design of a station to explore ways of
reducing its very high cost. A key reason why the station would
be expensive to build is the depth of the running tunnels. A shallower
station would be possible if the running tunnels in that area
were nearer to the surface. This appears, in principle, to be
feasible although much more detailed work would be needed to understand
the wider environmental consequences. The cost of a shallower
station would be of the order of £200m. The Promoter has
given very serious consideration to the Committee's decision.
As the Promoter has made clear, the key issue is affordability.
The challenge in funding Crossrail is huge and the Promoter is
engaged in an intensive value management process to bear down
heavily on the cost of the project. The revised tunnelling and
depot strategies are a result of that process and will yield substantial
savings. The Promoter believes it is vital to continue to develop
a Crossrail project that can be delivered in order to secure the
benefits that it will bring. The Promoter does not believe that
adding £200m to the cost of Crossrail can be justified and
cannot therefore accept the Committee's decision."
16842. Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed, Ms Lieven. First of all I am going to say that we will
take away this document and read it as a Committee and go through
it line by line, but I can tell you that already it is pretty
obvious that we are going to have to come back here because our
instructions are on the decisions we have made that it is for
you to go away and build them into the proposals which come back.
Clearly, in the case of 17.1 and 17.2 that is not the case. You
have come back and said that you do not accept our decision. While
we fully understand you are not the Promoters for Crossrail and
you act on their behalf, it is not for Crossrail or anybody else
to take the decision on that. It is for this Committee to take
the decision and if there are any changes to be made to the decision
on the Bill it will be made by the Committee itself or, when it
leaves this Committee, on the floor of the House, and there it
will be either set in stone or not, as the case may be. It is
impossible to give a full response to this now. We will have to
go away and digest it, discuss it among ourselves and then come
back here with our response to it, and we will do that at the
earliest possibility, but we warn you that people on a Committee
such as this do not take kindly to being told that you are not
going to accept their decision because that is not your role at
all. Anyway, we will move on to the first case. Thank you very
much.
16843. Ms Lieven: Thank you, sir.
The Petition of Ms Ann-Marie Cousins.
The Petitioners appeared in person.
16844. Ms Lieven: Sir, just a brief factual
outline. If I can have put up the relevant map, Ms Cousins' own
house and garden are at 71 Abbey Grove, which is to the west of
Abbey Wood station. It is not easy to see on that map but it is
being pointed out in outline where the site is and you can see
the middle of that map is Abbey Wood, which the Committee will
remember is at the end of the terminus of the south east branch
of Crossrail.
16845. That is the general outline. If I can
then put up the plan that shows the two plots concerned, the plots
are outlined in yellow, two plots at the end of Ms Cousins' garden.
The Committee can see plot 217 and plot 219.[1]
You can see from the photograph above that it is outlined in red
where the land affected is. The two plots are affected slightly
differently. Plot 217 is required permanently for works, including
the widening of the railway to four tracks and the erection of
an acoustic barrier. Plot 219 is only required temporarily, primarily
for sewer diversion works, and Mr Berryman will explain them.
You can see from the photographs that Ms Cousins' garden is a
slightly unusual shape. It widens out at the end and in that widened
section at the end she has constructed a fairly large garden building
which I think is used as a playroom and outbuilding to the main
house. We will have to demolish that garden building during construction,
for which, of course, she will receive full compensation. It is
not possible to reconstruct it during the construction phase because
there is nowhere else on the site that is big enough to put it
on, but it would be possible to reconstruct a very similar building
at the end of the construction phase.
16846. I should have said a moment ago that
the Committee will remember that the tracks down to Abbey Wood
have to be widened to four tracks to allow the railway to operate,
so we are in a situation where, certainly in our case, there is
absolutely no alternative but to take this land. We have looked
at it very carefully and there is quite simply no alternative,
but at least the good news is that Ms Cousins will receive full
compensation for the land that is taken.
16847. I hope that is sufficient in opening
and I will be calling Mr Berryman to explain why we need the land
and what we need to do on it.
