Appendix 1

London Assembly Transport Committee – 17 December 2019

Transcript of Item 6 – Elizabeth Line update

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Now let us move to our main item today, which is an update and review of where we are with the Elizabeth line and Crossrail. We have a fantastic panel before us today. I am very lucky to be chairing this meeting today. Let us start from left to right: Mike Brown MVO, the Transport Commissioner at Transport for London (TfL); Heidi Alexander, the Deputy Mayor for Transport; Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan; Tony Meggs CB, who is the Chair of Crossrail; and Mark Wild, who is the Chief Executive of Crossrail. Thank you all so much for coming along today and we look forward to a really good discussion.

I believe you wanted to do an update to start off with. Is that correct?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Thank you. Chair, one of the important roles I think all people in positions of power should face is scrutiny. One of the things that I did six months ago was ask you if we could come back and give more information on Crossrail. Two Members of the Assembly who do a brilliant job holding me to account and do a good job for Londoners are Gareth Bacon and Florence Eshalomi. I think genuinely Parliament’s gain will be the Assembly and Londoners’ loss because they have done a brilliant job holding me to account but also asking the tough questions that lead to us being better in the jobs we seek to do. I am sure we all echo your comments and congratulations to both Gareth and Flo. From personal experience I think they will regret going to that place and leaving this place, but who am I to say? I am sure Heidi [Alexander] would agree with that as well.

The additional delay and further cost overrun of Crossrail has been very disappointing for all of us. I am pleased we are able to attend today to provide further information and, as importantly, to answer any questions about the latest developments. As you know, on 7 November [2019] Crossrail Ltd confirmed that the central section of the route between Paddington and Abbey Wood would now open as soon as possible in 2021 rather than in late 2020, additional funds of between £400 million and £650 million would be needed to complete the project, and that we and Londoners would be provided with further details early in the new year about when the Elizabeth Line will open. The project team’s view as they approach the final stages of construction is that they need more time to complete the testing of the trains and to manage the handover of the railway into customer service both safely and reliably.

Despite the setbacks, it is clear that enormous progress is being made at Crossrail. Tony Meggs, Mark Wild and the whole team now have a far better grip on the project. While responsibility for delivery sits with Crossrail Ltd, I am pleased with how open the new leadership team are being about the scale of the challenge and how the project is progressing. I have emphasised the need for regular and transparent reporting. I have personally attended two Crossrail Board meetings and Heidi, Mike [Brown MVO], my chief of staff, David Bellamy, and I regularly meet with Tony and Mark as Chair and Chief Executive, who provide us with detailed project updates and share any emerging issues and risks. To be frank, this marks a welcome change from Crossrail’s previous leadership team, who completely failed to understand and report what was actually happening with the project.

Of course I share the frustration of Londoners that the Elizabeth Line is not yet open and I apologise for this, but progress is being made. We have already achieved some very significant milestones over the last six months. This includes the start of multi-train testing, the successful handover of Victoria Dock and Pudding

Mile Lane Tunnel portals, and the completion of stage 5a, allowing TfL rail services to operate between Paddington and Reading.

Chair, I want to finish by saying this. This is an extraordinarily complex project the like of which has never been undertaken in the United Kingdom (UK) before. When complete, the Elizabeth Line will completely transform travel across our city and we must not forget what a fantastic addition to our transport network it will be. But the point I have made to the Crossrail Board is they must knuckle down, continue making progress and deliver the Elizabeth Line as soon as possible for Londoners. I will continue to work closely with the Department for Transport (DfT) as joint sponsor. Mark, Tony and the Board are clear that the Elizabeth Line must be completed to the highest possible safety and quality standards. With your permission, Chair, can I hand over to Tony Meggs, who is the Chair of the Crossrail Ltd Board?

