Examination of Witnesses (Questions 6980
- 6999)
6980. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: While
we are on this theme, what would prevent them increasing the frequency
of trains from, say, Dartford to Ebbsfleet? You are talking about
new jobs, regeneration and increasing demand, and obviously we
want to support that as far as we can, but people are obviously
going to look at the cost of a scheme which you are proposing,
which would be half-a-billion pounds, which is not exactly small
change, and whether or not you could achieve it more cheaply by
increasing the frequency of trains between Dartford and Ebbsfleet.
(Mr Donovan)
As I said, I am not a rail expert but I do know that Dartford
station is a block, so if you were moving more trains that were
terminating at Dartford from the east, then there would be an
issue about how you would achieve the turn-round there and the
ability to turn them round. There certainly are trains that do
that sometimes; where there are faults in the system they will
stop trains at Dartford that are coming up from further east and
then change at Dartford rather than running them all into London.
So that certainly can happen. In terms of increased frequency,
I cannot really comment on that; it certainly would be a possibility.
It would increase the changing between trains all the time but
it would not give you the Crossrail-type service where you are
getting on one train and going through.
6981. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: What
would prevent you running them right through to Abbey Wood then?
(Mr Donovan)
From?
6982. Ebbsfleet.
(Mr Donovan) The issue there would be
if you were stopping them at Abbey Wood do you have the capacity
to turn them? I think the Promoter said this morning that they
are doubling the capacity at Abbey Wood by doubling it from two
to four lines in order to enable the Crossrail trains to stop
and go back. If you are increasing the trains going in the other
direction and terminating them at Abbey Wood it would make Abbey
Wood a bigger and more complicated station, and probably, I would
assume, require even more built works at Abbey Wood.
6983. MS LIEVEN: Mr Donovan, can we turn
on in your exhibits to page 21 and following.[14]15
There you produce some figures which identify current conditions
in Bexley, and north Bexley in particular. Can you, in brief summary,
describe the conditions in north Bexley as revealed in these figures?
(Mr Donovan) Yes. Conscious of the fact that
Bexley has a long-held view of a leafy suburb, we have worked
very hard with successive governments over the last 20 years to
show that, actually, that is not the whole story of Bexley—it
is true of part of it. These diagrams in various ways indicate
the concentration of multiple deprivation indices within Bexley
and Dartford, and they show quite clearly that the most deprived
parts of Bexley, which are within the 25 per cent most deprived
in England, do sit along the Thames, along the suggested route
of Crossrail. That is 22.[15]16
Twenty-three shows a similar assessment of income deprivation,
and I think it is possibly just worth emphasising one point here:
that the characteristic of this area is very much that incomes
are quite low.[16]17
It would be well-known in London that Barking and Dagenham, for
example, has the lowest average house price. Vying for that position
is Bexley, and it sometimes is actually even lower than Barking
and Dagenham. Why that matters is it is a reflection of income
and expenditure and spending power, and to some degree it is a
reflection of the economic circumstances we are dealing with here.
There are only 50 or so properties in Bexley that are in the top
rank of council tax, and it kind of goes to tell the story that
there are a lot of people who are more deprived in Bexley than
one may imagine and why we are working hard, through our various
regeneration processes, to help with that situation, and why infrastructure
like Crossrail would be so important.
6984. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: Mr Donovan,
is not one of the reasons for the explanation you have just given
of the social conditions of Barking, Bexley and round there, is
that it was a dormitory area for Ford Motor Company that has very
largely gone away, and therefore it is not going to come back
at that level.
(Mr Donovan)
That certainly would be a factor in Barking and Dagenham. The
only direct linkage from Bexley into the Ford Motor Company was
a ferry that used to run about 100 or 200 cars a day from the
north part of Bexley to there. Bexley has traditionally not had
very large manufacturing employers; it has had a large number
of manufacturing employers but not large employers. So the economic
downturn that affected the whole of Barking and Dagenham and that
northern area, as a result of Ford gradually declining and then
pulling out—
6985. If you go further down your line, Mr Donovan,
and go out beyond Ebbsfleet, to which you are trying to bring
benefit here, you have got another area where a very large amount
of industrial activity has gone away, with the removal of the
naval dockyard at Chatham as a going concern. It is now a tourist
site and nothing else; all the industrial work associated with
naval dockyards has gone. That is not going to come back either.
