UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 794-i i i

House of COMMONS

Oral EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE the

transport Committee

impact on transport of recent adverse weather conditions

MONday 14 March 2011

rt hon philip hammond mp

Evidence heard in Public Questions 218 - 276

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Transport Committee

on Monday 14 March 2011

Members present:

Mrs Louise Ellman (Chair)

Steve Baker

Mr Tom Harris

Julie Hilling

Kelvin Hopkins

Kwasi Kwarteng

Mr John Leech

Iain Stewart

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP, Secretary of State for Transport, gave evidence.

Q218 Chair: Good afternoon, Secretary of State. W elcome back to the Transport Sele ct Committee. I understand you would like to make a statement to us .

Mr Hammond: Yes, if I may. I would just like to welcome this opportunity to answer the Committee’s questions on the response of the transport sector to the challenges posed by what was a period of exceptionally severe weather earlier this winter. After a long period of relatively mild winters, the last three years have seen lengthy spells of snow, ice and very low temperatures across the country. Some parts of the country have experienced even more extended periods of severe weather this winter. We now know from the Met Office that December 2010 was the coldest for 100 years, that snowfall was the most widespread since December 1981 and that many areas have experienced record low temperatures.

Exceptional conditions of this sort would put any transport system to the test and inevitably would lead to disruption. We saw the evidence of this across much of northern Europe. While we cannot avoid some disruption during extreme weather, we should of course seek to minimise the impacts, and it is appropriate after a period of severe weather to carry out a thorough review to learn lessons about what went well and what did not so that we can assess whether there are practical and affordable measures which will help us to be better prepared next time.

I welcome this inquiry as part of that process, and we will look forward to the Select Committee’s report as an external view of the performance of the sector and indeed of the Department. Certainly, it is the Department’s view, as we made clear in our memorandum to the Committee, that our transport response this winter was significantly improved by implementation of the recommendations arising from the Winter Resilience Review led by David Quarmby following the 2009-10 winter. This meant that the country was able to enter this winter much better prepared than it was the previous year.

During the period of extreme weather, I chaired the ministerial Winter Resilience Network Group that brought together the relevant Government Departments, the devolved administrations and local authority representatives. This proved to be a useful mechanism for coordinating responses to some of the specific problems that emerged. Undoubtedly, some known weaknesses showed themselves again, for example, the vulnerability of the third rail network to extreme cold, and some new problems emerged notably in relation to airport operations.

My Department is of course working with local authorities, key transport operators and regulators on the follow-up to issues that emerged last November and December. Transport operators, local authorities and regulators are also working on their own lessons learned, and I note in particular that BAA are producing reports about the impact on air travel and airport operations. Similarly, there is a rail National Task Force project looking at the viability of various technological solutions to the problems experienced on the third rail network.

Our first focus was naturally immediate intervention to improve the situation on the ground during the disruption, then on what could be done in the short term to improve resilience if there were a further bout of severe weather this winter and to make further improvements to our preparations for meeting the winter weather challenges for next year. The Committee’s recommendations will be timely in that latter respect. Beyond that, there are some obvious questions about organisation and management of services and service responses that need to be answered, but we are also asking ourselves wider and longer-term questions.

As a starting point, I have sought advice from the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, on the possible longer-term significance of three severe winters in succession. I have today published that advice and have placed copies in the Libraries of both Houses. In short, Professor Beddington’s conclusion is that, while climate change is likely to mean that in the longer term the trend is for milder winters, it certainly does not mean we can rule out fluctuations, perhaps greater fluctuations, around that long-term trend, leading to some individual winters seeing conditions similar to those experienced in the last couple of years.

The question we have to answer is: do the problems of recent winters suggest that a more fundamental change in approach is required? Does it make sense for UK plc to invest significantly more to prepare for winter weather conditions, or would that be disproportionate to the likelihood and cost of disruption? Having commissioned a further work package to consider these questions in more detail with other Government Departments, I would very much welcome the Committee’s view on these wider questions as well.

In summary, and to anticipate the Committee’s likely high-level questions, my salient observations on the two severe weather periods affecting the UK in November-December 2010 would be:

1. The third rail network remains unacceptably vulnerable to disruption.

2. Communications with rail passengers during periods of disruption are inadequate.

3. The Highways Agency and local highways authorities generally performed satisfactorily and salt stocks throughout remained more than adequate. However, public expectations of local authority salting plans may not coincide with the resource-constrained reality.

4. Heathrow Airport failed to manage the severe disruption of 18 to 21 December effectively and there are clearly lessons to be learned from this experience.

5. It is essential that there is an ability to impose restricted timetables at a disrupted airport, particularly at Heathrow because of its lack of spare capacity, and to enforce them to avoid the unacceptable spectacle of thousands of passengers turning up for flights that were not going to happen and then being held in substandard conditions in terminals.

Those are my salient observations about the event, and I look forward to elaborating on these points in answering the Committee’s further questions.

Q219 Chair: Thank you very much for those opening remarks and the new information about the work that has been done since the advent of the bad weather. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK growth fell by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010 because of the snow in December costing the UK £1.6 billion. Has the Chancellor asked you to account for that?

Mr Hammond: No, the Chancellor has not asked me to account for it. I have asked my economists to make an estimate of the travel disruption cost. You will understand that there are some quite wide ranges involved in these kinds of estimates, but the Department has estimated that the cost of travel disruption to the economy, including broader welfare costs to individuals, is about £280 million a day. Of course, that does not reflect the total cost to the economy of the severe weather, some of which was not delivered in terms of transport disruption.

Q220 Chair: How much-£280 million?

Mr Hammond: £280 million per day is the central point estimate.

Q221 Chair: Because of transport difficulties.

Mr Hammond: Because of disruption to transport. Those are the total direct impacts on the economy, including welfare impacts, because of disruption to transport as a result of the severe weather. That will be a subset of the total cost to the economy as a whole of the severe weather disruption.

Q222 Chair: Do you regard that as something that should have been avoided or something that was unavoidable?

