Examination of Witnesses (Question 460-479)
MR TOM
HARRIS MP AND
MR BOB
LINNARD
12 DECEMBER 2007
Q460 Chairman: Can I ask you about
ITSO? Are you quite confident that it is fit for purpose, if it
actually is evolved right the way across the United Kingdom?
Mr Harris: Yes, is the short answer
to that. I think ITSO has many advantages. The comparison is always
made between ITSO and Oyster for obvious reasons—I am a
big fan of Oyster; I have two Oyster cards—but I think the
ITSO standard allows us to do more with an ITSO card than will
ever be possible with Oyster.
Q461 Chairman: I should explain to
you that we had evidence that it is a slow system, that it is
not very businesslike, it is two years behind programme because
it has not been fully tested in-house. TranSys have made it clear
that someone really has to take control of this programme. How
effective is ITSO as an organisation?
Mr Harris: The DfT has committed
to funding ITSO over the next year by £750,000. A condition
of that funding is that we are going to carry out a full review
of the organisation to make sure that they have proper resources,
expertise, personnel to make sure it is effective.
Q462 Chairman: How likely is it that
all these new technologies such as contactless bank cards and
mobile phones are going to make ITSO obsolete?
Mr Harris: ITSO is not a smartcard,
it is a standard.
Q463 Chairman: A standard that we
are told has been overtaken by all sorts of other new bits of
technology which can do the job better and faster and perhaps
more efficiently. You know yourself, Minister, from your own office
that when you came in here originally you must have had one level
of computer, we are now waiting on different technology, faster,
smarter, easier to use for people like me. It is not beyond belief
that this standard has now been past by other people going faster
and better.
Mr Harris: The big selling point
of ITSO is that it is very flexible. For example, although it
has been rolled out as part of the concessionary scheme next April,
it is currently possible, if the commercial will is there, to
put ITSO information on your mobile phone and use that as a smartcard.
ITSO is not simply a credit card sized card with a chip in it,
it is a standard which can be applied to all sorts of things that
in future will become far more normal to consider using.
Q464 Chairman: Is Transport Direct
fully integrated with the system?
Mr Harris: With ITSO?
Q465 Chairman: With the travel information
coming from local authorities and PTEs?
Mr Harris: Transport Direct is
a website which gives up to date information about, for example,
carbon footprint of different modes of transport, travel times
et cetera. There have been 20 million visitors since it was launched.
I am not aware of any direct interface with ITSO but in future
whatever journey you are going to make I hope more and more people
become aware that Transport Direct can absolutely contribute to
making that journey seamless.
Q466 Chairman: Your view is that
ITSO is a good standard, it is flexible, it can be adapted to
new increases in different technology. That is your view.
Mr Harris: Yes.
Q467 Chairman: You intend to do a
very full assessment of the workings of these systems.
Mr Harris: There has been an on-going
assessment of ITSO's workability, if you like. Once we are into
the new National Concessionary Scheme we will certainly do an
analysis of that and that does use ITSO smartcard technology.
Q468 Chairman: What about people
who are not very happy with all the new gadgets and who like the
old fashioned tickets and money and things like that? Are you
going to look at the price difference between electronic tickets
and conventional tickets?
Mr Harris: Whether you choose
to pay by cash or whether you choose to use a smartcard on trains
your fare will continue to be capped if it is a regulated fare
by 1% above the rate of inflation. If a train operator, however,
wanted to reduce the cost of a regulated fare as much as through
a smartcard then they would be perfectly entitled to do that provided
that nobody choosing to pay by cash is going to pay above what
the regulation states should be paid. That is the flexibility
that train operating companies could use; whether they will or
not is another matter.
Q469 Chairman: Is Transport for London
right when it says that the cost of adding ITSO to Oyster would
be £50 million?
Mr Harris: I do not have a figure.
Mr Linnard: It is subject to the
study we were describing earlier. It is only when we have seen
that and when we have the negotiation with TfL informed by that
study that we will know how much it is going to cost.
Mr Harris: This takes us back
to the question that Mr Stringer was asking just before the break
about this difference between the time it takes for an ITSO card
to be read through the reader and an Oyster card. I think the
point here is that if we were simply going to change the information
on the card so that an Oyster reader could read an ITSO card,
that is where the delay comes in, that is where you have quite
a big differential between an Oyster card and an ITSO card. The
£50 million or whatever the figure is of the capital cost
is about changing the actual readers throughout London so that
they will read ITSO and Oyster cards. When that happens that is
when you get almost a negligible difference in the time it takes
to read an Oyster and ITSO card.
Q470 Chairman: Is all the personal
information that is stored on this card going to be absolutely
safe?
Mr Harris: No personal information
is stored on the chip.
Q471 Chairman: Why are we being told
that district councils are placing personal information like name,
age and address on smartcard chips?
Mr Harris: They certainly do not
need to on ITSO. All the information on an ITSO card is held in
the back office. The only information in total on the card is
what is on the face of the card, your photograph and your name
and that is for fraud purposes. All the other information about
you should not be held on the chip, it should be in the back office.