16848. Chairman: Ms Cousins?
16849. Ms Cousins: Thank you. First of
all what I would like to do before I introduce myself and what
I would like to do is to say a big "thank-you" to Yemi
Akinyemi from Crossrail and David Walker from Winckworths, the
solicitors, and that is because they have really supported me.
I want to make my presentation. I have been very nervous and overwhelmed
by it and they have made it clear that if I want a voice I do
have a voice and they have been so patient, especially David,
in re-scheduling me and saying, "If you want to do it come
and do it". I would just like to get that out of the way,
thank you very much.
16850. My purpose is to not to go through the
petition as is because it is written down and I do not want just
to go over old ground, but obviously if there are any questions
those will come up later. What I want to do is break up what I
want to say into about three sections and talk about me and my
family, our property and summarise the key fears that I have about
this development and any promises that are being made.
16851. Who am I? I am a single parent. I have
two wonderful girls aged 10 and seven and we have lived at 71
Abbey Grove since 1989. That is important. I have not just moved
there. I have a long-standing history in that community. I have
no plans to leave. This is something that the neighbours are considering,
"If this is going to go ahead it is big business against
a small person. We have to leave". For some people it is
not that easy to uproot and start again. I have been committed
to the borough, even at the time of the 17% interest rate, just
to show you some of the difficulties I have gone through when
house prices went high. I have survived that and I really would
like to survive this as well.
16852. I work for Greenwich Council and I am
a Justice of the Peace. I am active in the community, for example,
with the local church and with helping develop the youth group.
I have helped to develop the supplementary school in the borough
and over-50s projects for African-Caribbean and African over-50s
elders in the community, so I am very much embedded in that community.
16853. When we come home the last thing the
children and I need is to feel restricted. Part of the difficulty
that I have is that I really do not know what we are going to
be left with, because if you look at Crossrail's response they
use words like "approximate", and so I really do not
know. Just to quickly respond to this full compensation, whatever
that will be, it is not about the money. It has taken a lot to
get where we are.
16854. To help you to understand a bit more
about the property—and I love that aerial view; I am actually
going to keep it as one of my photo album pictures, so thank you
for that as well—and show you the ground level view of our
area I have seven photos that you can scan in apparently and I
will briefly explain them. This is Abbey Grove, I live there.[2]
Yes, we have all the other problems with graffiti and so on and
it gets cleaned off, but that is part and parcel of our community.
That is where I live, I am happy. When I first moved in this was
the view, going back to around 1990, straight through to the back.
There was not anything there.[3]
It has taken me years to get to a position, if we move on to other
slides, where I could build those two constructions. The garden
is a used garden. We use it through the seasons. These were taken
when the children were young. Remember, they are 10 and seven
now. I did not deliberately go and take photos for this.[4]
I have raided my albums. That is spring when we are out in the
garden, summer we are out in the garden. It is well used. Even
at that time you can see if you look straight down the garden
those structures were not there. On the next slide, autumn, we
are out there with fireworks, whatever; we use our garden. There
is a winter one as well. We are out there; that is not space that
is locked away or we are cooped up in the house. I might be but
the kids are outside anyway. We use that space. They are probably
in their school clothes there and I was trying to figure out:
was this after school or before school? Knowing my children, if
it was fresh snow they would have been out there first thing in
the morning.
16855. The next slide is bringing you right
up to date to this year. What I was meant to be trying to photograph
was the plant in the foreground. It was my child's homework. At
the end of the summer term they brought home a little seedling
that they had in cotton wool in the bottom of a plastic tub. We
have all done it in school; I do not care what age you are now:
think back, we have all done that. We nurtured it and it grew
and there it is. It is growing up a little bit on the window sill
and I just wanted to take that for my daughter but it shows the
view about a year and a half, two years ago, when those structures
were finally put up.
