Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-319)
MR SHASHI
VERMA AND
MR STEVE
BURTON
5 DECEMBER 2007
Q300 Mr Hollobone: When is Oyster
going to be extended to the overground lines from south and south-east
London?
Mr Verma: We extended the Oyster
to London Overground on 11 November. We are extending it to three
train operating companies, Chiltern, c2c and the West Anglian
services on the One railway in January 2008. The remainder will
come in at some point in 2009.
Q301 Mr Hollobone: What has been
the problem with getting those rail companies to be part of the
scheme?
Mr Verma: This has been under
discussion since before Oyster was launched and at successive
stages the Mayor has had to sweeten his offer to the train operating
companies to come on board. Last year the Mayor and the Secretary
of State agreed a deal where the Mayor will pay for all the equipment
which needs to be installed when the train operating companies
start accepting Oyster, and likewise the Secretary of State will
pay for the acceptance of all the equipment which is required
for the acceptance of ITSO on Transport for London services. We
have now spent, since May of last year, eighteen months in commercial
negotiations with the TOCs to make sure that they can agree to
the scheme, they can agree to the revenue apportionment coming
out of the scheme, and I am pleased to say we are near the end
but we are not quite at the end yet. There is a lot of technical
discussion also going on in parallel, but there is a very intense
phase of installing new equipment. It is worth just reminding
everyone here that there are 275 stations on the London Underground
network, which is what we launched Oyster on four years ago. We
have 250 stations on the national rail network as well, so this
is a challenge of a similar proportion in extending Oyster over
National Rail.
Q302 Mr Hollobone: Coming back to
enforcement, presumably Transport for London is responsible now
for enforcement on London Overground. Are there disparities in
the rules and regulations between bus passengers, Tube passengers
and Overground rail passengers with regard to enforcing conditions
of travel?
Mr Burton: Yes, there are. They
are subject to different by-laws and different regulations and
that is one of the issues which going forward we would look at
to rationalise, because our view is that it is confusing for passengers
to have different rules and regulations applying to different
parts of the network where you are using the same ticketing product.
Q303 Mr Hollobone: Are those the
rules and regulations you were talking about being covered by
this Transport for London Bill which is going forward?
Mr Burton: Partially, but not
entirely. Without going into too much arcane legislation, there
is a number of rules and regulations which apply to different
modes of transport. So there is a national set of regulations
for public service vehicles, which are buses and coaches. There
are rail regulations, there are London Underground regulations,
the trams in London have their own regulations, so there is a
number of different pieces of guidance and regulation that we
need to look at to rationalise that. So it is quite a complex
job to do. It is one of the things we are very keen to look at,
particularly for TfL's own network because, as I say, I think
it is very confusing for passengers if you have differential activities
around revenue and enforcement.
Q304 Mr Hollobone: Is it for the
Mayor to sort that out, or is it for Her Majesty's Government
to sort that out?
Mr Burton: I think it is for the
Mayor and TfL to put together a coherent package of things that
need to happen to regulate it in an even way, and then there is
a number of agencies within the Government, including the DfT,
and other agencies in the Government to enact the changes that
will make that happen.
Q305 Chairman: Do you think the contactless
bank cards and mobile phones are going to make ITSO obsolete?
Mr Verma: I would not go so far
as to say they will make ITSO obsolete. Again, I think we are
considering the use of contactless bank cards and mobile phones
for a very specific reason, which is that our system, what we
call a ticket, is just a means of payment. What we are trying
to do is collect a payment when people travel through our system.
They do not get a reserved seat, they do not get any of the other
attributes that you would normally associate with a ticket. So
what is important to us is to be able to collect the required
payment from the customer in a fast and efficient way every single
time they travel, but at the same time to make that process of
collecting that revenue as unintrusive as possible. Despite all
the advances we have made with Oyster cards, and clearly we feel
very proud of it, it is still the case that the basic method by
which we are collecting revenue is unchanged for the last 150
years. When you arrive at a TfL service, whether that is a bus
or the Underground, you have to change your currency into something
that we have given you before you are allowed to travel. This
is the way we have done ticketing for the last 150 years, but
it does not need to be that way. If you go further back into history,
people were collecting cash on buses. The reason we stopped doing
that was because a large portion of the cash used to go unaccounted
for and was typically taken by the conductors. The ticket was
largely invented as a means of accounting for the revenue which
was being collected. We have moved on from that point, but for
the last 150 years at every point where new technology has been
introduced we have had to invent it. For the first time the banking
industry seems to be coming up with a product that will actually
work for us and will be there in the hands of a large majority
of the people, if not all. So this is something we are looking
at adopting because this would remove the hassle for the vast
majority of people from buying tickets in the way they have to
do today.
Q306 Chairman: Is it reasonable that
TranSys, who actually have the Oyster contract and have a vested
interest in protecting Oyster, should be carrying out the study
into whether ITSO can be integrating with the system?
Mr Verma: Unfortunately, because
the system right now is provided by TranSys and at the front end,
which is at the gates or on the buses, it has to be integrated.
There is no option other than the fact that we have to go to TranSys.
This is the PFI contract that the Government -
Q307 Chairman: So you have built
in some independent checks and balances, have you?
Mr Verma: I have a very large
team which oversees everything which TranSys does.
Q308 Chairman: If a large team is
a guarantee of independence, life would be a lot easier!
