Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
RT HON.
RUTH KELLY
MP AND MR
ROBERT DEVEREUX
24 OCTOBER 2007
Q60 Mr Wilshire: Page 183, paragraph
11.71, is where you are reporting on aviation safety and your
involvement in the switch towards European safety arrangements
as distinct from the United Kingdom. One understands that. There
has been, as I am sure you know, a degree of anxiety expressed
within the aviation industry about European standards being at
risk of being lower than national standards. In four you say you
have been working through our seat on the management board of
the EASA. Can you assure us that at no point in all of what has
happened during the period of this report that we now have any
lower standards than we used to have under national arrangements?
Mr Devereux: I think I can. All
that has passed to EASA so far from memory is approval of aircraft
type, the A380. Nothing else has so far passed. I am well aware
of your views that we share about the importance of EASA having
the right confidence to take anything else beyond what they have
already got and that is exactly what the United Kingdom is intending
to do.
Q61 Chairman: Is there a clear indication
they have a proper budget now?
Mr Devereux: I believe they do.
We put a lot of effort into ensuring that they have proper business
planning arrangements, budgetary control and also some growing—
Chairman: As a supplementary to Mr Wilshire's
question on that, you are aware that EASA, unlike its predecessor,
has increased the costs of engineering checks on aircraft to such
an extent that it may be many people will try and avoid building
them in. This has been raised by the department. I am not going
to ask you too much about it now but I have raised this personally
with the department and if it has a direct effect on safety it
will not be helpful.
Q62 Mr Wilshire: For the next one
I cannot give you a reference because I cannot find it. It is
a question of why I cannot find it because I have looked in your
environment section and your rail section. You are seeking to
improve the environment. One of the ways is to deal with surface
access problems at Heathrow. Why does not Airtrack figure in any
of your thinking and planning in this report?
Ruth Kelly: It does. I do not
know whether it is in this report and I am afraid I cannot answer
that question but we do see Airtrack as making an important contribution
to passenger access to Heathrow.
Q63 Mr Wilshire: Does that mean that
in the next report we will see a commitment to funding it?
Mr Devereux: At the moment I believe
the Airport Authority is working with Network Rail to decide exactly
what the scheme is and what it would cost. When we know what it
does and whether it is worth it, we will give you an answer to
the question.
Q64 Mr Wilshire: Finally, can I draw
your attention to pages 134 and 135 which are very specific Heathrow
matters? At the bottom of 134, paragraph 8.24, you are talking
about modelling work and you say, " ... which we expect to
complete in spring 2007." Have you completed it?
Mr Devereux: We have completed
it. It is a prerequisite for any consultation on development at
Heathrow.
Q65 Mr Wilshire: It is done and ready?
Ruth Kelly: It is done and the
full evidence will be presented in a consultation paper I hope
later this year.
Mr Devereux: It took longer than
spring 2007 but it is done by October 2007.
Q66 Mr Wilshire: In paragraph 8.25
at the top of the next page you say, "In parallel, we have
worked with BAA." I believe that to be sensible but I am
sure you will be aware that there are those who say it was entirely
wrong and a matter for judicial review that you worked with BAA.
Are you comfortable with the fact that you did the right thing?
Ruth Kelly: When I came to this
department one of my priorities was and is to get the department
to work better with outside organisations rather than be closed
to their input in the development of policy. I see working with
BAA and other people who know what is happening in the Heathrow
area and can provide and help us get the best possible evidence
base as absolutely essential to the development of good policy
and, incidentally, not just at Heathrow but in any area of policy
that the department may look at.
Q67 Mr Wilshire: You will therefore
have looked at the criticism levied at you and you are content
that you can answer that satisfactorily?
Ruth Kelly: Indeed.
Mr Devereux: The Air Transport
White Paper made perfectly clear that in order to develop propositions
about Heathrow we would have to work with people who had some
of the data. If you think about this paragraph, it is talking
about public road traffic modelling and what the Airport Authority
can and cannot do with parking, drop offs etc., is immaterial
in effect to what happens to road traffic. It is simply not in
the gift of people sitting in Whitehall to say, "It will
work like this."
Q68 Mr Wilshire: I can only repeat
that I agree with you but there are those who do not and I think
it is important that we address the criticism from those who think
you should not be doing it. Paragraph 8.26 on page 135: "We
are planning full public consultation in 2007." When are
you going to start it? What form is it going to take and for how
long will it run?
Ruth Kelly: The precise date has
not been set yet but I expect to proceed to consultation later
this year.
Q69 Mr Wilshire: It still will be
this year? That has not slipped?
Ruth Kelly: No.
Q70 Mr Martlew: I was thinking what
I had to moan about. I was looking round the constituency and
the A74 between my constituency and the Scottish border is being
made into a motorway. You have just given the go ahead for a northern
development road and the village called Temple Sowerby on the
A66 has just had a bypass and they have been waiting 30 years.
It was ahead of schedule. I did come up with something. When you
were first made Secretary of State—I think it was your first
Question Time—I asked you a question about the high speed
link to the north and you were very dismissive of that. If you
look at the Eddington report, while he dismisses Maglev, he does
not dismiss the high speed train at all. The reality is that we
have a capacity problem on the west coast main line. There will
be some improvements in the future but we do need to increase
capacity. A high speed line is not unusual in this country because
we have got one of course and the Queen will hopefully be opening
St Pancras very soon. It is a tried and tested type of technology.
Why is your department dead set against a high speed train to
the north?
