Select Committee on Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 18220 - 18239)

  18220. Our allotments are a cushy option for Crossrail being nice and flat and free of buildings. We believe the Acton diveunder could be constructed without destroying the Noel Road allotments if the Promoters were prepared to think a little more creatively and go to a little bit more trouble in considering alternatives. When we were first shown Crossrail's plans they stated the project would need far more land than is now threatened. Originally my son's local primary school was to lose one third of its playing fields, three sports fields were to be taken and another allotment site to the east. We then found that the recent additional provisions have withdrawn the requests for these areas. We ask that one more small area is withdrawn from the list of lands required, and that is the Noel Road allotments.

  18221. Mr Liddell-Grainger: Thank you. Ms Lieven?

  18222. Ms Lieven: Sir, I am not going to ask any questions. I will call Mr Berryman, if I may.

  Mr Keith Berryman, Sworn

  Examined by Ms Lieven

  18223. Mr Berryman, I have the plan up from the Supplementary Environmental Statement.[23] Can you explain why it is that we need the land at Acton Yard?

  (Mr Berryman): Here is the site of the proposed diveunder which will take Crossrail trains underneath the entrance to the freight depot. The frequency of the Crossrail trains and the length and type of trains which use this depot would make operation of both these counter services incompatible unless a diveunder is provided, and this is one of the major pieces of infrastructure on the western part of the Crossrail route. In order to build that, we need to have work sites nearby. We are intending to use this area up here, and indeed the area that the Petitioner pointed to, but the problem is that this diveunder will have to be built around live railways, it involves big pieces of plant and kit, and working in very short possession periods, as you know this railway is electrified and is very busy so we have short duration periods to get on to it, and we need to have work space close enough to the diveunder to enable that to be effectively managed. On the western end of the diveunder we intend to use this piece of land which, as the Petitioner has pointed out, is the existing railway land, but unfortunately, despite quite a lot of effort to try and do so, we have not been able to get away from the need to use this bit of land here as open storage and assembly areas and so on for the equipment.

  18224. So just to be clear on one point the Petitioner made, would it be possible to simply swap and use the replacement allotment site for our work site instead of the existing allotment site?

   (Mr Berryman): No, that is too far away from the site to be used for the uses we have in mind. That would be suitable for a storage area or as offices and so on but, as the Petitioner has pointed out, there are plenty of other areas around within the existing railway depot which we can use for those purposes, so that site would be too far away for the uses we anticipate to make for this site here.

  18225. Going back to the allotment site, mention was made by the Petitioner that we were only going to use the southern part of the allotment site. Can you explain the position on that, please?[24]

  (Mr Berryman): Well, the Petitioner is right, the northern part of the allotment site would probably not be needed. The difficulty is that it is going to be very difficult to get into that northern part once we start work here. There will not be any access from Noel Road into the allotment site. In fact, I understand that the pictures of the well-used and I have to say very good and very nice allotments are mainly in the southern part, in any event. Most of the ones towards the north are less well-developed and less well-used. I am not trying to suggest this is not a well-used site; we are aware it is a very valuable and well-used site.

  18226. And has Crossrail looked hard at whether or not there are alternatives to using that site?

   (Mr Berryman): We have. We have spent a great deal of effort on this area generally. As the Petitioner pointed out we have drawn back considerably from what was in the original Bill as a result of AP3, and there is another allotment area which has affected the Great Western allotment, I think it is called from memory, in the middle, which we were originally going to take quite a big piece of. We have managed by dint of strenuous effort to reduce that to quite a small triangle which we will be taking, and I think three allotments will be affected, and that is the best we are able to do.

  18227. Can we then move on to the other side of this, which is what we are going to do to help the allotment holders on the new site?

   (Mr Berryman): I think the first point I ought to make is that the existing allotments, after our work has finished, will revert to being allotments, there is no question of any permanent occupation of that site, but our temporary occupation will be for a number of years, so that is the issue.

  18228. Mrs James: I have to make this point, but if this allotment was not conveniently there, what would you do? If this was a built-on site and it was not there, what would you have done in the circumstances?

   (Mr Berryman): Well, it is a hypothetical situation --

  18229. If the allotment had been built on when there was a previous plan to build on it you would have lost this option. You just would not have had the option of moving in for a couple of years and taking over the allotment.

   (Mr Berryman): Yes. We would have had to think of another way of doing it.

  18230. I think it is the allotmenteers' problem. It is hard cheese on the allotmenteers that they are there, but "Oh well, they can be temporarily moved because it is convenient".

   (Mr Berryman): I would not put it quite like that. There are other locations on the project where there are buildings close to the railway where we have had to fundamentally alter the design. It has not been before this Committee but --

  18231. You have moved people out of buildings and inconvenienced them for two years and asked them to move back in?

   (Mr Berryman): There are several places like that, yes, but there are a number of places where we have altered the design—I do not mean the design of the detail but the whole design of the scheme, because of problems like that.

  18232. I do feel sorry for the allotmenteers.

   (Mr Berryman): We are very sympathetic to them and want to try to put them in a position as best we can where they are as little affected as possible.

  18233. Mr Binley: Can I ask two questions, because this concerns me too. The first is, and I do not mean this in any sense as a deprecatory remark, but have you ever had an allotment?

   (Mr Berryman): I have never been in that fortunate position. I have spent most of my life traipsing round the world --

  18234. I am not trying to say that you must have one but my second question leads on from that because my father had what he called "40 pole of garden ground" and he worked assiduously at it and he nurtured it, and the use of an allotment is about how much work over a long number of years has been put into it. Do you fully appreciate that?

   (Mr Berryman): Yes, I think we do. We understand that that is the issue and we understand that that is a problem with moving an allotment; it is not like moving a caravan or something like that.

  18235. You cannot just have the same thing by simply moving from one piece of land to the other. That is the point I need to know you fully appreciate.

   (Mr Berryman): We do understand that point and what we are trying to do, as I will come on to in a moment, is to make the transition as nearly adequate as we can, but we recognise that it is never going to be ideal.

  18236. Sir Peter Soulsby: Can you tell me a little bit more about what you plan to put on the site? You talk about storage and assembly.

   (Mr Berryman): The dimension between the rail and the edge of the allotments is just over 10m. There will be a diaphragm retaining wall running along, and what we need to do is to have the plant running up and down that 10m strip and it needs to be assembled, it is made up of very large elevations, and we need to assemble the reinforcement cages and things like that to drop into the trenches for the diaphragm walls when they are built. So it is a question of really assembling very large pieces of kit and very large elements of the structure to drop them in in the short periods of time which we have available during the railway possessions.

  18237. Mr Liddell-Grainger: So is it 30 feet from the existing line, or from the new site lines?
  (Mr Berryman): I believe it is a bit over 30 feet, nearer 40, from the existing line to the edge of the allotments, but the new line will go more or less in the same position as the existing line.

  18238. Sir Peter Soulsby: So you are not saying it is impossible to do it without taking this land, but very inconvenient?
  (Mr Berryman): Extremely inconvenient, yes. I would say it would perhaps require a fundamental re-think of how we tackle this problem of the freight yard.

  18239. Mr Liddell-Grainger: Would you anticipate a danger to the people working with machines around them?

   (Mr Berryman): If they were still there, yes, there certainly would be.


23   Crossrail Ref: P135, Supplementary Environmental Statement, Acton Main line Station and Yard-Revised Scheme and Impacts (SCN-20070125-018). Back

24   Committee Ref: A203, Aerial view of Parcels 156 and 157 owned by the Great Western Allotment Association (SCN-20070125-020). Back


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2007
Prepared 14 November 2007