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Lovely. Tony, over to you.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair, and to the Mayor. Just to add a few comments, a year ago, when Mark [Wild] and I were asked to come and help get this project over the line, the project was in severe disarray. There was no viable plan for completing the work and bringing the railway into operation, certain stations were far behind the rest, threatening very long delays to the overall programme, there was a considerable gap between Crossrail and contractor estimates of cost and schedule, and there was a complete breakdown of trust between the sponsors and the company.

Since then we have done a great deal to improve the company, its governance and its performance, addressing the major shortcomings outlined above. These improvements, by the way, include acting on essentially all of the recommendations made in your report earlier this year. We have at all times operated with extreme openness and candour, describing both progress and challenges as they have arisen. In my experience, no public project has been subject to the degree of scrutiny and the level of transparency that we have maintained throughout this year.

Our earliest opening programme in April contained four major tasks: developing and integrating the train signalling software; completing the stations, shafts and portals; completing the routeway; and then when all of that is essentially done, extensive trial running and trial operations to get the train ready for passenger service. We have made good progress against the first three items here. The software is now integrated and much further developed, the station shafts and portals are virtually all completed and the routeway is almost completed and tested.

However, the programme will take longer than we expected in April for two primary reasons. We do need additional time to complete the assurance and handover process. That is the complex integration of all of the systems, which we are happy to talk about in more detail, and making sure that everything is as specified, is working correctly and is safe and reliable. This has quite frankly turned out to be harder than we had originally anticipated for various reasons that we can again go into. The second is progress on the software. We have made very good progress on the software but nevertheless we feel we need one or two more iterations of the software to develop the reliability we need.

Now, I would like to be able to sit here today and give you the new opening programme. The executives have provided the Board with a revised schedule but we are undertaking, as the Board, a certain level of due diligence right now and an independent review to make sure that this forecast is as reliable as it possibly can be. We really are sorry and we do apologise to Londoners, businesses and our sponsors who are waiting for the Elizabeth Line. Nobody is more anxious than we are to get this project done. We are very disappointed that it

is going to take longer than we had originally hoped, but we cannot take any shortcuts on this job. Every single thing that we discover as we go through this process needs to be fixed, corrected and built to the highest possible standards. As the Mayor has said, this will be a tremendous addition to London and the southeast when it is completed and rest assured we are working night and day to get this over the line as soon as possible.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Thank you very much indeed for those detailed opening words. If I could start with questions - and I think, Tony, you have just touched on it a bit - in terms of the public and how they see it, the opening date has been changed four times since the Crossrail project began. When do you anticipate it will open? Do you want to give us a bit more information on why the opening date keeps slipping? You would think from outside that if you give it a bit more time you would be able to open it.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): First of all, let me say that I really do believe that we have made a lot of progress this year, and secondly, that we have got to the bottom of what remains to be done. Subject to the due diligence that we are currently doing, we are going to produce a forecast that we can totally rely on.

The reasons for the slippage I think Mark [Wild] can help with in more detail here, but it is really that as the work has progressed and we have begun to understand the full amount of work that is required for the final integration and testing, assurance, validation, certification and so on, we have found things that are wrong and materials that are inappropriate. This is very, very detailed work. Some of this is inevitable in a project of this scale and magnitude, some of it is quite regrettable, but nevertheless we are fixing everything as we go and it is just taking a little bit longer or several months longer than we had originally anticipated.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Maybe, Mark, you could give us a practical example of something where you found the wrong material had been used, for example, just to help us understand this.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I would say Tony [Meggs CB] is right, there are really three areas of uncertainty. We took a commitment to be transparent and to tell the Mayor, the Deputy Mayor for Transport, Mike [Brown MVO] and our other sponsor exactly where we were. There is a downside to that because you are seeing our workings as we are working through it. The reason that we always want to set quite forward-leaning dates is that we clearly want to get this railway open as soon as possible. The easiest thing in the world to do is to kick this for several years and several billion pounds, but it would help nobody. We really have to keep the pressure on to drive very aggressively towards the front edge of the opening windows. There is always this tension we have between the earliest possible date and the reality of the uncertainty.

