Transport for London Bill [HL]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. I think that TfL generally, since its creation, has been a success under both its mayors, and it has certainly improved the general transport in London. Therefore, I congratulate the noble Baroness on achieving a Second Reading for it, which is often quite difficult in this House. I have one concern about Clause 4, which I have already informed the noble Baroness about. Whereas most of the Bill is to do with the financial issues for TfL, which is very useful, TfL has managed to slip in a little clause about selling off land, which one might suggest is necessary to help finance some of the new projects. There is nothing wrong with that. However, my concern is that TfL needs to take a long-term view on the land that it holds and might need in the future. Experience to date is that it is very difficult to forecast with any certainty what land transport, and in particular railways, might need in the future. One recalls Dr Beeching’s slashing of lines—closing them down over the years because everyone was going to go by car, and how wonderful that was going to be. Now, of course, everyone is struggling to reopen lines. There was a very welcome announcement last week in the autumn Statement about reopening the Oxford to Cambridge line. The problem is that it goes from Oxford as far as Bedford and no further, because the land was sold off for building probably 20 years ago, and there is a problem—somewhere near Bedford, I think—where the line should have gone across a boating lake. Whatever one thought of Dr Beeching, no one thought that there would be such a demand for new rail transport in the future. I had an issue about 15 years ago with the then British Rail Property Board, encouraged by the Department of Transport, over a freight terminal. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. There was a lovely piece of land in Battersea that was ideal for building a concrete batching plant. All the materials could come in by rail and then be distributed locally as concrete to the local buildings. However, there was a competition between the concrete company and Battersea dogs home to have this piece of land because the dogs needed more land for exercise. I made the point to anyone who would listen that dogs do not need to be rail-connected, whereas it is quite useful for concrete work to be rail-connected. No one thought it was particularly funny and Battersea dogs home won, probably with lots of extra traffic on the road. My message is that it is very difficult to forecast what bits of land might be needed for what in the future. We can talk about station extensions, but we know that no one wants to build extra stations or extra platforms because the services work fine at the moment, except when one suddenly discovers that one cannot lengthen the platforms any more or that one needs to lengthen them or put an extra platform in because of the demand. Then one needs land. Extra land might be needed for the maintenance of new bits of rolling stock or small rail freight terminals around London. The problem is that once these bits of land are sold off, it is almost impossible to get them back again at any reasonable price. Compulsory purchase is a very long and tortuous thing and no one likes doing it. Basically, one is always told, ““Can’t you go somewhere else?””. I suppose I do not trust anyone to have a long-term policy to hold on to land. That comment applies to what remains of the British Rail Property Board before it gets subsumed into the Department for Transport, to the department itself, and to Transport for London. They all do it with the best of intentions, but my issue with Clause 4 is that whether one trusts everyone or no one, it is useful not to have the beneficiary of a sale being the organisation that organises the sale. In this case, the beneficiary is clearly TfL. I would like to see some wording in the clause—and I am very happy to discuss it with the noble Baroness and Ministers in the future—that retains the requirement to get permission from the Department for Transport, which presumably would not have an interest in the land, for such a sale. I would feel comforted that as much protection as possible had been given to these pieces of land, which are necessarily near railways. If they are miles from a railway line, it probably does not matter very much, unless one is going to talk about river transport, and I have not looked at the land holdings for that. That is the kind of wording that I would like in Clause 4, and I look forward to discussing it with the noble Baroness in the next few days.