Examination of Witnesses (Questions 12760
- 12779)
12760. CHAIRMAN: I think we had better
come back to this general area a little later on.
12761. MS LIEVEN: I think that may be
right, my Lord. If we proceed with the Residents' Association
of Mayfair and the Coalition now, then I suspect those on our
side who are involved in rail issues will want to go out and decide
how they want to handle things.
The following Petitions against the Bill were read:
The Petitions of the Residents' Society of Mayfair
and St James and the Crossrail Coalition of Residents and Petitioners.
MR ALEX
GOODMAN appeared on behalf of
the Petitioners
MS MARINA
ATWATER and MR
GUY CARPENTER
appeared as Agents.
12762. CHAIRMAN: Are you going to make
any opening statement on this?
The Petitions of the Residents' Society
of Mayfair and St James's and the Crossrail Coalition of Residents
and Petitioners
12763. MS LIEVEN: I was going to, my
Lord, yes, a relatively brief one. My learned friend Mr Goodman
is here to represent, I believe, both the Residents' Association
of Mayfair and the Coalition, and he has been good enough, a few
minutes ago, to hand me a written summary of submissions, so I
have some idea of what points are going to be taken.
12764. CHAIRMAN: We have had it this
morning for the first time.
12765. MS LIEVEN: Well, the same with
me, my Lord. I had it about 45 minutes ago
12766. CHAIRMAN: Consequently, we have
not had the faintest chance of reading it.
12767. MS LIEVEN: Well, my Lords, most
of it comes as no huge surprise and I was going to cover, therefore,
those issues in opening anyway. There are one or two issues that
I am going to touch on, but really it will be for Mr Goodman to
explain to you what the concerns are. Anyway, perhaps we can just
start by putting up the map of Mayfair, and this may seem rather
obvious—
12768. CHAIRMAN: No, we have not had
it before.
12769. MS LIEVEN: No, we have not really
focused in this Committee on this section of the route and I think
it is important that your Lordships understand the areas concerned.
Your Lordships, I am sure, will be wholly familiar with the fact
that Mayfair is the area bounded by Park Lane to the west, Oxford
Street to the north, Regent Street to the east, and we do not
need to worry about the south. The Crossrail route runs roughly
parallel with the Central Line and Oxford Street just to the south
of Oxford Street, and we have marked on here the two tunnels and
you can see tunnels coming in out of Hyde Park, which we were
talking about yesterday, under Park Lane and then under this part
of Mayfair. There is one station which falls within Mayfair and
that is the station that we call Bond Street and, like all our
central section stations, Bond Street Station has two ticket halls.[2]
The western ticket hall falls close to the existing Bond Street
Tube Station, which I am sure we all know and love, on Oxford
Street and it is on a site on Davies Street just to the south
of the existing Bond Street Station here where I am marking on
the map (indicating), and it has easy connections into Bond Street
Tube Station where one can interchange on to the Central Line
obviously and the Jubilee Line. There are then the normal long
Crossrail platforms which run again under Mayfair and the eastern
ticket hall is in Hanover Square which lies one block to the south
of Oxford Street in Mayfair, and the ticket hall lies where I
am indicating in Hanover Square. It is fair to say at this point,
because it has been a concern of the Residents' Association of
Mayfair, that the eastern ticket hall does not link into Oxford
Circus Station. Such a link was found to have very little transport
benefits and to be enormously difficult to construct effectively,
and Mr Berryman can give more evidence on that later.
12770. CHAIRMAN: It would be a long walk
too.
12771. MS LIEVEN: It would be a long
walk. All of our modelling suggested that very few people would
do the walk because it was not sensible and also plugging into
Oxford Circus Station was a very difficult thing to do without
hopelessly overcrowding Oxford Circus Station. Then obviously
the tunnels run off to the east towards Tottenham Court Road and
out of Mayfair. I am going to call them the Society and the Mayfair
residents because the Residents' Association of Mayfair and St
James is a bit of a mouthful. I understand that the Society and
the Mayfair residents have three principal concerns they are going
to raise with you today: the provision of information, alternatives
and the deletion of clause 21, which I will come to separately.
12772. So far as the provision of information
is concerned, we are just getting hold of this note which your
Lordships asked for on Information Papers; it has not arrived
yet unfortunately, but I can deal with information without it.
