Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR TIM
O'TOOLE AND
MR NICK
AGNEW
29 JANUARY 2009
Q40 Chairman: I am specifically referring
to the trains because again, talking to the victims, many of them,
as you know, had to get out and walk on to the tracks carrying
casualties and they had nothing with which to carry them, yet
it would appear that there were carry sheets which were available,
yet nobody was told where they were, in what quantities, how to
get them or how to use them. The first question: do these things
exist or not?
Mr O'Toole: They do exist. They
do not exist in a number that would have been able to address
that situation because there just is not room for them, and the
intention is that the real purpose is to deal with the one-off
and the idea is that the driver or a member of station staff who
responds to a situation would access it.
Q41 Chairman: Where are they kept?
Mr O'Toole: They are kept under
the seat compartments.
Q42 Chairman: How many of them?
Mr O'Toole: Two on every train,
I am informed.
Q43 Chairman: Two on every train
rather than every carriage?
Mr O'Toole: Yes.
Q44 Chairman: Why are the public
not told where they are?
Mr O'Toole: Because the public
does not have access to them, the driver has to access them.
Q45 Chairman: Have you considered
putting such devices in each carriage?
Mr O'Toole: Well, we consider
all of these ideas as they come along, but again our emergency
team had a review of how exactly would this work, would it be
effective, how would people deal with that, and determined that
it would be of marginal utility.
Q46 Chairman: What about the first
aid training of members of staff? What level of training do they
receive and how many of them are trained?
Mr O'Toole: We have 1,000 first-aiders,
so, of our, say, 12,000 employees that are on the operating side
of the business, there are 1,000 first-aiders fully trained. Also,
as a result of 7/7, we have added a module to our training for
our supervisors so that they get basic first aid training to,
hopefully, help really their self-confidence in overseeing an
incident.
Q47 Chairman: One of the ideas that
was suggested after the July bombings was that the travelling
public should be encouraged to take first aid training, and some
work was done on this, I know, by your own organisation, and that
the qualified first-aider would be rewarded by subsidised, or
perhaps even free, travel. How far has that idea progressed?
Mr O'Toole: I am not aware of
how far it has progressed. Plainly, it is a political decision
because that is a funding issue. It would not be for me to pass
on that.
Q48 David Davies: Mr O'Toole or Mr
Agnew, you have mentioned better communication as one of the lessons
learned from the last bombings. Is there anything else you can
think of that has been improved since that happened in 2005?
Mr Agnew: Certainly one of the
things, and again I make no apology for using the word, is the
strengthening of the partnerships which, in many cases, existed
already, but, in some cases, have been reinforced or forged from
new. If I can use the example of the London Resilience Team, which
is a body that has representatives from key London agencies, including
the responders, we have embodied, not just in our own focus on
the post-7/7 situation, but in the workstreams of London Resilience,
the need to make sure that we use the full partnership to its
best effect in the context of things like the 7/7 attacks. That
is not to say it did not happen because it happened very, very
well during 7/7, but it is part of progressive lessons learned,
review, and the ploughing of those lessons learned into future
work.
Q49 David Davies: I think you and
Mr O'Toole mentioned earlier on that the staff will conduct a
full evacuation exercise every seven months.
Mr O'Toole: That is correct.
Q50 David Davies: Is that done with
other agencies, such as the police or the ambulance service, and,
if not, how often do you have multi-agency exercises?
Mr Agnew: Well, we do conduct
multi-agency exercises, both at a local level and on a larger
scale, and we do carry out, at the local level, as Mr O'Toole
has said, actual physical exercises. We also—
Q51 David Davies: How often would
that be, Mr Agnew? Is there a target for how often those take
place—once a year or once every six months?
Mr Agnew: Well, the exercises,
as has been referred to, every seven months are very much around
operational procedures.
Q52 David Davies: Those are just
evacuation exercises for the staff though. What I am getting at
is the multi-agency exercises with the police and the ambulance
service. How often will they take place and how many will take
place in London?