There are three very simple examples. The software is taking probably another spin. That takes about three to four months every time we change the software. We have just loaded version 11 onto the central operating section. It could be OK for trial running but more likely we will need another variant of it. The great news with the software is that the systemic problems we might have had a year ago of “Will the transitions work?” are mostly solved. We are now into the very, very fine safety and reliability tuning of the software.

To your point about certification, Crossrail is of an immense size. London Underground would do one large station every two to three years, and there is a reason for that. We are doing 30 in about nine months. Crossrail has 16 million individual parts that distil down to 2.5 million assurable lumps. If you are travelling on a Crossrail station you can be assured when you are travelling on it that it is at the highest possible standards

of fire retardancy, fire suppression and public safety, which means that for all those 16 million items, distilling down to 2.5 million bundles of work, we do need the certification. We have found gaps when we have tested things. That is why we test the system extensively.

I will give you a great example of why this is so complex. There are 17,000 smoke detectors in Crossrail and there are 20,000 public address speakers. Why is that important? If there was a fire in one of our stations, we evacuate it in about six to seven minutes. We do the evacuation by very careful integration of the fire system with the public address system and the lift system. What we are finding - there are lessons, of course, for future projects - is that we probably underestimated the scale of Crossrail but we fully know where we are now. However, it takes a lot of time and we cannot walk past the integration of the fire systems with the public address systems, for obvious reasons. While it is frustrating right now that we are picking up delays, it is worth the while to spend the investment in the engineering now to get the outcome we need. The facts are that a lot of these systems are so safety-critical that we cannot and will not walk past them.

Broadly, we have not found a lot of defective work. It is more in the integration and the certification, from one single smoke detector right the way up to the system. We need to make sure that 20,000 smoke detectors work. Those are the challenges at present.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): OK. Thank you for that. I think your latest estimate is that you will open as early as possible in 2021. That could mean right up to the end of 2021, realistically. What confidence can we have in that new timeline you have put out?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Before Mark answers, if I may, originally Mark and Tony gave us a six-month window between October 2020 and March 2021, if you remember.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Yes.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): You and I and others were very angry that last time we only discovered four months before the opening that it was not going to open. What Mark, Tony and the team could have done is said, “We will still open in that six-month window”, and then lo and behold, approach that and say, “We may not make March 2021. It may go to April or May”. Because we are now demanding transparency, they have been very honest and said, “Look, we are not going to make the first three months of that window. There is still a possibility we could make that window in March 2021 but to err on the side of caution and be fully transparent” --

I have asked them to come back with a new date and what they have assured is that by early next year we will have a new window. I just wanted to explain. I am sure that under the old regime I would have been told, “Everything is hunky dory. Do not worry, the six-month window still applies”, and in December 2020 we would be told it did not. I welcome the fact they have been open. The downside is that it is a concern, but the good thing is that we have sufficient notice to do mitigation and try to make sure we keep to that window.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Thanks, Mr Mayor. It is still possible to open this railway in quarter one of 2021. In fact, with the work we have done, we are very confident this railway will open in 2021. We have spent our whole lives for a year looking at every nut and bolt of this and we are very confident this railway will open in 2021. Our objective is to get it as early as possible and we have produced a plan with a range of uncertainty. The key uncertainties are the software and the safety integration of these stations, and we are about to submit that to our Board in early January [2020]. I guess the Board will consider it, Tony.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Just for clarity, at our November Board the executive proposed a revised range of dates. The Board accepts the delay and the increase. We understand that, but we are doing quite a lot of work and have asked quite a few questions of the executive just to be absolutely clear that as and when we revise this window, which will be wholly within 2021, we do not ever have to do it again.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Great. Thank you very much for that. We have a lot of more detailed questions that will get into some of these issues. I want to just pick up with Mike the issue of the impact on TfL in terms of revenue because in your papers for tomorrow’s Finance Committee it suggests there is between £500 million and £750 million in additional lost revenue as a result of this delay that TfL is going to have to absorb. I wondered whether you might comment on that. What time period of delay does that cover? That sounds to me like it is longer than a year.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): Thank you, Chair. Yes, you are quite right that the original projections in last year’s Business Plan were that we would see a revenue hit for TfL’s revenue of some £600 million. The further delay that was communicated we have budgeted or put in the Plan at a further £750 million. Just to give you a sense of how that is broken down, that is £100 million for 2021, £300 million for 2021/22, £300 million for 2022/23 and £100 million for 2023/24. There is some rounding in those numbers but broadly that is the make-up of that additional £750 million.