Mr Hammond: I certainly do not think that all of it could have been avoided. As I said in my opening remarks, clearly, there is a trade-off between investment in resilience to withstand winter weather conditions and the impact of those conditions if they occur. I think the sensible way to treat a set of events like this is to look at the individual incidents that comprise the overall event and see where a modest amount of additional investment may have made a significant difference to the outcome. I think a pattern is beginning to emerge. At Heathrow Airport, for example, the airport operators themselves acknowledge that some additional investment may have enabled them to respond more effectively to the weather event. On the third rail network, the scale of investment required is likely to be significantly larger and we will have to do a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis to make sure that money invested is money well spent.

Q223 Mr Leech: You said in your opening statement that you would look at anything that was practical and affordable. Given that the possible cost to the economy was £1.5 billion, how much do you think would have had to have been spent to avoid that cost to the economy? Has any assessment been made of that?

Mr Hammond: I do not think we are in a position to give a figure to answer that question yet. I emphasise that I do not think there is any practical level of investment that would have avoided the transport disruption cost altogether. We saw across north-western Europe, and later on in the north-eastern United States, severe disruption caused by these types of weather patterns, even in countries that are well used to and well prepared for severe weather disruption, so I think it is unrealistic to think that we could avoid it altogether. But I also think it would be complacent to suggest that, on the evidence, there are not some interventions which look as though they bear further scrutiny on a cost-benefit basis. We have to bear in mind that in many cases the investment would have to be made by transport operators, not the Government. In many cases the transport networks are operated by private operators.

Q224 Mr Leech: You also mentioned in your opening statement the Beddington report that you have put in the Library today, which suggests that winters will get milder, but does it mention anything about the level of precipitation and, therefore, the potential for additional snow at a higher temperature than we have had in the past? If so, how many extra years of very bad weather would we have to have before we decided that it did not look as though the winters will get milder in the future? We have had three bad years on the trot. How many bad years on the trot do we have to have before we start thinking that perhaps the evidence we are being given by the meteorologists is wrong?

Mr Hammond: That was my question to Sir John Beddington. We have now had three severe winters in a row. Should we be planning for a more frequent occurrence of severe winters? His answer, in short, in his reply to me is no. We would expect the trend to be milder and, from memory, wetter winters, so the implication of that is more precipitation. That does not mean of course that there will not be severe weather events and there might be greater levels of variability between winters than perhaps we have been used to seeing in the past. But my high-level question to him was: is there something happening here that means we have to plan for regular prolonged periods of very low temperatures as well as very high snowfall? His answer to that was no.

Q225 Mr Leech: Does he accept, though, that there may actually be an increase in the level of snow over subsequent years, even though winters may be milder?

Mr Hammond: My recollection is that he did not draw attention specifically to that possibility, but I think it is right to say that in my further conversations with him he made the point that winters could be milder and wetter. I take that to mean more precipitation and, therefore, if we do get periods of extreme cold weather that is likely to occur as snow.

Chair: Mr Stewart, is your question to do with this issue, because I want to keep for the moment on the weather issue?

Iain Stewart: It is to do, more, with the third rail point.

Chair: I will come back to you on that then. Dr Kwarteng is yours on the weather issue?

Q226 Kwasi Kwarteng: Mine is specifically relating to Mr Leech’s first question with regard to the cost benefit, Chair. Secretary of State, I want to pick up the question of the cost benefit. You were suggesting that, obviously, we could not get rid of all the costs of the snow, but at some level we could invest a little bit and avoid some of the costs. I was just wondering whether you had been given any figures with regard to the amount of money we could have spent and the estimated amount we could have saved as a consequence of the spending, or was it just a general estimate?

Mr Hammond: If I may say so, that is perhaps at the moment a premature question. Some work is going on about the resilience of the third rail network, looking at the possibility of an extended roll-out of heated third rail. There is another work stream going on looking at the possibility of modifying the contactors on the trains so that, instead of picking up from the top of the third rail, they pick up from the side or underside of the rail where it is less liable to form ice. If there was a practical solution that arose from either of those work streams, we would then have to look at the investment cost and the likely improvement to disruption on those networks that we could expect to see as a result. For example, on heated rail, nobody proposes heating the entirety of the third rail network. It is about applying heating elements to areas where traction power is particularly important: uphill stretches, station stops and so on.

Q227 Kwasi Kwarteng: I understand, but at the end of this process will there be two figures, essentially? Will there be a figure which says, "This is how much we could spend and this is how much we could save"?

Mr Hammond: I anticipate a rather more disaggregated process than that. I anticipate that there will be a series of interventions which are practical, each of which will have a cost attached to it and some estimate of the benefits that will be delivered, bearing in mind that in some cases it will not be for the Government but a private operator to make the investment. So I think we will have to distinguish between the private returns that the operator might expect and the wider public returns.

Q228 Kwasi Kwarteng: Is there a time frame for this? Will it be later this year, early next year or in a couple of weeks? When do you think this process will end?

Mr Hammond: There are various different work streams with different time scales, some of them quite short. I am expecting to have some reports from the Highways Agency by the end of March. I believe some of the rail working group stuff will be available by the end of May. There are other bits of work which are, by their nature, longer term and I do not expect to receive them before the summer.

Q229 Chair: Are you satisfied with the weather forecasts that you have received this year and last year?

Mr Hammond: Generally speaking, I think so. The weather forecasts that the Met Office provided were broadly reflective of what occurred. You are probably referring to the first period of weather in November, when there was some question about the detailed effectiveness of the forecast of snow on the evening of 30 November.

Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and the timing of events to within a few hours and, indeed, the pinpointing of them to within a few miles is not something that the Met Office can do with high degrees of certainty at the moment. When we are talking particularly about London, a pattern being out by a few miles can make a huge difference to the impact. When we are talking about the commuter networks, a timing difference of a few hours can make a huge difference.

It has been suggested to me that the Met Office could provide significantly more accurate forecasting in respect of the UK if it had larger amounts of computing power available. I think Sir John Beddington suggested to me that, if there was an investment of the order of £10 million, the Met Office would have a significantly greater capacity to forecast at local level with more accuracy.