Mr Agnew: Typically, if we take
last year, we had five or six exercises, table-top exercises,
involving a range of agencies, Transport, our colleagues in the
emergency services, on a range of subjects, and this is something
that we have built into the way we work and will continue to do
so, but it is not just about terrorism, let me stress.
Mr O'Toole: By my count, in the
last two years we have had 14 multi-agency drills of the kind
that Nick has just described. We also, on our own, run multi-agency
drills that go beyond agencies and invite the boroughs and other
affected parties at least once a year, which are very, very large,
I am talking about a gathering of 100 people to go through a whole-day
exercise of a drill, and we do that once a year. Of course, in
addition to every station having to do something every seven months,
we run a drill once a year for each line simulating how that management
team would deal with a problem.
Q53 David Davies: These drills which
happen once a year and the 14 multi-agency ones as well, these
are just simulations carried out in an office, are they not?
Mr O'Toole: They are table-top
exercises, right. We had, as you know, the very large exercise
at Bank which took up about half the City, and we found, quite
frankly, it was not great value for money from our perspective,
that kind of a drill, that we learn much more, it is much more
dynamic, through these table-top exercises and they just seem
better value for money.
Q54 David Davies: Did you say you
have 14 a year?
Mr O'Toole: No, I said there were
14 in the last two years.
Q55 David Davies: So about once every
two months. I wonder whether it would be possible, or desirable,
for anyone from the Committee to attend the next one, if they
come along once every two months or so?
Mr O'Toole: I do not run them,
but I do not see any problem with it. The whole point of it is
to give people confidence.
Q56 Chairman: Exercise Osiris II,
I think it was, which was held in the autumn of 2002, as far as
I am aware, and please correct me if I am wrong, it was the only
exercise that you have done, and I appreciate that it was not
at your behest, which involved large numbers of people physically
to be moved around the Underground, and it was actually Bank Tube
it was conducted at on a Sunday. What were the lessons learned
and why have you not repeated such an exercise, or have you?
Mr O'Toole: It was 2003, I believe.
Again, as I said, it is an awful lot of expense for an amount
of learning, from our perspective, that we think we get more effectively
through the table top because we can posit so many different variations
and, thereby, increase people's thinking. It, for us, was largely
not as effective. The police and fire services speak for themselves,
they may have found it of more value than we did.
Q57 Chairman: The travelling public
do not seem to be rehearsed in the evacuation of trains or tunnels.
Why?
Mr O'Toole: The fact is that on
our network, which is quite different from the train operating
companies which I cannot speak to, because of the power system,
the lack of space, the inability to exercise from the side of
a train for the most part on a Tube, we ask that actually people
do not evacuate, stay where they are, and only respond to our
staff coming to deal with them, so I am not quite sure what it
is we would do. When you consider the number of people we carry,
it would be very difficult to do anything useful in terms of a
drill with the users of the Tube.
Q58 Chairman: Coming back to the
eye witnesses, to whom I have spoken, who were stuck in the tunnels
after the trains had been bombed, they all remarked to me that
there were no emergency instructions inside the cars. Now, I absolutely
take the point about the fact that you would prefer to contain
people inside the carriages rather than have them out on potentially
live lines, but I absolutely take the point that there has been
a tiny, blue notice introduced since which, if I may say, is a
masterpiece of obscurity and ends with the interesting comment,
"Take no risks". May I suggest that this is perhaps
not terribly helpful, and this is the only form of transport I
have travelled on where you will get instructions to turn your
iPod down, not to eat smelly food, to keep your feet off the cushions,
but actually there is nothing really sensible told to the travelling
public in terms of what to do in the event of an emergency.
Mr O'Toole: I take your point.
Q59 Martin Salter: I was going to
probe how effective you thought your co-ordination was with other
agencies, but you have answered that in an earlier exchange. On
a specific issue, can I just ask if you have been consulted on
the Government's "Refresh", as they call it, of the
CONTEST project in general? Have you been brought into the loop
on that?
Mr Agnew: Yes, we work closely
with the Department for Transport and also, as I mentioned earlier,
with the multi-agency Government Office for London-run London
Resilience Team, and both of those have been examples of areas
where we have been briefed on the background to Refresh and some
of the work that has taken place.
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