So you have a significantly reduced demand pressure to maintain
communications for an industrial society.
(Mr Donovan) Two responses to that: firstly,
in Bexley we have actually retained, with the support of the Mayor,
for example, a fair amount of employment land in north Bexley,
and that employment land turns over but there is a fair amount
of demand for it, particularly for logistic uses, and there is
the requirement in London to get jobs away from the centre—to
spread them out more. That is part of the underpinning of government
regeneration policy, and has been for a long time—the relationship
between jobs and where people live. So there is a pressure to
try and make sure that Thames Gateway is not just seen as a commuter
belt but, actually, does link up people and jobs. That is why
Crossrail, as a whole, wherever it stops, is seen as very important,
because it helps that movement along the line and it helps give
people job opportunities that are not solely tied to commuting
long distances in and out of London. In terms of manufacturing,
yes, a lot of manufacturing has gone but we have still retained
some in Bexley in fairly significant employment areas, and as
I have said we still are facing quite a lot of pressure for jobs
and we are working hard—and I am not saying we are entirely
successful the whole time—to change that image, to attract
a different range of jobs.
6986. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: I would
like to say one word to the Chairman and my colleagues. This is
not for you to answer, unless you particularly want to. Having
had a long experience of this area, my experience is that it has
significantly seen the departure of large manufacturing interests
which have not been replaced, and the whole socio-economic context
of this area has changed beyond recognition. There is no trend
at this time which is likely to bring sufficient compensation
in terms of quantities of employment back into it to sustain the
argument that is being put forward.
6987. CHAIRMAN: Mr Donovan?
(Mr Donovan)
No, I would not subscribe entirely to that. I would agree that
this part of Thames Gateway has gone through a massive change
structurally, but ironically, in Bexley particularly, we have
actually had the reverse trend recently. We have got a sewage/sludge
incinerator, which does not employ a lot but is likely to increase
its employment base; work is commencing on a municipal waste incinerator,
which is one of the biggest in Europe (I am not saying these are
things we have supported but these are actually there); there
is a freight depot that has just got planning permission in the
Green Belt between Dartford and Bexley—all of which are
actually adding quite substantial jobs to the area. At the same
time, we are trying to change the nature of those jobs; we are
trying to increase the range of jobs available, and one of the
ways you do that is to improve accessibility, and one of the ways
you do that, obviously, is by things like Crossrail. If you improve
accessibility you will attract different people to a higher quality
of jobs, and it is that kind of balance that is underpinning the
whole of the Thames Gateway project. If we accept the logic that
the Thames Gateway of the future is not going to have significant
jobs within it, except at one or two key locations, then in practice
the whole Thames Gateway role is going to be very, very different;
it is going to continue to be significantly a dormitory to other
areas, and the aim has been to try and not get that; it is actually
to get more sustainable communities where people live and work
closer together. Whilst accepting some of the argument around
that structural change, it is something that we are, to some degree,
countering and have done for some years.
6988. Just in addition to what Lord James said,
of course you would not get Crossrail until after 2017 anyway—and
probably a good deal after that because of the extra work that
would have to be done.
(Mr Donovan) That is why some of the slides
we have put in all the time are showing that we are attracting
things; we are bringing new things in. If you go to the business
sector, which is fairly substantial in Bexley, for many years
the two things they have said are, one, the image of the area
(and we are spending a lot of time trying to improve that) and,
secondly, public transport accessibility. They have talked about
accessibility in the round but, to some degree, with the completion
of the road improvements that are there, we have now got an improved
road infrastructure between the Dartford Crossing and the Blackwall
Tunnel, but the public transport options—and it is the options
that are the issue for a lot of people.