I would say that in line with all our demand projections, and led to some extent by you and colleagues on the Assembly, we have taken a very prudent approach to our revenue forecast so any opening earlier in 2021, as Mark [Wild] has alluded to, would give us an upside on that demand projection and therefore revenue numbers. We have taken a very prudent approach given that we have to construct the Business Plan clearly in advance of having the clarity of the schedule that Mark and Tony [Meggs CB] have alluded to.

In terms of how we deal with that, of course in the Business Plan - as you will have seen because it was published last Friday [13 December 2019], though I do accept that not everybody will have had a chance to go through every detail of it yet - the net operating costs overall of TfL have reduced from £1.5 billion in 2015/16 down to a projected £307 million at year end for the current financial year. Our track record of bearing down on operational costs in TfL, in the core of TfL, goes a considerable way to mitigate that additional pressure on demand that we see.

There are of course other unknowns out there. We do not quite know how the macroeconomic circumstances are going to emerge in the fulness of time. We had a reasonable start to the financial year up until about October [2019] but we have seen some softening in demand since that date, particularly Tube demand, so we are keeping a very close eye on our core demand projections and of course that then will inform any further measures we need to take as we go into next year.

It is also important, I think, to just remind us that the three factors we face are Crossrail, of course, the macroeconomic factors and the loss of the operating grant from the Government. Assembly Members will be keen, I am sure, to be reminded of the fact that in the Government’s letter to us of 2015, the letter from the then-Secretary of State to the then-Mayor, the removal of the operating grant was explicit as being a dependent issue on Crossrail revenues beginning to come in. Clearly that has not materialised so it would be no surprise to you, Chair, or to Assembly Members to know that I am in dialogue and will be as soon as this afternoon talking to the DfT and reminding them about the sentence in that particular letter.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Very good. Thank you. It is helpful to be reminded on that.

The latest project cost, and that is November [2019], is that you are going to need an additional £400 million to £650 million. That is just the latest, not with your revised schedule and so on. I do not know who would like to take this question, but what are your predictions of the cost of delivering this project?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Those revised cost estimates of £400 million to £650 million do take into account the delays that we have been talking about. We do not plan to revise these cost estimates again. We do not plan to ask for any more money. The fact that we have not finally announced the exact opening window is simply because we are doing a little bit more due diligence, just to be sure that all the plans are in place. The £450 million to £600 million comes as a result as some prolongation of the project and some scope gaps that we have found as we have done the work. Just for clarity, when we come back in January [2020] with the new opening window we will not come back with a new cost estimate.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): OK. That brings the total to around £18.25 billion to deliver this project. Where is the extra money going to come from, just to fill this gap?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Those are conversations we are having with the DfT. As you will appreciate, because of the election and purdah - not to criticise anybody - we could not have those conversations during the election campaign.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): I understand, yes.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Mike [Brown MVO] alluded to conversations he is having with the DfT and those are some of the things that we are discussing with them, the issue of the capital costs as well as the issue of the lost fares revenue that was baked into the 2015/16 spending review.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): OK. Hopefully we will hear about that in the new year.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Yes.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Great. Let us move on.

