Examination of Witnesses (Questions 13220
- 13239)
13220. If there is a small claim—and I
think a small claim is defined as less than £5,000 in paragraph
3.1—paragraph 2.6, the member of the public who wants to
make a small claim because cracks have appeared and they need
to have their house repainted or whatever the small claim is,
I think the system is they go to the Small Claims Administrator
but then can the Small Claims Administrator refer the matter to
the Complaints Commissioner, paragraph 2.6?
(Mr Berryman) Yes.
13221. I think what is clear from 2.6 is that
there is then a process of arbitration.
(Mr Berryman) Yes.
13222. So just split our claims into two: if
you have a small claim and you are unhappy about how Crossrail
are working, the nominated undertaker working, you can end up
in front of arbitration. Is that right?
(Mr Berryman) Yes.
13223. And if you have a big claim, you can
end up in front of the Lands Tribunal.
(Mr Berryman) Correct.
13224. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr Berryman.
(Mr Berryman) I wonder if I could just correct something
I said earlier today to Lord James, when I suggested that LUL
stations might not be safe. What I intended to say is they do
not comply with current safety standards. In other words, they
are safe but they do not comply with modern safety standards.
13225. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: Yes,
I see. I have been going through in my mind all the places where
I could think of stations under thoroughfares, and it is a very
long list.
(Mr Berryman) It is, my Lord, but you will not find many
of them with ventilation stacks and escape stairs at both ends
of the station.
13226. They are so close to the surface that
they almost get their ventilation from the surface.
(Mr Berryman) The sub-surface lines are, yes, my Lord. The
District Line and Metropolitan Line.
13227. MS LIEVEN: Those are all my questions
for Mr Berryman.
The witness withdrew
13228. CHAIRMAN: Are there any other
of the Promoter's witnesses that you want to cross-examine, Mr
Goodman?
13229. MR GOODMAN: No, my Lord.
13230. CHAIRMAN: Ms Lieven, what is your
answer to this Petition then?
13231. MS LIEVEN: My Lords, I will do
my best to draw the points together. I think the first point is
one on consultation and information. I hope that the Committee
understands through the information it has been given over the
last few weeks that we do not view consultation as being a privilege
and that we are very committed to a regime of consultation and
information.
13232. So far as the process going forward after
Royal Assent is concerned—we did cover this in quite a lot
of detail yesterday and the day before with Westbourne Park and
PRACT—in my submission, the fundamental problem with everything
that Mr Goodman is saying is that he is trying to cut out the
local authority and say each local resident should be able to
go straight to CLRL individually and be able to go to any number
of meetings and whatever. In my submission, it is wholly appropriate
and completely in accordance with EU law that the primary route
of involving local residents from here on to the end of Crossrail
is through the democratically elected bodies of their local authority,
for two reasons. One is because they are democratically elected
to represent all the people in the area. Secondly, because, as
Mr Berryman said, they have the technical expertise, they have
the noise experts, or they have access to the noise experts, to
the traffic experts, to all the gamut of professional expertise
that is needed on issues such as this.
13233. Under both Schedule 7 in terms of further
above-ground works that have to have gone through the approval
process of Schedule 7, but also under section 61 of the Control
of Pollution Act in terms of getting consents for work-site working,
lorry routes, matters such as that, the local authority has a
very extensive series of powers that it can use on behalf of the
local residents. It is up to the local authorities in that instance
to decide what is the appropriate level of consultation—and
it does come back to what I said about Paddington a couple of
days ago. There are very much horses for courses. There will be
some section 60 decisions where it would not be appropriate, useful
or a sensible use of public time and money to consult people,
and there will be others where extensive consultation will be
necessary and appropriate. If the local authority gets that fundamentally
wrong in terms of what consultation it takes forward, then there
are legal mechanisms and complaints mechanisms against the local
authority. But that they should be that first tier is, in my submission,
wholly lawful and wholly appropriate.
13234. Even beyond that, if the residents are
unhappy and they feel the local authority is not fully serving
their interests, they have other recourses. They can complain
to the Commissioner. I think Baroness Fookes put her finger on
it earlier. Commissioners' powers are not generally executive.