Q230 Iain Stewart: I was going to ask a question specifically on the third rail but you addressed it in answer to my colleague from Spelthorne. I have a follow-up question on rail more generally. I appreciate that the electrification projects that you have announced recently are overhead line rather than third rail, but are there any lessons from the overhead electrified parts of the network that you can take into account in the design of that electrification project and the procurement of new rolling stock, so that in the design of those trains we build in better resilience to extreme weather?

Mr Hammond: Yes, I think on both counts. The overhead wire network generally performed satisfactorily during the extreme cold weather period, but there were two incidents on the East Coast Main Line which involved overhead line failures. The initial evidence is that that was weather-related, and Network Rail is looking at the implications of that and what can be done to improve infrastructure resilience. Obviously, if there are lessons that can be taken into account in the design of the catenary structure for the Great Western electrification and North Western electrification, that will be done. It is mainly about ice build-up and the additional weight that it applies to overhead wires.

Separately, there are issues to do with the resilience of rolling stock. We saw that the previous winter with the Eurostar trains. Lessons were learned and modifications made. I think there is a raft of further lessons that can be learned this year about resilience of motors and electrical equipment and the protection of air intakes from ingress of snow. A problem occurred this year with windows and windscreens being broken. Ice from passing trains broke off, struck windows and shattered them. It is rather more difficult to see how that can be addressed without moving to very expensive solutions, but lessons can be learned and the infrastructure operator certainly is already looking at that. Rolling stock manufacturers are looking at both retrofitting options and lessons they can learn for new train design.

Q231 Kelvin Hopkins : My questions relate to passenger information on the railways. As a regular train commuter, I am very frustrated time and again by the failure of information systems. It seems to come down to the fact that where the trains are is only known definitely to those in the main signal boxes under the control of Network Rail. On the platforms we have automated indicators, which seem to get into a tizzy when things go wrong, and then we have recorded voice information over the top of that. Often they do not relate to the platform indicators. Then there is live voice information, of which there is too little and often at the last minute. You get a voice override saying that the train just coming in does not stop here or whatever. On more than one occasion I have waited on the platform in the cold for maybe an hour and a half simply because I did not have the information. If I had had the information, I would have abandoned my journey, tried to find another route or at least gone somewhere to get warm.

This seems to be related to the division between track and train, the fragmentation of the industry, rather than having it within one integrated, single entity industry, as I would certainly like it to be. Have you discussed with the railway operators the problem with providing information to passengers, because I know this causes great frustration?

Mr Hammond: Yes. I would agree with everything you have said, except for your conclusion. I do not think it reflects the fragmentation of the railway. The lack of information, which I think I mentioned in my opening remarks, was one of the key complaints that passengers had. The problem, which Quarmby clearly identified in his audit, is that the system has become highly dependent upon the central database where timetable changes have to be uploaded by somewhere between 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock the previous afternoon. There are large numbers of systems, including the electronic information systems at stations, which are driven from that uploaded database.

What it means is that, when weather patterns change at short notice or further timetable changes have to be made, perhaps late in the evening, as I think occurred on 30 November, or where the practicalities during the day’s operation mean that the timetable that has been uploaded cannot be operated, there is a disjunction between what the computer is shoving out on to the electronic indicator boards and what is really happening in the world. What Quarmby said was that, basically, there is a cultural problem and the system has become dependent upon a computer-driven information supply such that the back-up systems are not used. For example, I am told that, on lines in the South Eastern franchise, there is an ability for a controller sitting in a London terminus station to provide voice announcements down the line at stations, but that is not routinely done because electronic information is relied upon.

I think there are two separate work streams here. One is about introducing greater flexibility into the main database so that late updates can be accommodated and information provided from them. The second is about providing more resilient and widely used back-up systems so that station and control room staff can override and intervene to provide timely information.

Q232 Kelvin Hopkins: To pursue that a little further, if all the electronic systems and voice announcements were built into the main signal boxes with one person in charge, would that not overcome these problems to a very large extent? One could have override to manual, so to speak, whenever necessary. One person could see where all the trains were and what announcements were being made and could then make any corrections themselves as and when necessary.

Mr Hammond: I do not think this is done from signal boxes, but I take the thrust of your point. A control room at, say, Waterloo would have sight of what was happening all the way down the South West Trains lines. Certainly, looking at how we can make that more resilient and flexible is part of the work that is going on now. I think there is a balance between the desire to use automated systems as far as possible in normal operation-this is part of making the railway affordable and sustainable-and having the back-up systems there when things, as it were, have to revert to manual. If I may switch sectors, it is a little like, in NATS, having all these fantastic computer screens and marvellous electronic equipment, but they still have little wooden blocks with bits of cardboard in them to use as a back-up if anything goes wrong. There is something to be said for the wooden blocks and cardboard approach when the chips are down.

Q233 Kelvin Hopkins : But the same people are operating them in the same control tower, not different people.

Mr Hammond: Yes, they are.

Q234 Mr Harris: £10 million for new computers for the Met Office to use seems quite a good spend if the consequence of that is that it would save significant amounts of money in lack of disruption to the economy. Were you convinced by that argument?

Mr Hammond: It is certainly an argument that I have asked my departmental economists to look at. This is not a pitch to the Department for Transport; it was a comment by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. I have not yet had anything formal from the Met Office. This was just an indication of an amount of additional computer processing power that would be required to develop more granular predictive models for the UK.

Q235 Mr Harris: But have you formed an initial opinion? To be honest, it sounds too good to be true that you can spend £10 million and have a significantly more accurate system of forecasting very specific weather patterns across the country. Have you formed an initial opinion about whether these are magic beans or it will have any effect?

Mr Hammond: No, but I have established a working group with the chief scientific advisers from my own Department, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and Defra, together with the chief economists of those three Departments, to look at issues about weather forecasting and optimum levels of investment so that we can look at the long-term question of whether we are predicting it correctly and responding correctly to it in some kind of rigorous framework, with the scientists and economists leading.

