Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
100-119)
MR GRAHAM
PENDLEBURY, MR
IAIN FORBES
AND MR
CHRIS PARKIN
9 FEBRUARY 2010
Q100 Joan Walley: A further question
from that is, given the discussions that are taking place about
future public transport, what input have you had into the general
trend of policy so that, for example, you could put in controls
or basic standards of the age of bus vehicles when looking at
bus contracts?
Mr Pendlebury: That would be something
we could do.
Q101 Joan Walley: Do you?
Mr Pendlebury: We do not determine
them; these are largely locally-derived quality bus partnerships
and so forth.
Q102 Joan Walley: So neither the
Department for Transport nor the local authorities have actually
got any control over the most up-to-date standards? An area could
not say, for example, that they wanted to have only the highest
standards in terms of air quality control.
Mr Forbes: To give one example
of a local authority that has done that, Oxford has established
a low-emissions zone where they came to an arrangement with the
bus operators in their area, which stated that the buses that
operate in Oxford have to meet certain emissions standards. The
Local Transport Act 2008 also makes it easier for local authorities
to form quality partnerships and other arrangements with operators
to set in place those sorts of arrangements.
Q103 Joan Walley: Would that actually
facilitate those higher standards?
Mr Forbes: Yes, it would mean
that a certain proportion of the bus operator's fleet would have
to meet the higher and cleaner Euro standards.
Q104 Joan Walley: Do you monitor
how many local authorities have actually introduced that?
Mr Forbes: We engage with local
authorities to see what is working, what the good practice is
and seek to share that where possible.
Q105 Joan Walley: Which local authorities
would you say have the best example in terms of what is working?
Mr Forbes: In terms of negotiation
with bus operators, I think you can point to Norwich and Oxford
as two local authorities which have taken a lead on this.
Q106 Chairman: Given that the importance
of trying to improve the fleet, and with more demanding Euro standards
obviously new vehicles in all categories are getting cleaner but,
as you have identified, the real problem is the existing stock
and the fact that there are a large number of vehicles on the
road which pre-date some of these standards, is there any incentive
for local authorities to do as Norwich and Oxford? Is there any
reward they get for doing this or do the councils just feel rather
better about themselves?
Mr Pendlebury: Where the local
authorities know there is an air quality problem and they have
declared an air quality management area and we are saying in their
local transport plans that they should be integrating transport
policies within their area to deliver both their public transport
objectives and also their air quality objectives, they have that
incentive themselves. I am not sure that a top-down command and
control edict from Whitehall when you are getting into quite locally
specific service provision is necessarily the right way to go.
We can obviously keep that thing under review, but it is again
trying to strike the right balance between making sure there is
good service level of buses and the like within local authorities
matched against air quality objectives.
Q107 Chairman: It was not really
a top-down command and control I was thinking of, I was just wondering
if there might be some incentive. Another factor which is quite
material is modal shift, of course. If we can get more people
to go by buses there can also be quite a bit benefit. Are there
steps that the Department is able to take to try to encourage
that modal shift?
Mr Pendlebury: Modal shift across
the piece—whether it is from cars into buses or freight
from road to rail and so forth—is something that we are
keen to do and we have a number of different measures to try and
bring that around whether it is freight facilities grants or very
large amounts of public money that go into funding bus services
through bus service operator grants and measures such as that,
so we are keen wherever feasible to try to encourage a modal shift.
Although we never tend to get into the business of trying to tell
people how they should travel around, we want to make services
as attractive as possible even if it is something as fundamental
as the concessionary fares policy that we have had with respect
to senior citizens. There are a lot of measures around there.
You are talking really about much broader DfT policy initiatives
than ones that are specifically aimed at air quality because air
quality will be one part of that but it will be to do with congestion
reduction and climate change benefits and so forth as well.
Q108 Martin Horwood: Given the health
impact of this alone and given the first evidence we heard today
that said that shifting towards low-carbon vehicles like electric
vehicles would make a dramatic impact on all this, is DfT, or
the UK generally, trying to pressure for a much faster timetable
for the introduction of zero-carbon vehicles at EU level?
Mr Pendlebury: There are two answers
to that. The first is in terms of the regulatory measures which
is where you have things like the new car CO2 standards which
again we have been heavily involved in negotiating, so there are
standards which apply in 2015 and again in 2020 which introduce
pretty radical cuts in the standards that will apply to new vehicles.
Quite apart from that, we established a few months ago now something
called the Office for Low Emission Vehicles within the departments.
It is located within DfT but it actually comprises officials from
three government departments whose remit is to accelerate the
pace of change and it has a budget in total—all the money
that it is managing and disposing of—of about £400
million which, in current circumstances, is a very substantial
amount.
Q109 Martin Horwood: In practice
the European car market is going to respond to European regulations
over the whole car market.
Mr Pendlebury: Yes.
Q110 Martin Horwood: Should we not
be bringing forward the target for all new cars to be zero carbon
to something like 2040 or even earlier?
Mr Pendlebury: There is a 2020
target which is 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre which is substantially
below the Prius model which has just been phased out so that is
pretty radical technology. You can just about deliver that with
conventional technologies without switching into hybrid or plug-in
electric, but our whole incentive mechanisms that we will be introducing
to get ultra-low-carbon vehicles in and which will take effect
very shortly (I am not able to give you a precise date at the
moment) and we will be trying to bring these things forward as
fast as we reasonably can, but obviously in a sense we can go
as fast as the manufacturers are able to deliver the models.
Q111 Martin Horwood: My question
was not really about these local incentives, it was about whether
we are pressing the rest of Europe to move much faster towards
what you are calling ultra-low-carbon vehicles.
