Examination of Witnesses (Questions 8640
- 8659)
8640. CHAIRMAN: I think we will do that.
8641. MR ELVIN: Then there is no problem
with Lord Berkeley developing his case properly.
8642. CHAIRMAN: Is that all right, Lord
Berkeley?
8643. LORD BERKELEY: That is absolutely
fine, my Lord Chairman, thank you very much.
8644. CHAIRMAN: Are you going to say
anything at all, Mr Elvin, to start with?
8645. MR ELVIN: No.
8646. CHAIRMAN: In that case, it is over
to you.
8647. LORD BERKELEY: Thank you, my Lord
Chairman. I am Tony Berkeley, a member of the House of Lords,
as your Lordships know, and I am also Chairman of the Rail Freight
Group, but I am here to introduce witnesses on behalf of six Petitioners:
the Freight Transport Association, number 33; the Rail Freight
Group, number 34; Hutchison Ports UK Limited; number nine; Quarry
Products Association, number 72; the Freightliner Group Limited,
number 102; and Mendip Rail Limited, 32.[1]
I have given them in that order, my Lord Chairman, because that
is the order in which I propose to call witnesses, but I am also
going to call an expert witness, Mike Garratt of MDS Transmodal,
whose report I think you have already seen, Crossrail: Protecting
the Need to Cater for Rail Freight Growth.
8648. My Lord Chairman, these six Petitioners
represent most of the end customers, ports and train operators
affected by Crossrail either on the Great Western Main Line, the
Great Eastern Main Line, or both. They agreed that, since they
had very similar concerns, it would be sensible to sort of pool
their resources and make one overall submission to the Committee
rather than each company or organisation repeating the background
and everything all over again.
8649. We have not included EWS Railway in this
group since that company has many additional concerns of which
the Committee has already heard some and will be hearing more
tomorrow, I believe, but, in preparing our evidence today, we
have worked very closely with EWS and I think it is true to say
that we have all got similar concerns. Mendip Rail is part of
this group and it fully supports this group's arguments, but it
did not want to appear today and I think that would have created
some duplication.
8650. My Lord Chairman, these and many other
organisations petitioned the House of Commons Committee who, having
heard their evidence, were clearly concerned that the Promoters
had not produced enough evidence on the effect of the proposed
Crossrail trains on the GW and GE Main Lines, if I may use those
abbreviations, on existing and forecast future traffic. They were
also concerned that the Government had not tackled the all-important
issue of rights to access on the railway, and Mr Elvin will be
telling us something about this after lunch, I believe, and whether
the Government were going to seek to use industry processes to
achieve what they felt they needed, or whether they were going
to retain clauses 22 to 45 of the Bill, giving themselves power
to direct the Office of the Rail Regulator to give Crossrail trains
priority.
8651. As your Lordships know, the Commons Select
Committee concluded that most of the issues should be dealt with
by your Committee after some detailed timetabling work had been
carried out and after the Government had applied for, and received,
a decision from the ORR on their access option application. The
one requirement that the Commons Select Committee made in respect
of freight, which was of course much welcomed by the freight community,
was to require the Promoters to give an undertaking that the Acton
dive-under for freight trains, which is Works 3/17 and 3/17A,
and I am sure the Committee are well aware of which one that is,
should be completed and operational before Crossrail trains started
running.
8652. Now, my Lord Chairman, since the end of
the Commons Select Committee hearing, the Timetabling Reference
Group was restructured under the chairmanship of Network Rail
and it has done some good work. The Rail Freight Group and train
operators have been fully involved in this process and, as I believe
you have heard, the interim conclusion of this group is that the
number of freight trains that the Great Western and Great Eastern
Main Lines could accommodate in 2015 without Crossrail was very
similar to the number of trains that these lines could accommodate
in 2015 with Crossrail and—and it is an important "and"—with
the new works described in the Bill complete, and this issue was
discussed on Day 21, paragraph 8170 which you have heard, so I
shall come back to this later in Mike Garratt's evidence which
will be after lunch now.
