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Crossrail Bill

My Lords, I am occasionally tempted to support this Bill because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, said, it concerns an important project for the City and will be one of the important engines of the UK economy, and because it introduces and puts investment into a very low-carbon form of transport. I am also tempted to support it not least because many other capitals—I think of the Paris RER system—have much better public transport arrangements than ours and provide much easier access to places of work. I also have a rather sentimental family connection to the project. When I first heard about Crossrail, I was living in Cornwall and said to my father, who lived in Witham in Essex, ““Do you know, I’ll be able to get on one train and go all the way through to visit you both? That’ll be great, won’t it?””. He looked at me wisely, as fathers do, and said, ““Son, by the time that happens, I’ll be dead””. I talked to him about that in the mid-1980s and he died in 1994, but I do not think that even he would have believed that it would take 23 years after his departure, as is being predicted tonight, for it finally to happen, although I know that he would applaud it. I am sceptical about the plan, partly for a very selfish reason in that I still live in the south-west. On a number of occasions, I have asked—not through the House but of people involved in the project—what guarantees there are regarding the increasingly vital passenger links into Paddington from not just the far south-west but south Wales, let alone the commuter belt of the Thames Valley and Bristol. Will users of those links be able to commute to Paddington relatively unencumbered, not only during construction, which will take a considerable time, but once Crossrail is operating? Will there still be sufficient train and passenger movement over that line so that the west of England, Cornwall and south Wales are not cut off from communication links with the south-east and London? This is not an imaginary problem. In the past month we have seen relatively small rail engineering projects—small in comparison with Crossrail—on the west coast main line and on lines into Liverpool Street cause total disruption because passenger movements into London were badly managed. My noble friend Lord Bradshaw mentioned copper-bottomed guarantees. I do not know whether the Government have a number of those that they can roll out today, but I would dearly like the Minister to give something between an assurance and a guarantee that during construction there will not be a closure of Paddington or a major decline in services from the south-west, although I do not understand from the detail of the project planning that has taken place so far how that is to be prevented. Following the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and given the growth in demand for track capacity, I am concerned whether, post project, services from the Thames Valley, the south-west and south Wales will be available in sufficient capacity to provide a vital transport link for, particularly, the south-west. At the moment there is some growth in air travel from the south-west into the south-east and, obviously, in car journeys. But government policy on climate change and other matters—on which I congratulate the Government for their objectives if not their policies—is there to try to increase rail travel and to reduce internal air travel and car usage. I hope the Government understand the great concern that we have in the south-west. I spent some 17 or 18 years of my career in the freight industry, mainly the road freight industry. Surely the great success of the rail freight industry after a long decline must not be allowed to be an impediment to the growth in passenger transport. This is an important area for the non-carbon transport of freight and passengers. On behalf of the people of the south-west, south Wales and the Thames Valley, I look forward to a robust assurance from the Minister about this long-term, grave issue, about which many in that part of the country feel there is little understanding. Although we understand that the project is important to London, the people west of London cannot be forgotten during the passage of the Bill.