Ruth Kelly: We are not dead set
against a high speed rail link. It was not the right answer for
now.
Q71 Chairman: Half dead set?
Ruth Kelly: Let me explain myself
more fully. If you follow the Eddington analysis, his basic point
was that, as an island nation which is relatively small, we have
pretty good connectivity between our major cities. You can get
from London to Manchester and back in a day, for example. In other
countries such as France, for example, that is not necessarily
the case. Our basic connectivity is good. The big challenges that
he identified for our system going forward were capacity and how
we meet the challenge of increasing capacity but also improving
reliability for people. He identified reliability, which I do
not think we thought about nearly enough in the past, as a really
big issue for passengers. It is something that we intend to correct
going forward. The question is: if you have a finite transport
budget which of course we do, even though we now have the long
term funding guideline in place, what is the best way to use that
to maximise the increase in capacity and to maximise the effect
on reliability? We set out a funding plan for five years which
I think tackles those pinch points, invests in the necessary infrastructure
and signalling which will help improve train frequencies, which
puts on additional carriages, platform lengthening and so forth.
As we move forward to the next period, if the railway continues
to grow as it is growing at the moment, which is very rapidly
after decades of decline, it may be that a high speed link is
the appropriate answer to that. I am completely with Eddington
here. Rather than jumping to the solution, we should think about
what the actual problem is. If the problem for instance is the
link between London and Birmingham, we should look at the high
speed option against the road widening option, against better
use of the road network, and think about what stacks up best in
value for money benefit cost terms. It may be that high speed
is the answer but we do not need to make that decision yet and
we will make it at the appropriate time.
Q72 Mr Martlew: It is the time that
worries me, Secretary of State. I accept that we can overcome
the capacity problems on the railway in the medium term but a
project of, say, building a high speed link from London to Manchester
would take, I would think, beyond ten years. Can you give us some
indication of what the timescale will be, when that decision will
be taken about how we are going to deal with the capacity problems
of the future?
Ruth Kelly: Again, it very much
depends on what happens to rail growth per se. One thing
we are not very good at is trying to predict what is happening
to rail patronage 10, 20 or 30 years from now, which is why we
deliberately took the view: let us concentrate on getting the
first five year period right up to 2014 and then think again,
before the end of that period clearly, about what the next investment
should be. If rail continues to grow or indeed grows faster than
we predict, it may be that we will need to consider this for the
next control period. What I am not going to do now is somehow
anticipate what is likely to happen to rail patronage over the
next seven years.
Q73 Mr Martlew: When you gave the
negative answer to the Chamber, you have now looked at it again
and it is not being ruled out.
Ruth Kelly: I hope I did not give
the impression that it was ruled out. It did not seem the best
use of £30 billion in the first control period, the period
of the Rail White Paper and funding commitments. I think people
often assume that a high speed rail link is incredibly good for
journey times and the environment. Neither of those is necessarily
the case. The high speed rail link that stops at every station,
no matter what speed it does between stops, is not going to shorten
your end to end journey time that much. It will be good or bad
for the environment depending on the power source that is used
to make it go.
Q74 Mr Martlew: This is the bit that
worries me about the thinking of the department. You threw in
a figure of £30 billion. Where does that figure come from?
Ruth Kelly: That is officials'
best estimate.
Q75 Mr Martlew: Where will this high
speed link go?
Ruth Kelly: I think that is assuming
a high speed link right up to Scotland.
Q76 Mr Martlew: This is all the way
to Glasgow?
Ruth Kelly: In the Rail White
Paper we specifically said that we need to look at the London/Birmingham
corridor if there was a significant increase in rail patronage.
Q77 Mr Martlew: That would not be
£30 billion?
Ruth Kelly: Clearly not. That
is why it might be a more viable option.
Q78 Mr Hollobone: Can I bring you
back to the infamous table A8 on page 218 and draw your attention
to the funding per head for the East Midlands and the eastern
region compared to the south east and the English average? You
will see that in 2001/2 the figures were broadly the same for
all of those, ranging between £86 to £89 per head. In
2006/7 the numbers are of course much higher, which is to be welcomed,
but the south east figure has zoomed up to £198 a head compared
to just 112 for eastern and 145 for the East Midlands. I have
two questions relating to this. One is why has the south east
been moved so much further ahead? The second is why is the East
Midlands and the eastern region going to see their funding effectively
cut for 2007/8?
Ruth Kelly: Clearly, different
regions will fare differently from one period to the next period,
depending on what the most cost effective investments are at any
one time. I also do not think this table includes local transport
spending which over that period has doubled in the East Midlands
and has doubled in every region. In the future we have, as has
been done in the last couple of years, committed to a regional
funding allocation process which is based on the number of people
in each region rather than on any other, more sophisticated metric.
The issue is, I suppose, looking at this that that is where the
problems have been identified and where the investment has taken
place accordingly. It is very difficult to read too much into
this table because partly investment in any year will depend on
what the historic investment levels have been, whether or not
there are motorway networks for example in the region and what
the needs are at any particular time.
Q79 Mr Hollobone: What I put to you,
Secretary of State, is that people in the East Midlands, which
is where I am from, and the eastern region are feeling huge transport
pressures at the moment not least because these are the two regions
affected particularly harshly by immigration. How quickly do you
feed into your future funding plans the figures from the Office
of National Statistics, some more of which we have had today?
Ruth Kelly: We always use the
best possible available figures from the ONS. For instance, the
latest projections for housing growth will have fed into the high
level output specification for the railways and of course we use
the best figures that are available.
| 