8653. My Lords, the other major piece of progress
has been the submission of an application for an access option
by the Promoters to the ORR and its determination which was received
on 14 April. The ORR consulted fully and the Petitioners I represent
have welcomed the final decision as being fair and reasonable
and in line with its duties under section 4 of the 1993 Railways
Act, as amended, "to promote the use of the railway for the
carriage of passengers and goods, and the development of that
railway network to the greatest extent that it considers economically
practicable".
8654. So, in general, the Promoters, I believe,
have come a long way since the start of the process in Parliament,
and it has taken a long time, but they have come a long way, and
it is right to pay tribute to their willingness to make changes
as a result of the representations made by the rail freight industry.
I must also point out that the Petitioners I represent have no
wish to prevent Crossrail happening. In fact, some of them have
commercial interests in bringing building materials to the sites,
so they want to see it happen.
8655. What remains to be presented to the Committee
today are some really final, but very important, details which
the Petitioners believe need resolving before they can have the
full comfort that their businesses will not be adversely affected
by the construction and operation of Crossrail and that in the
long period between the present and the currently planned opening
date of 2017, which is nine or ten years away, my Lord Chairman,
Crossrail will comply fully with industry processes which have
been developed over more than the last 12 years, and they are
accepted by the industry as being fair and transparent.
8656. My Lords, turning now to the witnesses
I propose to call, there are six of them, but I am not going to
spend much time with each, so I hope I will not delay the Committee
too long. I will start off calling James Hookham of the Freight
Transport Association to give a short overview of the importance
of trade in general to the UK, the main routes and its effect
on GDP, and the consequences of the new `sustainable transport
policies' as proposed by Sir Rod Eddington in his report in 2006
and accepted by the Government. I will then call Alan Bennett,
DG of the Rail Freight Group, to speak about the growth in rail
freight, the expectations that government documents and policies
have given it and what is needed to achieve both absolute growth
and an increase in the market share with road freight. We will
discuss the importance of ensuring business confidence to invest
in rail freight, trains, terminals, et cetera, and how this is
best achieved against a backdrop of passenger services and Network
Rail because, whereas freight is totally in the private sector,
most of the passenger services are in some way controlled and/or
financed by the Government.
8657. Turning to the specific flows and the
issues relating to the Great Eastern and Great Western Main Lines,
the rail freight on the former is primarily deep-sea containers,
which is the line from Ipswich to London and from Felixstowe,
and from the Haven ports which is Felixstowe and Harwich, but
there are ports on the north side of the Thames which the Committee
will know, such as Tilbury and, in the future, the London Gateway
which could also have the potential of being affected by Crossrail.
On the Great Western, the main traffic is aggregates and other
building materials delivered to terminals along that route and
elsewhere, and my witness will describe the high proportion of
volumes of such material that get delivered via that route to
many places in the whole of the south-east of England.
8658. On the east side, I will be calling Andrew
Cann of Hutchison Ports UK who will describe the high growth of
imports in containers, where they have to go and the need for
suitable rail services. On the west side, I shall call Jerry McLaughlin
from the Quarry Products Association whose members will be particularly
affected if there are any problems of supplies to the terminals
in the London area which generally go through the Acton Yard,
and we have talked about the Acton dive-under already. Next, I
will call Lindsay Durham for Freightliner which is the largest
operator of container trains, but which also moves a lot of building
materials and other cargo. She will describe the operations of
rail freight, the investment achieved and the need for best asset
utilisation and the customer demands for high reliability as part
of an overall logistics chain which of course includes from ports
and quarries to the destination of a concrete batching plant on
a construction site or a supermarket for supermarket goods.
8659. Finally, I will call Mike Garratt of MDS
Transmodal, who wrote the report you have all got, to explain
the forecasting of rail freight through the GB Freight model,
its acceptance by Government and the Promoters, and the importance
of timetabling the overall journeys from end to end and the future
demand for freight trains on these lines, not only in 2015 but
also looking further ahead 25 years or so to 2030. Mike Garratt,
alongside some of the train operators, has been sitting on this
timetabling reference group I mentioned earlier, and he will talk
about the options for enhancement to cater for these growths,
although of course we recognise that some of them are the responsibility
of the Department for Transport with a different hat on from being
the Promoter of Crossrail. Nevertheless, I think it is important
that the Committee is aware of that.
1 Committee Ref: A52, Rail freight interests (LINEWD-34_05-001) Back
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