The whole rationale of Ombudsmen, thinking back to the 1970s and
when they were introduced, was precisely that they can have an
informal role in brokering compromise and discussion behind the
scenes, and that has worked very well on the Channel Tunnel Rail
Link, and we have every reason to believe it would work very well
here.
13235. If local residents still are not happy
and they want some kind of bigger fist, they can go to their local
MPs and use the political pressure that way. If the local authority
is being so hopeless, and really I think the Committee can be
very confident that that would not be the case on this route given
the degree of scrutiny that Westminster and Tower Hamlets have
put us under so far, but just say it did happen, then ultimately
the residents can go to court and take action against their local
authority and get injunctive relief. If a noise is being caused
which is wholly unreasonable and Crossrail is ignoring the Commissioner
and ignoring everybody, then there are mechanisms there. So it
is quite wrong to say that the residents are powerless. Then of
course there is also the phone helpline, so if somebody is drilling
outside your door at three o'clock in the morning for the fifth
consecutive day, you can ring up Crossrail 24 hours a day and
actually speak to somebody and see that something happens. That
is the process that was adopted on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link,
where a massive station was built close to local residents and,
as Mr Berryman has told you, it worked well.
13236. In my submission, we have a whole mechanism
there that is wholly appropriate. It is also the case—and
I think it is important right at the end that we acknowledge this
and that it is balanced—that we cannot build a £16
billion project through central London without causing a bit of
dust, noise and disturbance to local residents and occupiers.
It is an impossible task. It comes back to Lord Brooke's point,
which is that the local authorities are there to balance up those
interests, so they can say, "All right, there will be some
noise at night. Is that a reasonable level of noise given that
there is a massive public benefit in this scheme?" Somebody
has to do that because, to be frank, the person who lives next
to the noise is not really going to be the person to do that balance.
That is again where the local authority comes in, and in my submission,
that is a wholly acceptable, wholly appropriate mechanism.
13237. It is important to emphasise, because
as Mr Goodman says, "We don't know what is in these environmental
minimum requirements. We don't know whether they're sufficient
and whether they meet EU standards" or whatever. Every single
one of these requirements has been agreed with the local authorities.
They have not just been agreed with the individual lead authorities.
The lead authorities have gone back to all the other authorities
and agreed with them. These are not standards we have plucked
out of the air and imposed on people. These are standards that
have been beaten out through meetings over the last three years,
and even if Westminster had a completely off day, which I can
promise you, having met Mr King on a number of occasions is unlikely
to be the case, and failed to spot that we were proposing to drill
unbearably for 24 hours a day, three years on the trot, outside
somebody's house, you can be absolutely certain that one of the
other local authorities would have picked it up.
13238. Please do not go away and think that
this is imposing something on people which there has been no opportunity
to balance, to think about, to discuss. It just is not like that.
Even in terms of individual residents, again I have said in opening
on this Petition, and I am going to reiterate, they have had an
enormous amount of information and the Code of Construction Practice
goes on for pages and pages in the information paper, it is all
there on the net. If the residents had some unhappiness about
some paragraph, it has been on the net for years, and the final
version has been on the net for months, so they could have come
and said, "We do not like this." It is not the case
that they have not had the information.
13239. Can I then turn specifically to clause
21 and the deletion of it. We have not heard very much from Mr
Goodman about that so far, but the reasons I gave in opening are
that we need clause 21 because otherwise the nominated undertaker
cannot know what work it can carry out without the danger of a
member of the public going to the magistrates' court—and
the magistrates' court might take a difference view from the local
authority—so it leaves us at risk, if we do not have that
clause. In my submission, the critical point is that that clause
was accepted in the Channel Tunnel Rail Act and it has been accepted
in an even stronger form in a number of TWAs. So, in my submission,
it is a perfectly sensible and reasonable clause and it does not
remove the local authority's powers, so if we are acting in breach
of the section 60 agreement, the local authority can step in,
and I revert back to all the points I made about local authorities.
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