Crossrail Action Group
Opposing the Crossrail Plan for Romford & Chadwell Heath

Appendix B

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): I would like to welcome Suzanne May and Rufus Barnes from London Transport Users Committee. They will present their quarterly monitoring report and their business plan. Before that, would you care to make any comments about what you heard from Crossrail or on the announcements that are being made this week?

Suzanne May, Chair, London Transport Users Committee: We have put out press releases. It is what everybody says is it not, a good idea –

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Show us the money.

Suzanne May, Chair, London Transport Users Committee: Exactly. It looks as though it has moved perhaps two inches, but where is the money and the funding because if it is not there I can see huge problems approaching. I do not know whether there is a new way of developing the money, but something must be done at some point because capacity is becoming an acute problem, particularly considering the influx of people moving into areas where they are dependent on public transport to get them to where they work.

Before I cover the monitoring report, I will hand over to Rufus Barnes to speak on the business plan because he has done the work there after consulting with the members. The business plan itself contains our initial ideas and is what was termed ‘high level’, which may seem an old phrase but maybe that is meant to be strategy, so it is a very early draft for your comments. You have consulted on its presentation with Rowan Limmond so I just wanted to flag up the caveats around it.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: You have before you the committee’s monitoring report, and I would just like to draw your attention to a few points within the report about what we feel we have achieved in the last year. As you can see, finance is very much as intended, and our expenditure came out very, very close indeed to budget indications. The accounts are being audited at the moment and you will have the audited accounts in line with your direction for audit as soon as the audit has been completed.

On complaint handling, ‘proud’ is a strong word, nevertheless we did receive 60% more appeals’ cases last year than we received in the previous year. That was wholly due to the problems following the derailment at Chancery Lane Underground station and the subsequent closure. In paragraph 3.2 of my report you will see that this resulted in us getting about £62,000 of additional compensation for passengers that they would not otherwise have received. This resulted in quite high levels of satisfaction from passengers.

In paragraphs 3.2 and 3.6 we report the results of two of the questions that we asked passengers in a questionnaire sent out with all final responses. You will see that we report that we achieved the highest ever level of satisfaction amongst passengers for LTUC’s involvement in complaints’ handling. Although we are not yet satisfied with the speed with which we dealt with those concerns, I think that in relation to the complaints we received last year, had we actually pushed forward and sent out responses without the enormous amount of work that my staff did in negotiation with London Underground, we would have received worse responses, worse results for passengers and a lower level of overall satisfaction. Remember that we are the appeals body, and therefore we are fighting without powers to get a good deal for passengers. We think that achieving the highest ever level of satisfaction is something that we should be proud of.

On policy development we report that we completed the work that did not finish the publication of all the projects that we had intended to report on last year, including one that we had not put in our original proposals, which is referred to in paragraph 4.4 ‘Fair Deals for London’. That report was dispatched yesterday and will be reaching you in the very near future, if it has not already reached you today.

We believe that this is a very timely report given the Government’s announcement last week that the Mayor is to have a bigger role vis-à-vis national rail and in particular the setting of fares, because LTUC’s findings show just how difficult this is going to be when different train operating companies (TOCs) in the London area have different traditional charging policies. For example, if you are a user of South West Trains you generally pay less per mile than if you are a user of WAGN trains, therefore that will need to be balanced out in order to achieve a proper integrated fares policy within London. TfL (Transport for London) was very excited that we commissioned this report because it gives them information they did not have. We had discussions with them before we actually undertook that work.

I would like to refer to paragraph 4.5, and to thank Members of the Assembly for making suggestions relating to the problematic bus routes that we should look at. Bus route 123 was specifically nominated by two Members of the Assembly, and route 263 was the subject of a considerable number of representations to the committee over a number of years. G1 is a south London route where we felt we needed to have some balance between the north and south. This work is now progressing and we plan to publish the report in October in line with our current business plan commitments to you.

Finally, under ‘Comments’, I would like to refer to paragraph 4.11 where we refer to our station champions. This was something that was set up after discussions with Network Rail covering the 11 stations in the LTUC area that are directly managed by Network Rail. We are in the process of expanding that and have now reached agreement with our members that we will take on a number of other important stations in London: Ealing Broadway, Clapham Junction, Stratford and Finsbury Park, which we recognise as important stations and for which members have indicated they would be willing to be the station champions. That involves them liaising very closely indeed with all the transport operators at those particular locations to try to ensure there will be passenger benefit and passenger improvement to improve the integration of public transport services, particularly in relation to those four stations.

I would be very happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Thank you. I thought it was very interesting. I noticed the large number of appeal cases, in the previous months as you say, and the money that you have secured for those people. You had a certain amount of resources, for example, to deal with that. As you descend from that peak, how are you redeploying your resources?