I understand that Mr Goodman is going to make a considerable point
of the obligations of the UK Government under what is called the
Aarhus Convention to provide environmental information to those
affected by schemes. It is our very clear case here that the Society
and the Mayfair residents and local residents in this area and
indeed residents affected by the other part of the Coalition,
that is the Spitalfields' residents, have received a very large
amount of information from us in both detailed terms, where appropriate,
but also in very clear terms. There is obviously a difficult thing
to do here, which is to tell people what is going on on a big
and complicated project in a way that is not misleading but also
to tell them in a way that is accessible to them so they can understand
what they are being told. It is our case that we have achieved
both here. We have provided the Society and the Mayfair residents
with a vast amount of information on this project. For the Society
and the Mayfair residents the Petition response document responding
to their response in the House of Lords ran to 23 pages. It did
not just set out a response to every single one of their concerns;
it referred at all appropriate points to the relevant Information
Paper and the relevant passages within the Information Paper.
The first tier of information was in what we call the PRD and
the second tier of information was what was referred to in the
IPs. In terms of environmental information, we have acted scrupulously
in providing information in that format. Of course, the Committee
are well aware that the IPs are all on the Internet and updated
whenever appropriate on the Internet, with the relevant dates
on the Internet. Anybody who wants to know about the project including
the Society and the Mayfair residents or indeed the Coalition
have got this cascade of information depending on precisely what
they are interested in and the level of detail they want to know.
12773. CHAIRMAN: It has been available
for a long time, has it not?
12774. MS LIEVEN: Different information
has been available at different times. As far as the PRD for the
House of Lords is concerned, obviously that has been available
for the last few weeks. The Information Papers were all put on
the Internet in, at that point, final form when we started in
the House of Commons and they have been updated since then. There
was also a lot of information when obviously the scheme was at
an earlier stage but we had information centres and we did local
consultation letters. There has been a constant source of information.
You have to balance these things because if we barrage people
with information then they just blank it out and it stops being
of any use. As far as the Society and the Mayfair residents and
the Coalition is concerned, all the way through this they have
had large amounts of information in various forms depending on
what they wanted. After she received the PRD, Mrs Atwater who
was representing the Society and the Mayfair residents—
12775. MR GOODMAN: If it would assist,
the point I was intending to raise was not strictly on the provision
of information. It may save time just to make that point now.
Ms Lieven is welcome to come back when she has properly understood
exactly the point I was trying to make in the written submissions
in advance.
12776. MS LIEVEN: I just want to explain
to the Committee what information has been provided. After the
PRD Mrs Atwater wrote to us on behalf of the Society and the Mayfair
residents and asked a series of further questions. We then wrote
back—and it is in the exhibits—not just providing
other information, but also with a schedule setting out where
each point was responded to in the PRD, to make it as accessible
for the Society and the Mayfair residents and its members as possible.
12777. The other aspect of information that
I just want to emphasise in opening is that we have received a
very large number of requests under the Freedom of Information
Act from the Society and the Mayfair residents. On my calculation
we have sent them 30 reports on Crossrail on various different
aspects pursuant to all these FoI requests. They have not just
had the most recent information from us; they have had full access
to historic information. They had a whole series of requests relating
to the previous scheme, the LU/British Rail scheme in 1992, so
we have sent them a whole series of reports from 1992 on the old
scheme.
12778. CHAIRMAN: That must be fairly
similar to the passage that I was referring to yesterday, which
is in Command Paper 7250, which provided a list of the things
that the Spitalfields group had been provided with. I have not
seen the list of the Mayfair ones but it is probably very similar.
12779. MS LIEVEN: It is very similar,
my Lord. Can we put up Exhibit 35—4-048, please?[3]
I am not going to read them through, but these are the documents
sent under the Freedom of Information Act to the Society and the
Mayfair residents. It probably differs from the one sent to Spitalfields
in this respect: Spitalfields were concerned with alternative
alignments for the eastern section of the route east of Liverpool
Street and it would be fair to say that one of the most consistent
points about the Residents' Association of Mayfair's concerns
about alternatives is that they would be alternatives, understandably,
that are not within Mayfair. We are looking at a different set
of alternatives.
2 Crossrail Ref: P80, Bond Street Station-Transport
and Access (LINEWD-ES40-011) Back
3
Crossrail Ref: P80, List of documents sent under the Freedom
of Information Act (WESTCC-35-04-048 to -051) Back
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