Navin Shah AM: On that question of cost, Mr Mayor, I appreciate that you need to have discussions with the DfT to meet the additional demand. Given the scenario that they do not meet the entire cost and there is demand for the Greater London Authority (GLA) to fund it - this is something that came up in our scrutiny discussions yesterday at the Budget and Performance Committee - where do you reckon that room for funding will be? What will have to go? Obviously, there are pressures on GLA funding itself and then on top of that if you have to fund any part of the increase for Crossrail, how will you square that circle?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): The first thing is that it is worth just putting on record - and I am sure the Committee would agree - that the DfT have been extremely collaborative, particularly over the last year. If you remember, the agreement we reached with the Government last year was a loan agreement in relation to a loan with the GLA and a separate arrangement with TfL which covered the increased expenditure in relation to the previous regime, if you do not mind me using that phrase. The discussions we are having with the DfT now are in relation to how we fund the additional capital cost and also the lost revenues we are talking about from them. I heard Martin [Clarke, Executive Director of Resources, GLA] and David [Bellamy, Mayor’s Chief of

Staff] in relation to what they said to the Budget and Performance Committee yesterday. It is an ongoing conversation we are having with the Government; dare I say it, a negotiation.

Now, you will be aware the way Crossrail is funded is unique. It is funded by a combination of central Government from taxation, but also a combination of London business and the London tax base paying for it as well. The point that the National Infrastructure Commission made was that these projects benefit the entire country. For example, if you look at the benefits to the country, the project is expected to generate between £40 billion and £70 billion for the UK economy. That begs the question, shouldn’t Her Majesty’s Government be contributing more towards any additional expenditure we are going to face? There are other benefits the country gets from Crossrail, which by the way starts outside London and finishes outside London as well. Those are parts of the conversations we have been having. I would not want to rehearse those negotiations in public but that is a flavour of some of the conversations that Mike [Brown MVO] will be having with the DfT.

I would just say, for the avoidance of doubt, that the relationship is a very good one. We are joint sponsors. Similarly, the Crossrail Board has the same candour with them as they have with us. I am optimistic that we will reach a negotiation with the DfT that suits everybody.

Navin Shah AM: Tony, I am somewhat reassured from the comments you made that the additional cost indication that you made covers the overrun and additional period required for completion but I am afraid we have heard this before in this Chamber and again we have a situation where the cost has escalated. In fact, looking at the original funding that was agreed at £15.9 billion and given the current difficulties that you have, that constitutes about 15%, which is a huge increase on the project cost. If you were to look at £14.8 billion then it is a staggering 23.3% increase on the original contract value of this project. I accept that it is complex and it has been difficult to nail the cost down. My worry is: could we sitting here next year looking at further cost increases on the project? This is a serious worry. How can you reassure when the last predictions have failed?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): We can be very confident in the latest cost estimates. The reason I say that is because when these cost estimates were made at the end of last year, that was without a real understanding at that time of what was left to be done. As we have gone through this year, first of all we have progressed a lot of the work. We have physically achieved a huge amount of completion of work. Secondly, we have a far better in-depth understanding of exactly what is left to be done. The third thing I would say is that the big money really goes on the physical work, completing the station shafts, the portals and the tunnel, and a lot of that work is now coming to completion.

I would be lying to you if I said, “I 100% guarantee that there will be no further cost increases”, but I can say to you I have a high level of confidence in the management team, in the work that has been done over the last year and in our grip and grasp of this project. These are their estimates. We as the Board have scrutinised them very heavily and we are confident that we have a) a good team, and b) a very good grasp on what remains to be done in this project.

Navin Shah AM: Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Assembly Member Arbour, you wanted to come in here?

Tony Arbour AM: I think it is to you, Mike. It is very difficult for ordinary Londoners to understand the impact of this because of course it is not something that is being taken away, it is something that we have

been looking forward to, but I do want to ask you questions about what is being taken away. Have TfL produced a list of projects that would have gone ahead but will no longer go ahead because of the project overruns and the loss of income?

