Examination of Witnesses (Questions 3720
- 3739)
3720. The second undertaking I am asking Crossrail
to give is in relation to the Community Liaison Panel, and I will
not go any further than read this out. We ask that Crossrail engage
fully with the community by recognising and treating the community
as equal partners in a tripartite Community Liaison Panel. Secondly,
we ask that they recognise that, as active and involved residents,
we are knowledgeable about the needs and the general health and
well-being of our community and are able, and in a position, to
bring these things to the attention of Crossrail. Thirdly, we
ask that they recognise that we are knowledgeable of, and capable
of fully understanding, what impact the Crossrail project and
the Hanbury Street construction site will have on the community,
but we are asking them to provide us with appropriate training
in order to enable us to understand the specific details and technicalities
of the impact of increased noise, dust, lorry movements, air pollution,
increased stress levels and risk of accidents, et cetera. We are
asking that they ensure that such training will also provide us
with knowledge and skills to negotiate for appropriate mitigation
to protect, and reduce harm to, the community. We ask that they
give us the assurances that we will be afforded the opportunity
to influence decisions relating to aspects of the Hanbury Street
construction site by providing us with full and appropriate information,
when requested. We ask that they provide the Community Liaison
Panel with some financial support in order to engage independent
experts as and when we want to engage them. Lastly, we ask that
they provide the Community Liaison Panel with some financial and
other support to maintain the proper administration of the Panel
so that we can produce information leaflets for distribution,
to hold public meetings, where appropriate, and to devise other
means of making sure that the community remain involved and informed.
With that, I will end.
3721. CHAIRMAN: Well, there is nothing
we can do about that until we have heard what Crossrail have to
say, so perhaps you can let them have the text.
3722. MS COVE: They have got it.
3723. MR ELVIN: Yes, we have it, my Lord.
3724. CHAIRMAN: In due course, they will
comment upon it.
3725. MS COVE: We could not ask them
to comment upon it today?
3726. MR ELVIN: I am happy to comment
on it now.
3727. CHAIRMAN: You can comment on it
now, can you?
3728. MR ELVIN: Yes, I was given it yesterday.
Indeed, my Lord, I prepared overnight a note responding to the
various issues Ms Cove and her Association have raised which I
emailed this morning, and there are copies of that note ready
to circulate amongst the Committee, if that is convenient to the
Committee.
3729. CHAIRMAN: I think we would probably
prefer to see it on paper and, yes, it is here.
3730. MR ELVIN: These were notes that
I was writing last night in order to deal with the issues. I am
happy to present it orally to help the Association, if that will
help the Committee, but I am equally happy to leave them with
the Committee in writing. I address the issues of community liaison,
the question of health impact and the question of lorries and
schools, which I think are all the main issues that Ms Cove has
addressed in her submissions to the Committee.
3731. CHAIRMAN: She wants finance.
3732. MR ELVIN: Yes, to which the answer
is no, so far as we are concerned. Our position is set out in
the first few paragraphs. We consider, and we would ask the Committee
to support us on this, that we have given the relevant undertakings
necessary to act reasonably and take this matter forward in terms
of community liaison, setting up the one-stop shop, and the undertaking
with regard to schools and lorries. As you know, the Schools Panel
is up and running and is not bedevilled with the sorts of issues
that the general Community Liaison Panel is facing, and it is
working and working well to the extent that neither the London
Borough of Tower Hamlets nor the schools themselves, who were
both Petitioners on this issue in the House of Commons, are petitioning
the Lords on the same issues, or indeed at all. You have already
had Tower Hamlets' statement, and indeed I have quoted it in paragraph
3 of the note, indicating that they are satisfied with the way
in which we are taking matters forward. As the Committee well
know, the primary monitoring body external to Crossrail is the
local authority. It has the power under the consents procedure
under Schedule 7, paragraph 7 of the Bill to deal with matters
such as lorry routing, dust, suppression measures and the like,
particularly to protect local amenity and the environment and
to deal with public safety, all of which will deal with these
issues, and it has the powers which it will have in consultation
with the nominated undertaker under the Construction Code which,
as I think Lord Brooke or Lord Young remarked yesterday, deals
with a whole range of the issues which go to health, safety, lorry
routing, all of those measures, dust control measures, noise measures,
measures to deal with lorry and construction traffic. All of those
issues are dealt with at vast length in the Construction Code.