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: At the moment, we are still in the position that we have more cases that we need to deal with before we can reconsider redeployment back out again. As we have reported to you, we have brought in more hours from a part-time member of staff, which is continuing to get us back down to a turn-round time that we would regard as acceptable. We certainly handled more cases last year, we have had good results, but, as I said, we have to get the timescales right.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): I noticed that your policy development was a little ‘rail heavy’ in the sense that most of the issues were to do with rail. While I’m at that - can I invite you to give a informal presentation of your work on ‘Fare Deals for London’ at some point to Members of the committee who might be interested, including myself?

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: We would be delighted to do so.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): We cannot do it in committee because we have fewer committees than we thought we would, but we would very much appreciate that. But do you agree that you need to focus more widely than the rail brief?

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: The business plan paper that I hope has been circulated to you has acknowledged that the programme for next year that is not bespoke needs to be balanced out with more non-rail issues. As you know, this year we are already working on the project on problematic buses and that will take quite some time because it will involve consulting people and be quite high profile. We have taken on board your comments about the balance.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): How do you think the abolition of the SRA (Strategic Rail Authority) and the proposal to give more powers to the Mayor, although not many as yet, will affect the quality of the service?

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: That is a leading question. I do not know. We supported the idea that the Mayor should have more control because we were concerned that under the re-franchising and changes during privatisation London passengers have not really benefited, while those outside have. We hope that it will affect the quality of service. It is difficult to tell because it will be very contentious outside the London boundary.

When they looked at the right boundary for having a rail authority in London it looked very much like the LTUC boundary, but in fact they did not start off by looking to see where the LTUC boundary was, they worked out where people would actually make their journeys and where the trains went and they came out to be the same. It would be sensible if the Mayor has control over the services outside the London boundary, but I think the Home Counties’ authorities will be very happy and there will have to be a system and a process that allows that to happen for it to be really effective.

It will certainly be for the good of fares, because as you will see from the document we produced, the Underground fares have been analysed and there does need to be a balancing up. It is quite extraordinary how different they are in some places. To have control over that part of the work would be very good. I think it would help Londoners and perhaps a different system would be better.

Darren Johnson (AM): On the representation issue, have you given thought to how those authorities outside of London but which are within the area of control that will be given representation and will you be making recommendations on that?

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: We have not done that so far, but I know that TfL have given it thought because we have been pressing them that they should, because it is not going to work unless they do. However, we have not done it ourselves. I do not know whether we would, or whether it would be appropriate. It is a good point.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: Chair, you indicated you would like us to give you a presentation on ‘Fare Deals for London’ and we would be delighted to do that. Our second report, ‘Whose Station Am I – Stations Jointly Served by London Underground and the National Railway’ will also be wending its way to you in the near future, and I wonder whether you would like us to organise for a presentation to you on both of those.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): I will think about that; it really depends on Members’ interests and time.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: Can I say that if it does look very rail orientated that is sometimes where the problems have been.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): That leads me on to my next question because, as you know, we have had this ongoing discussion about being strategic. Reading your report, you have been very active when there is a proposed railway closure. I wondered why there is no mention in either the business plan or the monitoring report of LTUC working on the Thames Gateway Bridge, the westward expansion of the Congestion Charge or the West London Tram. What role does LTUC have in those sort of massive consultations that go on in London? You are certainly there if there is even a whisper of a rail closure.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: That is because we have a statutory duty. We do not have any choice. We are part of the process, so it would go to judicial review if we did not do it.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Obviously you are so good we want to spread you over other areas.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: I think that it is difficult always to report to you everything we have been doing. I can assure you that we have spent a considerable amount of time looking at the West London Tram. We had a session at the January meeting of LTUC where Lucall Bernazi from TfL came and talked about all the intermediate road projects and we had input into that. Our committee meeting next week will look at East Thames Gateway Transport, where we are taking a further look at the bridge, the Greenwich Riverfront and East London Guided Busway Projects and we are making updates and inputs into that. We have people from East Thames Gateway London Partnership coming along.

As Suzanne said, the business plan draws attention to a very serious issue we have in that the law gives us requirements to do some things and options to do other things and that sometimes creates a real imbalance in what we have to do. In some cases, we have to do it within certain timescales because the law requires it.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): We understand your statutory role, my request was really for the other part of your role to see more light in awareness. We do not want you to communicate back on every meeting you go to, but I think Londoners would like to see something about the very major schemes in the report.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: Rufus Barnes admitted some heavy involvement of one particular member with regard to the West London Tram, who has been going to all the consultation meetings. She is a local resident herself, but she is very well aware, and has been taking soundings and spending an enormous amount of time making sure she knows what is going on and what people feel and then passing it on to us.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): But it does not find the light of day here. Clearly, it is not that you are not doing the work.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: I find it quite difficult because sometimes we have done reports and they have been too long and we have had our wrists slapped because they are too long. Sometimes it is difficult to know which schemes we should pick out.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Certainly, the major, major schemes in London.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: We are doing it all the time.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): There are no more than six major schemes. I can only speak for myself, I cannot speak for the whole committee and we have not discussed it, but I want to know what LTUC thinks on the major things that are happening in London.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: Would you like that to be in the monitoring reports or would you like it more often than that?