Mr Pendlebury: We are pressing
for 95 grams by 2020.
Q112 Martin Horwood: I am sorry to
cut across this, but I am talking about a complete shift towards
zero-carbon or very-very-low-carbon vehicles which needs to be
on a timescale that allows the car market and R&D to respond
and so on were you to invest in charging points around the country
or something like that. Are we trying to achieve that kind of
shift on a faster timescale than is presently envisaged?
Mr Pendlebury: We would like to
see that shift moving as fast as it is reasonably feasible to
do, bearing in mind that you have to de-carbonise the road transport
sector and you have to think about the energy generation sector.
If you move to all electric plug-in hybrid, you need to think
very much about what is the future shape of our electricity generation
and so forth. I would be pretty confident, certainly on the timescales
you are providing, that we will be getting towards that complete
de-carbonisation but obviously we can only go as fast as the technology
will take us, as far as the availability of rare earth metal or
whatever it is; we have to work within the bounds of technology.
Q113 Martin Horwood: The technology
responds to the signals that government and particularly the European
Union gives it, does it not?
Mr Pendlebury: It will do to some
extent, yes.
Q114 Mr Caton: Moving on to the costings
issue, how are the costs of poor air quality included in your
Department's policy appraisals?
Mr Pendlebury: That is quite a
complicated question. There are three sorts of areas where we
do this. There are policy measures or programmes of policies which
are targeted specifically at air quality improvements where we
have a particular set of methodologies that we would use. There
is then, if you like, a general policy appraisal where we are
looking at policies that are not primarily aimed at air quality
but may have air quality impacts—for better or for worse—and
then there are the individual scheme appraisals for particular
infrastructure projects. So we have slightly different approaches
on each of those circumstances based on the evidence that is available.
I was looking earlier today, and one of the things that we published
as a major policy initiative for the Department was a low-carbon
transport strategy published last July. As we have already referred
to, that can have some sort of impact on air quality, for good
and for bad, and so we did a very detailed impact assessment,
a vast tome, which actually sets out the methodology we have applied,
what cost values, how we have monetised air quality impacts; we
have done separate health impact assessments as well as sustainability
assessments just so they get some sort of handle on whether our
direction of travel on low-carbon transport is one that carries
with it air quality benefits on an acceptable level of cost that
we can try and mitigate against.
Q115 Martin Horwood: We heard today
and in written submissions how the health costs of poor air quality
are arrived at, but the environmental costs in the sense of eco-systems,
biodiversity, climate change and the impact on crops does not
seem to be costed. Are you doing any work on that?
Mr Pendlebury: It is true to say
that if you look at eco-systems impacts there is not, as far as
I am aware, a properly agreed methodology for quantifying and
monetising those benefits, so what we will tend to do, therefore,
is describe, if you like, in narrative terms what we think the
likely impacts will be, try to quantify those and, if possible,
monetise them where we can but it is not as easy as it is for
some other issues. It is certainly the case that we do take these
things into account but the methodology that is used is perhaps
slightly different from ones that we would use for human health
impacts and so forth.
Mr Forbes: As more evidence comes
to light, we are able to know more details about the impacts and
that will all feed into the work we do. We are always keen to
make sure that we are working with colleagues in Defra and the
Health Protection Agency to know the current state of the art
in terms of monetising the impacts of air quality.
Q116 Mr Caton: How are the costs
of actions to address air quality calculated and then balanced
against the cost associated with poor air quality?
Mr Pendlebury: There is a set
of methodologies that are developed by an inter-departmental group
on costs and benefits which has an air quality sub-group. These
are essentially economists and analysts around Whitehall who develop
methodologies for looking at different cost-benefit analyses including,
in this particular case, air quality. They have developed a series
of methodologies for looking at the impacts based on health evidence
that comes from people like COMEAP, medical and toxicological
evidence, and then you try to convert that into some sort of numbers,
develop baselines, develop scenarios and then put some kind of
range of numbers of them. It is never a perfect science, I would
hasten to add, but it is the best effort that we can make, and
then obviously you look at those numbers in the context of other
benefits around journey time savings, climate change benefits
or whatever.
Q117 Mr Caton: Are the penalties
of failing to meet European Limit Values factored into those cost-benefit
analyses?
Mr Forbes: Any potential fines
are not factored into the impacts of air quality.
Q118 Mr Caton: Is there a reason
for that?
Mr Forbes: I would have to rely
on the experts in the inter-departmental group to let me know
the exact reasons, but I would imagine it is because those costs
are not as easy to calculate as the other costs that are factored
in.
Mr Pendlebury: I would think it
would be difficult to include in a cost-benefit analysis a cost
of breaking the law.
Q119 Martin Horwood: Given these
legions of analysts who are producing methodologies for you across
Whitehall, are you not a little ashamed of the evidence from Professor
Kelly which suggested that you are so out of line with best practice
in terms of, for instance, bringing into the health assessment
long-term health conditions and so on, that you could be underestimating
the number of premature deaths by as much as 100%?
Mr Pendlebury: I did not hear
Professor Kelly's evidence; I only caught the tail end of it.
I think "ashamed" is quite a strong word. We publish
a lot of research; we take our evidence from COMEAP, the independent
bodies of health experts who are appointed by the Department of
Health, the Health Protection Agency and so forth and indeed I
must emphasise that that is where DfT will take its evidence from,
so there is a wealth of evidence published out there. There is
expert advice, there may be different views from different experts
from different parts of the academia, but I think we would generally
say that we take it pretty seriously.
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