Q236 Mr Harris: At the risk of leading you down a path of talking party politically, and, genuinely, I do not want to do that, do you get a bit tired of the ping-pong that goes on every winter between the Front Benches? You are probably not aware that I was one of the Labour Back Benchers who did not call for your resignation when I was invited to by the Evening Standard, because I heard all of this when we were in Government and I heard it a year later when you are in Government. This is not helpful, is it?

Mr Hammond: I do not think it is particularly helpful. If I may just join in the spirit of the thing, this was the first winter in which your party had found itself in opposition. I remember very well the first year or so that we were in opposition after 1997. Temptations present themselves to which one realises it is not always wise to succumb once one has been in opposition for a bit longer. Calling for the resignation of anybody and everybody at the first sign of a spot of rain is generally one of those lessons that you learn over time. I take it as part of the political rough and tumble.

I think there was some quite helpful continuity. After all, Quarmby was tasked by my predecessor. I received his report and accepted all its recommendations, and we have implemented the majority of them. We are on target to implement the remainder of them. I then asked him to come back and audit the implementation when the severe weather struck. I think there is probably more of a stream of continuity than disruption as a result of the change of Government.

Q237 Chair: You have a climate change adaptation plan, but there is no reference in it to snow or ice. Are you going to change that? Is it to be revised?

Mr Hammond: I am sorry?

Chair: The Department has published a climate change adaptation plan, but there is nothing in it which refers to snow or ice. Are you revising that?

Mr Hammond: It is a good question. I think the climate change adaptation plan is essentially a long-term view of the Department’s contribution to the challenges of climate change, and it is thinking much more in terms of de-carbonising the economy than it is of the short-term impacts of weather that, as I think Sir John Beddington’s response to me suggests, are not necessarily part of a longer-term climate change pattern. But I will certainly look at that in the light of that question, and perhaps I can write to you and tell you whether we are going to adapt it.

Q238 Chair: There is a section in it which talks about the increase in extreme weather, storms and other things, but it does not mention snow and ice, so we would be interested to know how you are going to proceed with that. To go back for a moment to the issues on rail, what is your assessment of Network Rail’s performance? Do you think they have enough incentives to look at passengers’ interests and deal with rail issues in bad weather?

Mr Hammond: Yes. There are certainly lessons that Network Rail and train operators can learn, but, generally speaking, I think the network operated quite well given the extreme conditions. The disruption was localised to the third rail networks, to the East Coast Main Line and there was some disruption in the north-east. Scotland, of course, was very severely hit and for a prolonged period, but across the rest of the network operation levels were reasonable and punctuality performance levels over the period for many operators remained in the high 70% and 80%. While they were nowhere near what we would expect in a normal period, they were not as catastrophic as some of the news reporting would have suggested.

Network Rail was caught at the very beginning of this period with a couple of its de-icing locomotives out of commission because it had not planned the start of extreme weather for 30 November, as I think perhaps many of us had not. Perhaps, for future years, all of us will want to think in terms of a possible commencement of severe weather from mid-November rather than early December, which has been the traditional planning scenario.

Q239 Chair: The rail regulator has called in Network Rail to complain about poor performance. Do you think that suggests there is something wrong with the incentives to Network Rail?

Mr Hammond: Network Rail’s principal incentive is to do with the punctuality performance indicators and network availability. Obviously, there are a number of work strands taking place. The work that ORR is doing is one of those work streams. I will be discussing its findings with both ORR and Network Rail in due course. You asked me for my observation. My initial reaction is that I think the rail network, on the whole, operated quite well given the extreme circumstances, with the notable exceptions of the East Coast Main Line catenary wire failures and the ongoing problems with the third rail.

Q240 Chair: I would like to turn now to aviation. Aviation is an area where you seem to accept that the Government needs to be more involved than it had been before, given the impact of it on the national economy. You have spoken about changing or extending the CAA’s regulatory regime to deal with bad weather. Could you tell us more about what you are considering?

Mr Hammond: We have a slot early in the second Session for a Bill that will include a new economic regulatory regime for regulated airports. The regulatory regime that we have in place for our airports is among the oldest of the economic regulation regimes in force today and it is, frankly, no longer fit for purpose. It does not allow the regulator to make adjustments or intervene in real time, or even over a short time period; it does not effectively align the interests of passengers with those of the airport operator; and it is clear to me that we need greater levels of incentive, both regulatory and economic, for airport operators to build appropriate levels of resilience into their operations.

I know you had the CEO of BAA before you last week, but I think it is worth mentioning that the snow plan that Heathrow Airport was operating was a joint snow plan that was signed off by the airlines that were using the airport as well as the airport itself. There is a shared responsibility by the community at Heathrow Airport, including the airlines, to look at this again now in the light of the experience of this year and to face up to the need for higher levels of investment possibly, bearing in mind that higher levels of investment translate into higher costs to users. That is the nature of the regulated airport model.

Q241 Chair: Will you publish the Regulation Bill in draft so that it can be subject to parliamentary scrutiny?

Mr Hammond: It was ready on the stocks in October. Now that we have a longer period of delay, it is our intention to publish this as a draft Bill so that it will see the normal scrutiny process of a draft Bill.

Chair: That would be helpful.

Q242 Kwasi Kwarteng: Am I right in thinking that the new regulatory regime will come into place presumably at the end of next year?

Mr Hammond: No. I think it will be able to come into effect in 2013.

Q243 Kwasi Kwarteng: The beginning of the year after next.

Mr Hammond: Yes.

Q244 Kwasi Kwarteng: Clearly, bad weather is something that can happen before then, because we will have at least one winter, maybe two.

Mr Hammond: Yes.

Q245 Kwasi Kwarteng: What incentives will you have to make sure that what happened last year does not happen again with respect to Heathrow’s rather sluggish reaction to the bad weather?

Mr Hammond: The one thing of which I can be fairly confident is that what happened last year will not happen next year, but I cannot be confident that something different will not happen. I think the very direct lessons have been learned, and, as you were no doubt told last week, Heathrow is revising its snow plan to deal with a higher level of snowfall; so it will have a snow plan to deal with 25 cm of snow.