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): I think our Business Plan, Chair, through you, is very clear on the things that are still going ahead in terms of the major investment around the completion of the Bank Station project, the Northern line extension, the resignalling of what we call the subsurface lines, the procurement of the new Piccadilly line trains and the new Docklands Light Railway Trains. That is all still going ahead. There are record levels of investment going ahead, as well as of course the continued electrification of London’s bus fleet, which is very important, with 2,000 buses being fully electric by the end of the Business Plan period. We are continuing also with the retrofit programme for Euro VI --

Tony Arbour AM: I have asked you about the things which are not going to happen.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): Indeed, but I am just trying to emphasise the huge swathe of things that are still happening. There is the extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone, of course --

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): We will be here all day.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): -- as successful as it has already been.

In terms of things that we have been very upfront and said will not be proceeding at the same pace as we originally intended, we have already talked about the Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf pedestrian and cycling bridge. That is being reviewed as to what we might do as an alternative link across that very important pedestrian and cycle link there. We have talked about Camden and Holborn station, which are two projects that we would have sought to go ahead with had we had the necessary funding to do that.

We are still in dialogue with the Government, and it goes back to what the Mayor so eloquently described as the ongoing discussion with Government generally in advance of a further spending review. We are still very optimistic we will keep working on the signalling upgrade for the Piccadilly line, which is a really important project. We do not yet have certainty enough on our capital funding going forward because the Government needs to make a decision on the retained business rate supplement. That is not yet clear going forward so it does not yet allow me to take to the Board a proposal for a procurement of Piccadilly line signalling, but I am optimistic we will continue that debate.

There are some genuine things. It is all very explicit in the Business Plan as to what is no longer able to be done but I am still confident that there is an awful lot going on, including, of course, the renewal of our existing asset base, which should not be understated. It is very important. Anyone who read the The Guardian article just yesterday will have seen the contrast between another metro somewhere else across the Atlantic and our metro, and the importance of sustained funding.

Tony Arbour AM: That is of no consolation to Londoners, and to my constituents in particular. There are a couple of projects in my constituency and I think this will help bring it home to people. For example, something that affects a great many of them is the less frequent running of buses which has been created by this. This is something that people understand. They do not understand the hundreds of millions, the extra £750 million loss of revenue - that is meaningless to them - but they do understand the fact that they have to wait five minutes longer for a bus.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): Can I just say on that, Chair, that one of the things we have been doing is ensuring that the bus service is configured for the current demand projection and the growth areas in London, particularly in outer London? We have added new bus routes, for example, just recently to Kidbrooke and Greenwich where there is some new housing and new homes being developed. We have added new bus routes there and across --

Tony Arbour AM: That is no consolation to my constituents in Chiswick, an improvement in a bus route in Greenwich.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): I would just say that London still has far and away the most comprehensive full bus service of any part of this UK and will continue to do so.

Tony Arbour AM: We are all proud of that. I answer to my constituents, theoretically you answer to the Mayor, and theoretically the Mayor answers to us. Not very often, but theoretically the Mayor answers to us. Someone the other day said, “Why is it I have to wait longer for the bus and the bus does not go as far as it used to?” I can very tritely say, as I do, “The Mayor got it wrong on Crossrail”.

Can I raise another couple of things that might well bring it home to ordinary Londoners? People might think, for example, that had there not been this loss of money, work on replacement of Hammersmith Bridge, for example, would have been much quicker and it would have been dealt with as a matter of urgency. There are some unpopular things which you are progressing with which you might not need to do. I can cite, again in Chiswick, that you are progressing with Cycleway 9 (CW9), which is something that is exceedingly unpopular. You are spending money on that. It may be that if you were to localise - and I understand the point you are making about the Business Plan - and if we had it project by project, borough by borough, people would understand the terrible impact that the mistakes made over Crossrail are having for all Londoners. That is really a rhetorical point, Mike.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): If I could just make one point, Chair, on Hammersmith Bridge there has been an extraordinary amount of great work done, led by the Deputy Mayor [for Transport], Gareth Powell [Managing Director of Surface Transport, TfL] and my team, working with the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, who of course own the bridge. It is not a TfL bridge.