6989. I understand that, but what are you doing
in the meantime? If you were successful in getting your amendment
into the Bill, still you would not get any Crossrail until 2020.
(Mr Donovan) Bexley Council, as a whole,
has recently, as a priority for the council, just pulled together
its whole public transport offer as the main issue for the current
Bexley administration. It has launched a scheme called "Jump
on Board" recently, and what that scheme is all about is
lobbying hard for significant public transport changes. Obviously,
Crossrail will take a long time to come—that is one. We
would be looking to try and get the Docklands Light Railway to
be extended into the north part of the borough. Thirdly, we are
working with Transport for London (and I am not saying they are
supporting this but they are aware of it and are looking at it)
for getting extensions to the transit systems that already exist
in parts of the Thames Gateway—for example, Fast Track in
north Dartford. There are proposals, fully worked through, for
the Greenwich waterfront transit, so, again, we have a transit
coming into Bexley stopping at Abbey Wood from Greenwich; we have
a transit that deals with the whole of the area in north Dartford
there, between Gravesend, through Ebbsfleet into Dartford up to
the edge of London. So we are also working on a number of other
things. We are also asking for the Oyster card system to be extended
into south London and to have longer trains because we are suffering,
to some extent, from shorter trains. While Crossrail is clearly
the most significant in the longer term, we are not ignoring the
short and the medium as well, but the public transport choices
we have in Bexley are so limited and the accessibility index is
so limited that we felt it important that we actually try and
come on a number of these different fronts in an integrated way.
So, yes, Crossrail would take a long time to come, but it is going
to take a long time to come in any event.
6990. How about transits? Are you going to make
any progress with them? They seem to be very popular now.
(Mr Donovan) Yes, they are. Can I put
it this way: if we do not get a transit linking through to north
Bexley then we would be the only part of Thames Gateway, from
Gravesend through into the Blackwall Tunnel and then, on the north
side of the river, in Havering and Barking to Canary Wharf, that
did not have a transit, because there are plans for transits,
at the moment, in all those areas either to build on what is there
or to extend. The only part of that whole network that is not
filled in is north Bexley. Those would be complementary to any
Crossrail-type solution, because they would actually feed into
all the stations and they would feed into the local employment
areas and they would feed through into the housing areas as well.
6991. Supposing you were successful. What would
be the timescale?
(Mr Donovan) It is difficult to be precise
about that.
6992. Of course.
(Mr Donovan) If we were successful tomorrow
it would be about, say, a five-year development period. It would
be highly unlikely to be successful tomorrow, but I should think
it would be five or six years' time. It would be disappointing
if we did not have some movement on that front.
6993. You mentioned accessibility. Can we move
on to page 26 and can I also note Lord James' point about jobs
and we will come back to that when we deal with the Crossrail
Business Case.[17]18
What does that figure on page 26 show the Committee?
(Mr Donovan) The darker the colour, the more
accessible a location is. It will not surprise anybody that the
closer you are to Central London the more accessible but, even
allowing for that, the south-east sector, Bexley and Bromley,
stands out as significantly lower in comparison with the rest
of London. Interestingly, if you do comparisons nationally, of
course, London tends to come out quite well. Relative to other
parts of the country, Bexley is quite accessible but, in a sense,
that is not where we are competing with, we are competing within
the London and North Kent economies and in those terms Bexley,
relatively speaking, is low in accessibility and the reason for
that primarily is that it does not have the choice of transport
mode. Yes, it has buses and the heavy rail that we were describing
earlier but it does not have the ability to choose and move around
in the ways that parts of inner, central and most of outer west
London have.
6994. If we turn over the page we can see the
consequences of that: the number of people travelling by car,
North Bexley, 51.3 per cent.[18]19
Over the page to page 28 there is an example of the Belvedere
Employment Area, people using car to get that to that area.[19]20
(Mr Donovan) Yes, and that again is a reflection
of the lack of choice that is available. Certainly the fact that
the North Bexley wards have 51 per cent still travelling by car
at a time when we are trying to encourage people not to go to
work by car is very significantly higher even than the rest of
outer London.