The CAA and BAA are looking at how a modified timetable can be imposed on airlines. There was not total co-operation by all airlines using the airport during the problems this year. Measures can be taken short of the new regulatory powers. I think the knowledge that the new regulatory regime is coming will encourage the airport operators to do things that are aligned with the proposed new powers before they are in force in a way that perhaps the absence of that new regime coming down the line would not encourage them to do.

Q246 Kwasi Kwarteng: As a follow-up, let’s say we have bad weather at the end of this year and Heathrow, in whatever way, fails to react as you would think appropriate. Who do you think would bear ultimate responsibility for that failure? Do you see that as something that is under your control?

Mr Hammond: No, it is not under my direct control at all.

Q247 Kwasi Kwarteng: You do not feel any responsibility over it.

Mr Hammond: The CAA is the regulator. Clearly, we have responsibility for the regulatory regime within which the CAA operates, which we have already acknowledged is no longer fit for purpose. That is why we intend to change it with legislation. Obviously, it would have been great if we could do it earlier, but a raft of legislation has to be got through.

It is probably worth bearing in mind that Heathrow Airport as a brand suffered enormous damage during that four-day period in December. There is no doubt in my mind that the biggest losers ultimately are the airport operators themselves, who have severely damaged their brand. In any business, if you build up, painstakingly, over many years a brand and then damage it, it takes a long while to recover. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Heathrow had only just recovered from the brand damage caused by the opening of Terminal 5 and was getting back into its stride when it suffered this bit of brand damage.

Q248 Kwasi Kwarteng: In your view, the chairman or the board of BAA should bear ultimate responsibility if Heathrow does not step up to the mark.

Mr Hammond: Let’s be clear what we are talking about. To the extent that the airport fails to deliver the kind of response to a weather pattern that it is reasonable to expect it to deliver, clearly the airport operator must bear responsibility for that, but let’s be clear. There will always be disruption if we get 6 or 8 inches of snow. If that occurs in a situation where 200-odd aircraft are sitting on their stands because the airline operating them has decided not to fly, that is likely to compound that disruption. When it all happens in an airport that is operating at 98% of theoretical capacity on a day-to-day basis, clearly the knock-on effects will be far more significant and take far longer to resolve than they would in an airport operating at 60%, 70% or 80% of its theoretical capacity.

Q249 Kwasi Kwarteng: So they bear responsibility for it. I know you gave a fuller answer.

Mr Hammond: The airport operator is responsible for the operation of the airport.

Kwasi Kwarteng: That is what I was looking for.

Q250 Mr Leech: If you looked at the statistics for Heathrow Airport in terms of how they were performing and their service quality rebate statistics, you could be forgiven for not realising that there was a major disruption in December, because none of the indicators has anything to do with the kinds of problems experienced in December. You would think that Terminal 4 had a perfect score because it met all its indicators. Do you think there is a case to be made for a revamping of those statistics, and perhaps to have a special set of statistics when there are adverse weather conditions, to have a better indicator of how an airport is performing?

Mr Hammond: I think there is a case for changing the regime so that performance in periods of disruption is one of the criteria by which the airport operator is measured-that is the point of the airport economic regulation regime-not just bad weather but, for example, the resilience to and recovery from a terrorist incident or an accident. How quickly the airport recovers is of critical importance to passengers and other users.

Q251 Mr Leech: But should those extraordinary incidents, whether they are adverse weather or a terrorist incident, be in the general day-to-day, week-on-week statistics? Should there be a separate set of statistics that come into place during a particularly difficult time, whether it is adverse weather or anything else, or do you suggest they should be in the day-to-day stats?

Mr Hammond: Under the new economic regulation we are bringing forward, if we have a regime where the operator’s remuneration depends, in part, on his delivery of certain performance metrics, then it would be appropriate to measure all of those. What I am suggesting is that resilience to disruption should be one of those metrics so that the resilience of the airport becomes a measured performance output by the operator.

Q252 Mr Leech: Apart from adverse weather conditions and a terrorist incident, what other extraordinary factors do you say should be taken into consideration?

Mr Hammond: Minor accidents, for example. Clearly, if you have a catastrophic accident that will cause major disruption and there is limited scope for the operator to deal with that, but how quickly a runway or taxiway can be cleared after a minor incident, for example, are the kinds of issues.

I think we have to start from first principles and say: what matters to the passenger? The challenge in designing the economic regulatory regime is to ensure that what matters to the passenger is what matters to the operator and the operator’s shareholders. So we have to align the economic incentives with the passenger interest. Clearly, over this period, the passenger interest was, first and foremost, getting the airport opened again so that operations could resume; secondly, having decent information about what was going on, which was a big failure; and, thirdly, having levels of welfare support where passengers were delayed and waited for long periods in terminals or were put up in hotels.

Q253 Mr Leech: I turn to a slightly separate issue. When we had the airport operators from Heathrow and Gatwick Airports in front of us, they talked about the de-icing materials they used. They have two levels: one is for less adverse temperatures and one that works down to about minus 15°. They said that beyond minus 15° the only way they could keep things running was by being ahead of the game, knowing in advance and being able to do the de-icing before the temperature was able to drop to that level. But they said that if the temperature dropped suddenly, or information on weather conditions came too late, effectively there was very little that could be done beyond minus 15°.

Given that some of the temperatures we experienced in the winter were as low as minus 20°, should we not be looking for an alternative solution to deal with those kinds of temperatures, or do you think that, given the de-icing materials they have and the assumption that temperatures will not get worse and winters will be milder, what the operators have in place will be sufficient?

Mr Hammond: First of all, although we did see some extremely low temperatures, they were not at Heathrow Airport. I think we got to minus 11° at Heathrow on one occasion, which is cold enough but still within the operating range of the de-icers they use.