There was previously, prior to the change of the funding from central Government, provision in our budgets to be able to maintain and keep up the effectiveness of these assets in London. That has fallen away. I met with the previous Chancellor just a few months ago and we had a very useful discussion about that and how we would begin to address this more strategically in terms of London’s bridges, where there are myriad ownership and operational issues that I do think need to be straightened out. Of course, I very much regret that it has caused quite significant local displacement of traffic. I do recognise that issue, but there is a very clear plan now that the Deputy Mayor has agreed with the Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham which sees a significant TfL contribution to take us to the first stage of working that through.

On cycling, Chair, if I may, through you, I make no apology for continuing to work on cycleways across London. This is one of the huge successes of recent years. We have seen a real increase in people cycling, which is a good way to travel around the city. Also, of course, I will never make an apology for something that tackles some of the safety issues that we have seen from cyclists around our city previously as well. I am very proud of the work the team has been doing on cycling.

To be honest, Chair, through you - and I am not talking about your particular constituency, Tony, but across London - when you look at the previous provision of 101 buses per hour up Kingsway in Holborn and you wonder what the biggest impedance to bus reliability up Kingsway was, guess what? It was another bus. The bus network in London had not been properly looked at for 25 years, it was long overdue and I am very proud that we are now developing new routes and serving new communities in developing areas in outer London.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Lovely. Thank you. We are going to pick up a lot of this with you, Mike, when you come before us early in the new year. We have a big round-up.

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): I am looking forward to it already, Chair, yes.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): It is going to be really good to hear your views on these things. One more Member, Assembly Member Devenish, on the finance, and then we are going to move to the next section.

Tony Devenish AM: My question is following on, really, from Assembly Member Arbour. He referred to a borough-by-borough breakdown of what has been cut. Could you provide that for everything that has been cut specifically to do with the increase in cost for Crossrail to the Committee?

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): We could do, except, Chair, that I just have to emphasise first that we do not look at London from a borough-by-borough perspective because that is not the way Londoners lead their life. I know you know that, but it is just not. It is not the way London operates and it is not the way that we think of it as Transport for London, not transport for an individual borough.

Also, if I could just go back to the point I made earlier - and I am not trying to be smart here - there is more than one issue at play in terms of our financing. One is the reduction in the operating grant from the Government to zero, going back to the letter of 2015 from the previous Secretary of State to the previous Mayor. That is a factor. The macroeconomic situation is a very real factor because a very small proportion of 1% of Tube revenue falling is absolutely material in terms of our funding projections, and of course that materialises across London. It materialises at particular times of the day and times of week, at particular stations and particular journeys. That is material as well.

I could certainly - and maybe it is relevant for the session in January, Chair - come back at that time with an assessment of where this is in the overall reach. Of course, I do not, on a granular basis, look down at just one revenue source or capital reallocation as to what that means because the Business Plan is produced. You will, I am sure, have had an opportunity to at least have a look at it since it was published on Friday and you will have more chances before I come back in January, and that explains very clearly where our position is and what our projection is over the next five years.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. It is on my reading list for Christmas. Can I ask one final question? You referred to your improvements on the cycle lanes. Could you, when you come back in January, give a breakdown of kilometre increase in cycle lanes under this administration?

Mike Brown MVO (Commissioner, Transport for London): I would be delighted to.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): We will look at the information. I think the Budget and Performance Committee has had a huge list of projects and where they are. It might just be about sharing that with all Members so that the information is there.