16856. Just to tell you a bit more about those
structures, they are not wooden. They are breezeblock and brick
and concrete. I went through a terrible planning and building
control process. We had to dig down a certain depth for the foundation.
I nearly gave up because of the costs which that incurred as well.
We have some very large trees as you can see from this aerial
view, so therefore to meet planning and building controls you
have to dig down a certain depth.[5]
They are not simple constructions this has thrown up. This is
a large garage with a toilet and it leads into a cesspit midway,
roughly where the darker grey area on the ground meets the lighter
area. The darker trees in the middle obscure it but there is actually
a cesspit dug down there, God knows how many feet into the ground.
It is a functional toilet. We could not build it into the main
toilet supply because it would be going uphill and, as building
control said, "We do not pump you-know-what uphill",
or something like that, so we had to have a cesspit.
16857. I have been through quite a number of
hurdles being a single parent, so it has taken me a while to get
there. I really do have an affinity for what I am trying to achieve
there and what I am doing in the community, and so now to hear
that that is possibly (and to what extent I am still not too sure)
going to be taken away from us is a difficulty. My children learned
to ride their bikes in the garden. As I say, this is a real live
situation. This is how we live. I did not have to have them out
on the street. You can see the street on the other side of the
photo. They learned to ride in the garden and not fall off. I
could be at the kitchen window and monitor them. Now they are
older, yes, with their friends they can go up and down the street
but at least they are not falling on anyone's cars and damaging
anyone's property. I think it is important to accept that.
16858. Moving on to my fears and loss of amenity,
as I said, it is all in the petition. I have already mentioned
the concern about the building and the work that is done and the
amount of land we may or may not get back at the end; I am not
sure about that. To me, looking at this property and what I have
done, as they say, an Englishman's home is his castle. That is
how I feel about this. This is a very large project, not just
the Abbey Wood end. During the consultation, and I think things
like this will happen with large projects, I was actually sent
an invite to the Whitechapel consultation, not to the Abbey Wood
one, so even in the development stages there were issues about
us not knowing what was going on in Abbey Wood. It was through
a neighbour saying, "Oh, did you hear about this? Why were
you not at the meeting?", and I was not even aware of it.
When I look back and think that this was addressed to "The
Occupier". This is something so specific you should know
who the people are that are liaising with the local authority
and so on, but it is not addressed to individuals; it is sent
to the occupier and there are risks of miscommunication as well.
16859. I have also had a history of previous
complaints with Network Rail. That is not Crossrail; it is Network
Rail, the local supplier. I notice a lot is said about noise.
It is not so much the noise; it is the vibration. That was one
of the concerns I have had to raise over the years with Network
Rail. When the freight vehicles go up and down that line, if you
are in bed you are rocked. If you need to be rocked to go to sleep
it is fantastic. If you do not it is a nuisance and I have had
to raise complaints about being in bed and being woken up at 5.30,
a ridiculous hour in the morning, when these freight trains have
gone down the line. It has taken MP involvement and so on before
you get responses. I then thought, "Oh, they have resolved
the problem, so where or how are they going to transport the freight?
Are they going on the roads?". What they have done is to
shift the time of day, so when I am at home in the holidays or
have time off work or whatever it is coming along during the day.
I have survived. I went to Jamaica once and I survived the earthquake,
five-point-something on the Richter scale, and what I feel in
the house with the bed shaking and so on is similar to that to
me.
1 Committee Ref: A 191, Oblique aerial photograph
showing location of garden building at 71 Abbey Grove (GRCHLB-13303-002). Back
2
Committee Ref: A 191, Abbey Grove (SCN-20061011-028). Back
3
Committee Ref: A 191, View of back garden at 71 Abbey Grove in
1990 (SCN-20061011-028). Back
4
Committee Ref: A 191, Petitioners use of back garden at 71 Abbey
Grove (SCN-20061011-029 to -034). Back
5
Committee Ref: A 191, Oblique aerial photograph showing location
of garden building at 71 Abbey Grove (GRCHLB-13303-002). Back
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