There are two separate issues here. We talk about de-icers. There are anti-icing agents for use on runways to prevent water freezing, and there are also the de-icers that the airlines use to de-ice aircraft. To operate an airport, you have to have both working at the temperature that prevails; otherwise, it is no use. I would not identify the problem as being what we do if it goes below minus 15°. I think we have a problem to address before that, which is the fragility of the de-icer supply chain. Both Heathrow and Gatwick Airports were using far more anti-icing fluid than they had ever budgeted to use, and far more than they believed it was possible to use. It is clear that the stocks they were holding were insufficient. From memory, they have a 300,000 litre tank at Heathrow and they were using up to 100,000-odd litres a day, whereas they believed that the most they could use would be 30,000 litres a day.

There is clearly a need to create greater resilience both in stock-holding at the airport and in the supply chain for this anti-icing fluid. Indeed, the Department for Transport did intervene-it was one of the few direct interventions we made-to secure some additional base material for anti-icing agent manufacture in the week of 20 December to reassure the airport operators that there would not be a run-dry of de-icer if they resumed operations at full level during the remainder of that week.

Q254 Steve Baker: Secretary of State, you were very clear that deep snow will always disrupt Heathrow, but we all know, and I am sure you recognise as well, that there was widespread human suffering there. Should the airlines and airports be quicker to discourage people from travelling at all?

Mr Hammond: Yes, definitely. One of the things that went wrong at Heathrow was the conflicting messages from airlines and the airport operator. On the morning of the 18th, British Airways took the decision that it believed Heathrow would have to close and it therefore suspended all its operations, leaving 200 aircraft on stands. The airport took a more optimistic view and believed it would be able to keep operating throughout the day. So I think British Airways passengers got a very clear message. "No matter what the airport says, we are not flying anywhere, so don’t come to the airport." In consequence, the situation in Terminal 5 was manageable.

Other airlines found that passengers were turning up, and the airport discovered it had no way to impose on airlines a reduced timetable. It does not have the mechanism that, for example, Network Rail has to require train operators to move to a reduced, pre-arranged emergency timetable. One of the things the airport operator at Heathrow is looking at, and I am sure they discussed this with you last week, is how they can require airlines to post an emergency timetable and therefore send out clear signals to passengers about what flights definitely will not be going in a situation where reduced service only is available.

Q255 Steve Baker: Is it fair to say that airlines could gain competitive advantage by being clearer, as BA were, about when they are stopping flights?

Mr Hammond: The airline business is, of course, a hugely complicated one and airlines have many factors to consider. In some cases they will have aircraft in the air that they will still be hoping against hope they can land in an airport which at this moment in time does not appear to be capable of taking them. If they do land it, they would then be looking for a load of passengers to take out on the return flight. There are very complex issues and different airlines will have different sets of interests. Long-haul airlines will have a different view from short-haul airlines; airlines that have a home base at Heathrow will have a different view from airlines that do not.

Q256 Chair: Does the Government support the imposition of an emergency timetable, and how would that be achieved?

Mr Hammond: We think there is merit in this suggestion and we have discussed it with the CAA. The South East Airports Taskforce resilience sub-committee is looking at this issue with the CAA. It would be achieved by creating a mechanism whereby, in extreme circumstances, a pre-agreed reduced level of service was imposed across all airlines. There would have to be a mechanism for ensuring that airlines complied with that reduced level of service and could be effectively penalised if they did not comply with it, by which I mean that, if an airline simply flew an aircraft into an airport that they had been asked not to fly into, they would suffer some effective sanction for that.

Q257 Chair: Who would be responsible for drawing up that emergency timetable?

Mr Hammond: That is one of the issues under discussion. It would probably be something done between the airport operator and the airlines, but there would almost certainly have to be involvement by the regulator as an arbiter of last resort if agreement could not be reached.

Q258 Chair: You said that Heathrow was operating at 98% capacity. Was that the major reason for the problems?

Mr Hammond: It seems to me likely to be the case that the higher the level of capacity utilisation in an airport the more vulnerable that airport will be to any form of disruption. If you are operating at 70% capacity and you have to close a runway for a few hours, you will recover fairly quickly; if you are operating at 98% capacity, you will not.

Q259 Chair: Should the Government have taken more interest in what was going on at the airports and taken more action to try to alleviate the situation? There was an offer to Heathrow of military assistance, but apparently that was made too late.

Mr Hammond: I was the one who conveyed that offer to the airport management. The response I got was not that the offer was made too late but that the airport did not feel unskilled labour was appropriate or helpful at that stage. The tasks to be performed needed operatives who were familiar with the layout of equipment on the aprons and taxiways and the airport rather than simply needing muscle. I made it clear to them at the time that, if they got to a point where they just needed some muscle, they should come back to us and we would be able to make that available.

Q260 Chair: Gatwick Airport has complained about problems of access to the airport and lack of co-ordination with rail and road for clearing access so that people can actually get there. Is that something you think the Government should address?

Mr Hammond: One of the Quarmby recommendations was about co-ordination between operators of other transport infrastructure and highway authorities. My understanding is that, with the exception of a brief period of difficulty on the M11 in the vicinity of Stansted, the strategic road network availability to the major airports was good throughout the period and was the highest priority in the Highways Agency’s operating response. But there are some issues about local road access, which is the responsibility of the local highway authority, and it is for airport operators and indeed other transport infrastructure operators to liaise directly with local authorities to ensure they have a robust plan.

Q261 Chair: I want to go back to the Government’s offer of military help to clear Heathrow. When Colin Matthews gave evidence to the Committee last week, he said in answer to a question: "It was a welcome offer of help, but it was made on the Tuesday and by Tuesday we had cleared the snow, so I wasn’t able to accept it. I do not want that to sound churlish. We would have accepted help from any source." That does not fit in with your explanation that they didn’t want unskilled labour.

Mr Hammond: The offer was made at 8 o’clock on Tuesday morning and, sadly, as people who were huddled in the terminals will remember, it was not the case that they had cleared the snow by that time. The northerly runway was operating but the southerly one was not, and not all the taxiways were cleared at that time. While it was definitely the case that one runway was working by Tuesday morning, it was in an attempt to assist in the resolution of the southerly runway that we made the offer.