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Just in the monitoring reports so that I do not feel it is balanced towards rail issues, because reading this report I felt it was more about one side and not the other.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: So we should have a better balance in the monitoring report.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Finally, I would like to push you on the ‘Passenger Voices’ issue. What are your reservations? If the Transport Committee was convinced this was a worthy project perhaps we could look at making a joint bid with the Mayor to the Department for Transport for extra funds? Would you support that approach? I should ask the committee whether we would support that approach, because if we think it is that bad then why should we pay for it.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: It is not that it is bad. Of course, it is all part of the Minister’s railway review. You may have noticed that the other committees apart from the Welsh and the Scottish ones have been dissolved. One way of getting round not having them there is to have a central call centre and a central complaints centre as they will have, but they could easily get overwhelmed. I think it is a huge jump into the deep-end of a pool and it may not have a happy outcome. I think it is quite dangerous to dissolve something before you know what you are going to put in its place, which is what has happened. That was what happened with the community health councils, so who knows what will happen with the Rail Passenger Committees (RPCs). I have great reservations about that. However, the deal is that if you do that then you must have something else and that is why I think this has been bobbing around and does not get dealt with for a few months and then it is has cropped up again. That is why in the end there is a hurry to get it in place and to implement it, because of what’s happening in the railway review. This is why everybody has been caught out. I feel very upset because I have been nagging and nagging about them not paying attention to what will happen to LTUC.

I think Rufus had some sort of assurance that the Mayor would also support going with everybody else to the Minister. I think his words were something along the lines of you could not have London as a big black hole.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: That was the Minister. As Suzanne has said, we have been trying to ensure that LTUC was tied in to this ‘Passenger Voices’ project but we were faced with virtually a fait accompli. Then we were suddenly told that the Minister for Transport had indicated that he thought ‘Passenger Voices’ project was wonderful and there cannot be this gap in London. We then find, as we told you in the letter Suzanne has written to you, that the annual running costs for London, at a time when we were planning to come to you and say no growth and we have been really caught out.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: That is why we did not think we could do it.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: We also had some severe doubts, and I think we should lay our cards on the table and say that we were initially told, and you would not appreciate this I am sure, that anybody phoning this number would be greeted with the response: ‘You have phoned up a rail passenger organisation.’ We did not want that because we wanted to ensure that London transport users were greeted accordingly. They have backed down on that now, which is why we feel able to come to you and say that they have committed that if we are involved there will be an appropriate response to meet all London’s transport users.

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: However, it does mean the cost for a new telephone system and a way of transferring calls.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): So you are saying that there is no way out and therefore you will have to do some things?

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: That is what it feels like.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): OK – we will take that forward on our side.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: Turning to the business plan document, the last week has merely served to confirm that transport is a moving scene which is very difficult for us to keep up with. In some respects, the document that I only finished writing for you last week is now out of date because the White Paper on the Future of Rail, as Suzanne has mentioned, proposes the abolition of the RPCs elsewhere in the country and the retention of LTUC, but there will need to be primary legislation which will affect our remit and the way we work. We will need to be involved in discussions with the Department for Transport that will have time implications and so forth as the legislation is put together.

Similarly, the hybrid bill for Crossrail that you have just had a presentation on from the Crossrail team, if past experience is anything to go by, will require LTUC involvement as it passes through Parliament, with LTUC making representations to try to ensure that there is the best deal for passengers. Conversely, in paragraph 7 I made reference to the likelihood that LTUC would need to have closure hearings for the East London Line and those may no longer be necessary because of the decision to give the Mayor more power over railways in London and the East London Line might be promoted in a different way. In the last week alone, three changes have occurred to what will be our workplan for next year.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): Please keep updating it.

Roger Evans (AM): With regard to the workplan and what is proposed, is the idea of transferring more powers over surface rail to the Mayor and re-organising the whole RPC structure a good opportunity for us to re-draw the LTUC boundaries so they are coterminous with the boundaries of London and this Authority, and to avoid having the slightly split role that you have had before operating outside London?