3733. On the health impact assessment, as you
will see from my note, it is simply not true to assert that health
issues have not been considered. The health impact assessment
is the tip of the iceberg, my Lords and my Lady. On pages 30 to
31 is the short summary in relation to Spitalfields. It draws
back, as I say in the note, to the Environmental Impact Assessment
which goes into enormous detail if you drill back into the technical
reports, which are all cross-referenced to air quality assessment
and noise assessment. Those are the two key factors which influence
health. The issue of noise and vibration and dust and nitrogen
oxides, those have been thoroughly assessed, even in the context
of the old proposals for the shaft which were much greater and
would have had a greater impact. We are looking at adding 16 lorries
into traffic where, on the Commercial Road, I think, on a daily
basis there is something in excess of 3,000 and we are adding
a minute amount to local traffic. We are contributing an insignificant
amount to air pollution which is why the assessments of the impact
on air quality, which is the primary concern so far as asthma
sufferers and the like are concerned, is very small indeed. Indeed,
the Committee should be reassured that the national air quality
standards, which are applied via European directives to the UK,
take account of the sensitivities of those with particular health
problems, such as asthma, and those standards are not breached
by Crossrail.
3734. In addition to this note, if the Committee
wants it, we have prepared a more detailed note on air quality
which goes through a little more the details and the figures,
drawing them out of the Environmental Statement and the technical
reports, all of which have been available since 2005 when the
Bill was first deposited, so we are happy to provide a further
note on air quality if the Committee requires further reassurance,
but the position in summary is set out in this paper.
3735. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. I think the
point is this: that I was looking overnight at the history of
the King's Cross Liaison Group which was actually set up by Camden
as the planning authority and the local health authority and the
everything else authority because they are unitary, and the first
issue was the extended hours of working, if you wanted to work
24 hours a day. This plainly ran into great opposition locally
and in fact it went to a decision by Camden which went to appeal
and the proposition for 24-hour working was lost. They then resumed
negotiations in the Liaison Committee and gradually an atmosphere
of trust and interdependence built up and, if that does not happen
here, the Liaison Committee is not going to do any good.
3736. MR ELVIN: My Lord, your Lordship
in a sense is pushing at an open door. We would be only too delighted
if the panel would start to respond and would constitute itself
so that we could have the necessary discussions.
3737. Of course the construction work is not
going to start until 2010 or thereabouts, so we are still some
way off. But, as I have said, and I repeat it in this note, we
are more than happy to set up a group which is similar in structure
to the Camden Group, which had the local authority chairing it;
it was tripartite—local authority, the Promoter, undertaker
and representatives from the local community. The key element
in this is the local community; the local community have to make
the effort to be engaged and appoint whom they wish to be representatives
and to engage. We have sought meetings with us chairing it, that
has not worked; we acted on London Borough of Tower Hamlets' request
to use the independent charity Planning Aid, that does not seem
to have worked; we were asked to fund and sort out the meetings
and clearly doing that has now led to complaints that they are
somehow partial, even though all we do is facilitate the meetings.
3738. The complaints that are being made to
this Committee are identical to the complaints that Ms Cove made
on 30 January of last year, volume 5 page 1733 and the like, in
the Select Committee Special Report. We can only facilitate and
if the community will not seriously engage then there is only
so much we can do. We have been saying the same thing now for
two years and trying, through independent third parties, to facilitate
these meetings. I would be only too pleased if those matters could
now be taken forward and the Camden arrangement would fall squarely
within our undertaking to the Commons because there is nothing
about the tripartite arrangement which is inconsistent with the
undertaking we gave below. So if that is the way forward we are
more than happy to take that way forward, and I say so in this
note.
3739. LORD SNAPE: Mr Elvin, do you have
a copy of the preliminary Crossrail group meeting, dated 30 November,
signed by Graham Seely?[1]
1 Committee Ref: A21, Correspondence from the Preliminary
Crossrail Group to CLRL, 30 January 2007 (TOWHLB-XR5F-108) Back
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