Q262 Chair: So you are disagreeing with what Mr Matthews told us.

Mr Hammond: I am telling you that the offer was made by me, by telephone, to the airport’s director of operations just after 8 o’clock on the Tuesday morning. They declined it. The reason they gave me was that they did not need unskilled labour. They needed to use the skilled resources that they had available to them.

Q263 Chair: We will note that difference of explanation. To turn to roads, we had evidence from Councillor David Parsons, the deputy chair of the Local Government Association, that local authorities needed £200 million for routine road maintenance because of the severity of the last two winters. Do you agree with that figure?

Mr Hammond: I cannot verify that figure. We accept that the severe winter weather has imposed a further burden on local highway authorities that they will not have anticipated on top of the damage caused to the roads last year. I have announced that we will be making at least £100 million of additional funding available to English local authorities directly to support them in repairing winter damage to their road networks.

Q264 Julie Hilling: I want to ask about the clearing of less major roads, not just side roads but also roads that are not gritted. It seems to me that the major thoroughfares are cleared pretty quickly and efficiently, but people are trapped on side roads and smaller thoroughfares for weeks, potentially. What more can and should be done?

Mr Hammond: That is a question for local authorities. If roads were not cleared, it certainly was not because of a lack of salt to do the work, but local authorities have to set their own priorities; they have to live within their means. Quite rightly, they will have established a hierarchy of routes to be cleared.

I said in my opening statement that my personal perception is that there is a disconnect between what the public understands happened and what local authorities plan to do. On the one hand, the local authority is saying, "We have delivered. We’ve cleared all the roads that we planned to clear in our winter resilience plan", and, on the other hand, somebody in Acacia Avenue looks out of a window and says, "There’s snow in the road and the pavements are iced. The local authority is not delivering; it’s not performing." I think it is very important that we distinguish between a failure to deliver the intended plan and a question mark over whether the intended plan meets the aspirations of local people. Of course, that is a discussion that local communities have to have with their authorities.

To make one further comment, if I may, during the first period of severe weather I said-and I was much lampooned in some of the press for it-I thought there was a case for local authorities making salt available to the community where the community wanted to deliver some self-help. We had many people contacting us saying they would be happy to go out and get together with their neighbours and try to clear their own streets to gain access to the strategic road network if salt was made available to them. One of the things local authorities need to look at is how they could support community action with supplies of salt and grit to enable that to be done in future events.

Q265 Julie Hilling: To push you a little more, clearly we are at a time of economic constraints on local authorities. I certainly had people in my constituency, particularly in the previous winter rather than the one just gone, who were trapped in their houses for three weeks. Elderly people could not get out at all, in particular because there are some very high areas in my constituency. It does not feel it is enough for me to say that the local authority should sort it out. It seems to me we need to do something stronger from the middle and to say that something should be done about this. Self-help is fine if you are able-bodied, but it seems to me we should be pushing a little more to say that it is unacceptable for people to be trapped for extensive periods of time.

Mr Hammond: To be clear, when I talk about self-help, I mean community self-help.

Julie Hilling: Yes.

Mr Hammond: I think people completely recognise that, in any community, whether it is a street or village, there will be some people who can get out there and contribute and some who cannot. That is the nature of a community helping itself.

The issue you raise is one of the conundrums related to the whole localism agenda. We cannot, on the one hand, say to local authorities, "It’s your budget and your community. You will be accountable to your community, but you have to make the decisions about how to prioritise the use of your resources", and, on the other, tell them that we will decide in Whitehall what they should do.

We can support them. We are supporting local authorities, for example, by funding a research project on effective winter resilience so that they can make the resources go further. We can support them by measures, for example, making clear, as we did, that agricultural vehicles using red diesel can be used on the roads for snow clearing, opening up the possibility of more local authorities contracting with farmers to do snow-clearing work, as is done in Devon and Cornwall very effectively. So there are some things we can do from the centre but I do not think they can be prescriptive; I think they can only be enabling.

Q266 Julie Hilling: I just have a last question in terms of the cost to the economy. Have you done an analysis of the cost to the economy in terms of health costs and people’s lost days of work from fractures and other accidents that happened because pavements or roads were not cleared?

Mr Hammond: No, I have not. I said earlier-I think it was before you came into the Committee-that we have done an analysis of the cost to the economy of the transport disruption, but the health costs from pavement disruption, if I may so describe it, would not be something on which the Department for Transport would focus on directly. That would be a local issue and perhaps something that CLG have looked at, but I do not have a figure for that.

Q267 Julie Hilling: But should that not be part of the analysis, because it is a direct cost of poor weather and poor clearance?

Mr Hammond: I think there are significant impacts across the whole of the economy, and whether they are direct or indirect is perhaps less important. I am simply saying that the Department for Transport’s focus is on the areas for which it has responsibility. It does not have any responsibility for the clearing of pavements; that is a responsibility for local authorities.

Q268 Mr Leech: To follow on from the questions about minor roads, is there any evidence from around the country that there is a lack of co-ordination between local authorities and the Highways Agency in terms of making sure that local roads that are the responsibility of local authorities and link into the major strategic network are actually being cleared? Obviously, the local authority decides which roads they will do. Is there any coordination to make sure they are doing those ones that key into the network?

Mr Hammond: There is. The local authority should have a hierarchy of roads. Clearly, those which connect directly to the Highways Agency’s strategic network should be at the highest level, and I think, generally, that is the case. There were one or two incidents during the December weather periods where there was some suggestion that failures on the local authority network caused back-up on to the Highways Agency network, but I think those were resolved largely by pragmatic action on the ground, which sometimes meant the Highways Agency moved on to bits of road that technically were not their responsibility to get cleared.

Q269 Mr Leech: Were there similar problems in connecting local roads to the other transport networks?

Mr Hammond: As far as I am aware, the railways experience this year was much better than last year. One of the issues that Quarmby identified for 2009-10 was poor coordination with highway authorities in clearing access roads to stations, particularly suburban ones. My understanding from talking to the train operators, certainly in the south- east and also on the northern TransPennine franchise, is that the level of co-ordination has been much better and generally routes to stations were getting cleared effectively.