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: The proposal is that the Mayor might go beyond that, but it is not set yet. In the future they might draw back the LTUC boundaries and then find a year or so down the line they are wrong again and they would have to change again. That is the difficulty for us because the cards have been thrown in the air and we are not quite sure where they will come down. There is the intention and it would be sensible to have the Mayor’s boundary outside the GLA boundary.

Roger Evans (AM): But that boundary would not be coterminous with the current LTUC boundary.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: It would be very close, but we would support a change to link the two.

Roger Evans (AM): Yes, that would remove some of the confusion. On your monitoring report, firstly congratulations on getting the time up for handling complaints. You have clearly done a lot of work there. I particularly congratulate you on the satisfaction results, which are a significant improvement and a clear step-change on what was achieved before. In the past, you have always told us that depends more on the performance of the operators than on yourselves, significantly of course because people are commenting on the result they have had rather than how quickly it has taken. Is there something you have done to achieve that result and that you will be able to learn from to keep it up at the high level in future?

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: I might not have made myself clear before. It is the speed of response that is outside our control because we are waiting to get the submissions from the operators before we can send out our final response. We asked two further questions of complainants: ‘How satisfied are you with the outcome?’, which we do not report to you because in some respects we cannot be sure about that; and, ‘How satisfied are you with LTUC’s involvement?’, which we do report to you, and that should be irrespective of what the operators tell us. We could tell them that we are terribly sorry we have not been able to achieve it for this, that or the other reason, but people may accept that and regard our response as very good.

I think that the reason we have done very well this time round is because after very lengthy discussions with London Underground we managed to persuade them that some of their decisions were wrong and irrational in relation to Chancery Lane. Therefore, we were both able to get money for people and have some more sensible decisions out of it, and although that took an enormous amount of time we did receive the right answers.

Roger Evans (AM): That high result is because a large number of the complaints you were handling related to one operation and you could work with that operator effectively so that you could get a good result for people, so we should not expect to see that high level continue into the future because regardless of how satisfied people are with your involvement, if they are not happy with the operator’s final response then that is going to contaminate their view of how well you dealt with it.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: You are right, but as the numbers of complaints settle down to a lower level we hope to enhance the quality of the way we handle each complaint, in which case we would hope to be able to maintain quality of response.

Roger Evans (AM): That is a stretching target for you. The other thing I congratulate you on is your report ‘When Is a Train Not a Train?’ on the rail-replacement bus services, something I was particularly interested in. Can you update the committee on what has happened as a result of that?

Suzanne May, Chair, LTUC: Tim O’Toole (Managing Director, London Underground) and London Underground came out quite well in the way that they managed their disruption in terms of the buses and the information, and we reflect that in the report. London Underground has taken the initiative and organised a seminar which takes place next Thursday morning. They have invited all the TOCs to come and discuss it with them. I am going to do a presentation on our report and there are other presentations about how people do it. It is a very practical seminar for half a day to see how they can improve things and what needs to be improved. That is a very nice and positive response. Although again it is the railways which aren’t doing very well on in – although some parts are and some are not.

Roger Evans (AM): With the PPP (Public-Private Partnership) and engineering work we are going to see more and more of these planned closures and we need to do deal with them.

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: We understand that about 100 people are due to go to that seminar, so it should be well attended and we hope that others will learn from the recommendations we have made.

Elizabeth Howlett (AM): I see that you are going to do a study into the G1 bus, which is in my patch of London. There were plenty of complaints about the bus, particularly the size of it going down the smaller residential roads, and the training of drivers considering there have been several damaged cars. One issue I want to bring up with you is whether you attempt to get representations from all areas of London on to your user data, because my understanding is that there has been nobody representing south-west London hitherto?

Rufus Barnes, Director, LTUC: I will have to pass that to your Chair because you appoint our members.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): It is a challenge to find someone from every part of London experienced in every mode of transport with every form of equalities’ issue amongst the number of members which the Transport Committee is recommending which is 18 people.

Elizabeth Howlett (AM): It should be very important to try to get members from all the geographic areas. It cannot be impossible.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): It is a balance between the strategic nature of this body and having everyone knowing everything. There needs to be links with people in the area if a representative cannot be found.

Elizabeth Howlett (AM): This is an issue in south-west London and there are people who can represent the area. I did encourage someone I knew to apply when I first heard about it, but by the time he got round to it it was too late for his application. There are people in south-west London who could do the job.

Lynne Featherstone (Chair): It is not a perfect system, which is why it needs to be strategic with community links.

This is Suzanne May’s last appearance. I know we have had our ups and downs, trials and tribulations and so forth, but on behalf of the committee and indeed London I would like to thank you for all the service and dedicated work you have given to LTUC. I wish you all the best for the future.

Rufus Barnes, LTUC: Can I remind you that we have invited you to put forward suggestions in relation to our business plan and we need to have your comments.

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