Q472 Clive Efford: Just before we
broke for the vote I asked you about the information that is stored
on the ITSO card that apparently, we were told, can be read by
the pay as you go Oyster card which causes a delay when the card
is swiped. Are you aware of this problem?
Mr Harris: There are two ways
of making ITSO and Oyster compatible in London. One way is to
allow the Oyster reader to read both cards. That is where you
hit the delays and nobody wants that. I understand why Transport
for London do not want that because you end up with having a lot
of people backing up on the turnstiles and causing a lot of delays
and probably some safety issues as well. What we foresee happening
in the next few years is the actual readers being replaced so
that they will read ITSO and Oyster cards and you do not have
to choose which reader to go; you can go to any reader whether
you have an ITSO or an Oyster card. The time taken to read that,
because we are actually upgrading the hardware and not just the
software, will be negligible; there will be no noticeable differences.
There is a difference, as I said earlier on, between 200 and 300
milliseconds.
Q473 Clive Efford: Are you aware
that one of the on-line ticket sales companies believes that it
can provide an ITSO type smartcard that will work with the current
Oyster system without requiring any new gates or readers?
Mr Harris: I am not aware of that
but I would be very interested to read what they have on offer.
Let me make it clear, I do not have an interest in making any
of these processes either longer or more expensive than they have
to be.
Q474 Clive Efford: We have introduced
the zones in London to make through ticketing easier to understand
between different modes of transport and we have allowed huge
fare increases on the basis of that from which train companies
are currently benefiting, is that fair on the travelling public
to introduce those zones well ahead of the benefits actually coming
along and should the increases not be delayed until such time
as they accept, say, Oyster pay as you go.
Mr Harris: I do not think it is
accurate to say that the train companies have benefited. We made
it quite clear when we gave a derogation on regulated fares that
the move to zonal fares would have to be revenue neutral and I
am not aware of any evidence to say that it has not been revenue
neutral. There were some people, because of historically artificially
low fares, when the zonal system was introduced they did find
themselves paying a much higher percentage increase on a one-off
increase. So there were losers when that happened but there were
also winners. If the Committee has any evidence that the train
operating companies have made substantial profits rather than
being revenue neutral I would be very interested to see that.
My understanding of the second point of your question, was it
necessary to move to this right away, I suppose the argument could
be made that it could have been postponed. There may be a technical
reason why it had to be done earlier—Mr Linnard might want
to come in on this—but I do suspect very strongly that whenever
that change was made the kind of increases that we are seeing
would have happened.
Q475 Clive Efford: Let me give you
south east London as an example. There is no alternative to travelling
into London other than the rail network; buses are not an option
for the length of journey so far as commuters are concerned in
my part of south east London yet they are paying massive increases
on the basis of the London zones being introduced with no justification
whatsoever.
Mr Harris: The south east, of
course, is slightly different from most of the other franchises
because of their 3% cap on average on regulatory fares because
of the very substantial risk that is going into rolling stock
in that particular area. However, I take your point that smartcard
technology has not yet been introduced but that one-off increase—and
in some cases a decrease—because of the introduction of
zonal fares. Can I just point out to the Committee that we have
moved from a position where there were more than 97,000 different
fares to a situation where there are 21 because of the introduction
of zonal fares? I said right at the beginning that part of the
attempt to encourage people onto public transport is to make that
journey more transparent, more seamless; I fail to see how that
can be done when there are 97,000 different combinations of fares.
Q476 Chairman: You have done that,
Minister, but you have not actually sorted out the business of
the district councils who have to negotiate with individual bus
companies, have you? Since all of this is funded at national level
why is that not done at national level? We have taken evidence
of the numbers of individual district councils that are still
negotiating; they are very large.
Mr Harris: You mean on concessionary
fares?
Q477 Chairman: Yes.
Mr Harris: There are 291 travel
concession authorities outside London; there are 1500 bus companies
they have to negotiate with. I am not confident in the DfT's ability
to devote the number of man hours necessary to achieve those negotiations.
Q478 Chairman: Could it not be done
on a county level or a regional level because each district council
having to negotiate with bus operators not only takes up an inordinate
amount of time and administration, it does not always produce
the result that people want, does it?
Mr Harris: No, I think that is
absolutely valid.
Q479 Chairman: They have no control
over the level of charges, do they?
Mr Harris: That is right. Once
the scheme is up and running and once we see how it is working
if a consensus emerges that we do want to move to county level
then there are powers within the act for us to be able to do that.
The caveat on that is that we have just agreed a three year local
government settlement. I think it would be very difficult to move
to county level before the end of that three year period. It is
not impossible and if the authorities are determined to go down
that road I think the Government have to listen to them, but I
think it would be very difficult before the end of that three
year period to start disaggregating the capital sums or the revenue
sums that have been given to the councils and start recalculating
that at a county level. That is why I think it is more likely
to happen in three years.
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