Q270 Kelvin Hopkins: The last few paragraphs of the paper you have submitted today talk about winter tyres. Was there any evidence that some people used studded tyres, wheel chains or anything of that kind? I noticed you have not advised people to do that, but particularly in northern areas perhaps was anybody using them?

Mr Hammond: First, let me make a distinction between winter tyres and studded tyres or snow chains. Winter tyres are formed of a softer rubber, which generally will have a better grip in extreme cold weather and snow, and they can be used on ordinary roads, or naked roads, if I may describe them thus, whereas snow chains and studded tyres can be used only on impacted snow, would cause damage to the road surface if used on ordinary roads and would therefore be illegal to use in those circumstances.

The evidence we have gathered is that the use of winter tyres is still on a very small scale in the UK. I understand that the Scottish Government is conducting an appraisal of the costs and benefits of the use of winter tyres on heavy goods vehicles, looking at this particularly as an anti-jackknifing measure. We will look with great interest at the results of that study.

I have said on several occasions during the winter that the use of winter tyres can deliver very significant benefits to motorists. It can give them an ability to move around almost unimpeded in quite severe weather conditions, but it has a significant cost. Winter tyres are expensive; they wear out quite quickly when used on naked road surfaces; and tyres are required to be changed twice a year and storage provided for those tyres. Usually, the follow-up question is: have we considered mandating the use of winter tyres? We looked at this very briefly and quickly concluded that there would be no cost-benefit case for mandating the use of winter tyres in the kind of weather that the UK can expect to see.

Q271 Kelvin Hopkins : On a related point-you may have done this without my noticing-did the Department give advice to drivers on how to drive, dealing with skids and driving in a higher gear to avoid high torques, wheel spins and that kind of thing? Some people are not naturally mechanical and are not comfortable driving in slippery conditions. Some of us techno-freaks are quite happy to do that.

Mr Hammond: I am sure all Transport Secretaries end up hearing themselves say, "It says in The Highway Code …" But I am sure it does say somewhere in The Highway Code how you should drive in extreme winter conditions. The advice issued by the police, and reiterated by myself and other Ministers at the height of the disruption, was simply not to use the roads unless it was absolutely essential. Driving conditions were extremely dangerous at the height of the bad weather, particularly off the strategic networks, and drivers were advised not to go out unless they had to.

Q272 Chair: Would the salt have run out if the bad weather had continued a little longer?

Mr Hammond: It depends for how long it had continued.

Q273 Chair: How much more bad weather could we have had with salt still being there?

Mr Hammond: The honest answer is that, if it had carried on at the level it did all the way through to 31 March, yes, we would have been in some difficulty, but we were in a much better place than we were the previous year. I have some figures somewhere. We were asked by Quarmby in his July interim report to create a strategic reserve of 0.25 million tonnes of salt. The Highways Agency was tasked with placing orders for that salt for delivery over the early part of the winter. That was done. When the severe weather struck early on 30 November, I instructed the Highways Agency to order a further 0.25 million tonnes of salt to boost our resilience and in anticipation that the first 0.25 million tonnes might be drawn down fairly quickly. In point of fact, over the course of the winter, we distributed just under 100,000 tonnes from the strategic reserve. The strategic reserve that was delivered came to just over 500,000 tonnes in total-I think it was 523,000 tonnes-of which we still have over 400,000 tonnes in stock at ports around the UK. We will carry that forward and it will still be there for next winter.

Q274 Chair: But what does all that mean? How many more days of bad weather could we have had with the salt still running?

Mr Hammond: It is a difficult question to answer. We began the winter with about 1.2 million tonnes of salt in place. The salt producers in the UK produce about 12,000 tonnes a day, so they are adding about 70,000 tonnes a week to the stockpile. We imported another 500,000-odd tonnes, none of which is really answering your question, I know.

Q275 Chair: I can see I am not going to get an answer.

Mr Hammond: Let me write to you. I can give you an estimated figure of the daily usage of salt during the severe winter period. You can then see how many days of resilience we had in terms of that level of bad weather and how long it could have gone on for. But the bottom line is that we have ended the winter with about 800,000 tonnes more salt left in February than we had in the previous year. We have well over 1 million tonnes of salt in place at the end of the winter, and that suggests we could have withstood a significant additional period of winter weather.

There is one other thing that perhaps I should say. In the July report, Quarmby urged highway authorities to reduce the level of salt they were using so that the recommended dosage was reduced. This was based on experimental work that had been carried out demonstrating that the standard 40 grams per metre salting level was effective. It is still not entirely clear at the moment how many local authorities actually adopted that more meagre salt-dosing system. That is one of the things we shall be looking at in the follow-up work, because, in terms of local authorities planning for next year, clearly a crucial factor is whether they are using a 40 gram or 60-gram standard dosing rate.

Chair: That’s all very intriguing. We will look forward to the answer and try to translate that into numbers of days the roads could have been kept salted.

Mr Hammond: I will write to you.

Q276 Steve Baker: On that point, if I recall correctly, a previous witness explained that salt is ineffective in deep snow. Do you agree that sometimes, mentally, we have too high an expectation of the effectiveness of salt?

Mr Hammond: Salt is not effective against deep snow. The salting process is much more complex than might be seen at first glance. It is important that the salt is laid at the right time in relation to the weather pattern so that it prevents snow settling or prevents water freezing. If it is laid in conditions where there is too much water around it, it will simply be washed away; if it is laid too late, it will not be effective. If deep snow is lying, it needs to be ploughed before the salt is applied to it. You are definitely correct to say that salt alone is ineffective against deep snow.

The second point that came out very strongly during this winter-but I do not think I had ever heard it before in the UK context-is that salt is, of course, ineffective once temperatures drop very low, once they get below minus 8°, because salt merely lowers the freezing point of water. It does not render water unfreezable altogether.

Chair: I can see this is getting ever more complicated, but we still look forward to your reply. Thank you very much for coming, Secretary of State.