6995. You have then got a number of pages where
you deal with the Planning and Regeneration Policy Framework.
I do not ask you to go through every detail, but in answer to
questions put to you by Lord James and the Chairman, amongst others,
what are Bexley doing about this deindustrialisation?
(Mr Donovan) What we are increasingly
doing is looking to focus around growth sectors. We have got one
pressure and one thing we are encouraging. There is a lot of pressure
for logistics uses. Those are not like they used to be in the
sense they still have job implications, they are not just warehouses
without jobs but, even so, the job densities in them are relatively
low and they only provide a limited range of skills. We are also
working to improve the knowledge economy-type jobs. We have a
Thames Innovation Centre which opened last year and is about working
to bring other sites together where we are looking to get the
innovation sector on board. In broad terms we are keeping our
employment land there, we are looking to increase the amount of
employment land going to different types of uses and we are also
having an active programme supported by the London Development
Agency for skills and training for our local workforce because
there is no point being successful in bringing jobs into the area
if the local people have not got the skills available to access
those jobs. Bexley people have relatively low skills in comparison
with much of London, so we are working very hard to try and ensure
that Bexley residents' skills are increased. By doing that they
will be more able to take on the higher level jobs we are looking
to attract as well as the lower level jobs which to some degree
we are still able to attract.
6996. Turning to the Planning and Regeneration
Policy Framework, you have produced some extracts from the previous
London Plan which has now been superseded.[20]21
If we go to page 34 we will see the basis upon which that planning
took place was a Crossrail line running to Ebbsfleet.[21]22
(Mr Donovan) That is correct.
6997. If we go over the page to page 36, what
did that plan anticipate would occur from the Belvedere/Erith
Opportunity Area?[22]23
(Mr Donovan) You would get 5,000 new jobs and
in that area about 1,400 new homes up to 2016. Obviously the homes
figure is slightly lower there because these are not the parts
of Bexley where you would expect to have the higher homes numbers.
Yes, it is 1,400 new homes and 5,000 new jobs.
6998. If we look at the text below in the box,
the last sentence on the page, what role did the London Plan envisage
that Crossrail would play?
(Mr Donovan) It would help improve accessibility,
as we have been discussing, and it was felt that was an essential
element to helping deliver not only those jobs but the higher
quality of jobs we are looking to achieve.
6999. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: Can I
put one last question to Mr Donovan. Conspicuous by its absence
has been any reference to Bluewater. What impact does that have
on all forms of communication, either by rail or road, and does
that have any consequence for you? You might want to indicate
where Bluewater is on one of the maps. It has not been shown.
14 15 Committee Ref: A35, North Bexley and Dartford:
Crossrail Original Route (BEXYLB-44_05A-021) Back
15
16 Committee Ref: A35, Deprivation within Bexley and Dartford
1: Overall Deprivation by Super Output Area (BEXYLB-44_05A-022) Back
16
17 Committee Ref: A35, Deprivation within Bexley and Dartford
2: Income deprivation by Super Output Area (BEXYLB-44_05A-023) Back
17
18 Committee Ref: A35, Existing accessibility 1: Average London
accessibility index 2001(BEXYLB-44_05A-026) Back
18
19 Committee Ref: A35, Existing accessibility 2: Bexley and Dartford
travel to work by car/van (BEXYLB-44_05A-027) Back
19
20 Committee Ref: A35, Existing accessibility 3: Mode of transport
used by staff in Belvedere Employment Area (BEXYLB-44_05A-028) Back
20
21 Committee Ref: A35, Planning & Regeneration Policy Framework
1: Thames Gateway (BEXYLB-44_05A-029) Back
21
22 Committee Ref: A35, Planning & Regeneration Policy Framework
6: Previous London Plan (BEXYLB-44_05A-034) Back
22
23 Committee Ref: A35, Planning & Regeneration Policy Framework
8: Previous London Plan (BEXYLB-44_05A-036) Back
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