Mr Verma: The point I would make
to you is that a large part of the new technology work that is
going on is actually going on within my team not within TranSys,
so the work that is going on to adopt—
Q309 Chairman: I understand that,
but all I am saying is these people have the Oyster system. They
supplied the Oyster system. You have asked them to look at whether
it can be integrated with ITSO and if you are not careful they
are going to be doing the final arbitration. I may be an untrusting
creature, but it seems to me they might have a vested interest
in saying no.
Mr Verma: There is no doubt that
they have a vested interest. They are a technology provider. They
have a long-term contract. They have essentially a monopoly position
for 17 years and the means that we have at our disposal to control
that is to build a similar capability within our team. I can assure
you that we have spent a large amount of effort building technical
capability within our team to make sure that we are not being
given answers which are inadequate.
Q310 Chairman: Have you got any idea
of how much it will cost to integrate the two systems?
Mr Verma: We expect that it is
going to be in the region of about £50 million.
Q311 Chairman: Is that just the marginal
cost of adding ITSO?
Mr Verma: That is just the marginal
cost of adding ITSO.
Q312 Chairman: So no other upgrades
are included in that figure?
Mr Verma: No upgrades, no.
Q313 Clive Efford: Mr Verma, if you
can tell us, if you have got the information, what proportion
of the cost of the Freedom Pass in London do the local authorities
currently get back from central government?
Mr Verma: I am sorry, I do not
have that information to hand. I can provide you with that information
if we have access to it, but I do not have that information to
hand right now.
Clive Efford: If you could it would be
useful.
Q314 Chairman: Could you give us
the figures about the young people who are travelling with free
bus travel?
Mr Verma: About 16% of people
travelling on the buses are travelling on under 18 concessions.
Q315 Chairman: What impact has that
had?
Mr Verma: We do see a more pronounced
peak in the afternoon which we did not see before. This is when
people are coming out of school between 3.00 and 4.00 in the afternoon.
But the afternoon peak is not as sharp as the morning peak. So
the morning peak is still the one that drives the total provision
of bus capacity in London.
Q316 Chairman: Do they cause an enormous
racket? Is there a lot of overcrowding and antisocial behaviour?
Mr Verma: As I say, the peak bus
capacity is in the morning. The same bus capacity operates in
the afternoon, so it is difficult to make the case that there
is overcrowding. The point about antisocial behaviour as well
has been trailed very widely.
Mr Burton: Just on the capacity
issue, London Buses works very actively to monitor where there
is under-capacity on the network and we have added a number of
additional buses to routes where capacity is an issue, and that
is kept under constant review. With regard to antisocial behaviour,
our feeling is that the noisiness and low level disorder has increased.
That is mostly to do with the increasing number of young people
on the network and that is the way young people are. We think
you deal with that through behavioural information, through visual
policing, through making kids more aware of the impact of their
behaviour on other people, and we are looking at doing all that
over the next year or so.
Q317 Chairman: Yes. It will put off
a lot of people, particularly pensioners, from travelling, will
it not, if the level of general antisocial behaviour is higher
than it used to be? It is a fairly urgent problem is what I ought
to have said to you, is it not?
Mr Burton: We are dealing with
that issue in a number of way. I think a lot of the noise and
stuff like that probably is not antisocial behaviour even, it
is just generally young people being rowdy on the network.
Q318 Chairman: Yes, but in spite
of what people say most pensioners can sort out the difference
between somebody who is making a row and who is making themselves
perpetually deaf by having an industrial level of noise in their
ears through some tin and someone who is actually doing something
which is causing the atmosphere to deteriorate for everybody else
on the bus.
Mr Burton: Yes, we recognise that
and one of the issues for us is to find the most appropriate way
to deal with those issues. For that low level stuff one of the
things we found to be very effective is over the last year we
have put out 440 PCSOs into the outer London boroughs and their
roster and their shift pattern is focused around that school run,
3.00 to 5.30 time period and they are very visible on the buses.
The thing about PCSOs is that they are there to be visible to
the public. We have had very positive feedback about that and
that is one of the ways we are dealing with this. But I think
it is really important to say that there has been approximately
a 35% increase in young people travelling on the network over
the last two years because of the concessionary travel, which
we are very positive about because it does allow people to travel
around the network. If there is a very small number of those children—and
I actually do believe it is a small number—who are committing
disorder/antisocial behaviour then we will deal with them appropriately.
I think it really is important to say that our experience is that
it is a small number of the kids who are problematic rather than
the majority, as sometimes you read in the papers.
Chairman: Yes. I did have an agent who
was a bus driver who used to do the school bus runs and who alleged
that they came out of some of the best disciplined schools and
behaved like absolute maniacs, so I hope it is something you are
dealing with seriously.
Q319 Clive Efford: Just on that line
of questioning, do you get the majority of complaints about the
school bus run or is it about the young people who are now using
the buses where they did not in the past because it is now free?
Mr Burton: The peak time of those
sorts of issues is during the 3.00 to 6.00 period when the kids
are travelling home mostly in general terms, and that is when
we focus our resources. There is a number of options. In relation
to kids travelling to the bus stop from the school, one of the
most effective ways we have got of dealing with that is we work
with schools who actually have teachers out just to be a figure
of authority around the queues. So there is a number of ways in
which we can deal with this and we are doing a number of things.
Chairman: I just want to ask you about
your own revenue protection.
Clive Efford: Perhaps if people sent
their children to the local school it would reduce the problem.
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