Let us move on to progress.

David Kurten AM: Thank you. Good morning. I would just like to ask you about the progress of the projects. Obviously you knows Jacobs [Engineering Ltd], the Project Representative, produce monthly reports, and they have noted that there are multiple risks that have not been addressed or mitigated. I wonder if one of you could tell me what you think are the major risks and how you have responded to what Jacobs have said.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I would say - and I am sure Tony [Meggs CB] would agree - our relationship with the Project Representative is very constructive. They have access all areas. What you are reading is a genuine independent view for the sponsors, not for us or our Board. There is nothing hidden from the Project Representative so they are giving you a fair view of what they think, and we find that constructive.

On the risks going forward, we are at a very challenging point in the programme. It was always going to be difficult and hard. If you go and look, for example, at Tottenham Court Road station or Farringdon station, they are really impressive structures and they look like we could almost open them now - I am sure people have been to Farringdon - but behind the mask, there is a lot of integration work to do.

Our first risk, particularly in stations, shafts and portals, is this really complicated integration work. The fire alarms have to match the lifts. It is quite complex work and we cannot take any shortcuts. For example, if you are in a lift in one of our big stations and you get trapped, you can be reassured that an alarm will go off and the closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera will beam on you and you will be communicated with within a short number of minutes. There are hundreds of those lifts and escalators in Crossrail. The first risk, I think, David, is the integration. We have a good grip on it but it is uncertain because while we are testing something we find problems and gaps.

The second risk is in the software development. We have uploaded version 11 of the software. I was with Mike [Brown MVO] and the big boss of Bombardier, Alain Bellemare [President and Chief Executive Officer], and we reflected on the progress in 2019 on converging the software. If you go back a year we had several software systems that could not talk to each other, and one of our most notable achievements in the year is to bring the software of Siemens and Bombardier together. We are just uploading it now and after Christmas we start the final iteration of testing. In there, if we find problems, we need to fix them. Whilst we are very confident, with any software system of this complexity and safety integrity we might still get problems.

The third element of risk is in the routeway, the tunnel. One of our most notable achievements, I think, is that by the end of January the tunnel is finished and everything is installed. Even now, the radio systems, these very complicated radio systems, have been installed in the routeway. The track is in. The overhead line is in. The point machines are in. The radio systems are in. The platform screen doors are now fully commissioned. We have just finished the very last commissioning of electrification. People will remember the Pudding Mill Lane explosion of two years ago. Do you remember that?

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Of course.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): In our year we have rebuilt the 400,000 volt substation at Pudding Mill Lane and corrected the explosion. The routeway is ready, but it is a large linear asset of 42kms and the assurance of that, again, is a bit of a challenge.

David, the uncertainty we face is really in software development and the hooking up and integration of these millions of assets. The positive is we have a firm grip on this, but as we test things it might be that we find things and we simply cannot walk past them. We have wound the minimum requirements down to the absolute minimum, we have brilliant support from TfL and London Underground and the operator is embedded in our organisation as part of our organisation, but when we get into testing at this level it is the biggest thing anybody has ever done in UK railways and probably the biggest integration job in Europe that has ever occurred. At that scale we would be a bit naive to say it was not a challenging thing, but we have the right team, we have the grip and I think by the time we get to February, March and April next year a lot of these risks will start to be retired, particularly in the software, which is a big moment for us.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I just add a couple of remarks? First of all, we welcome the Project Representative’s caustic input to our programme. Their senior representative comes to all of our Board meetings. Not only do they provide a healthy critique, they also add real value through their experience and suggestions. Secondly, we have taken note of some of their comments about being aggressive and that is one of the reasons for part of the input into the revision to the forecast. Many of the comments that they have made will be addressed as we revise the forecast.

Then the third thing to say is that indeed the cost forecast that we have provided you - the lower bound number, the £400 million over - does contain some £400 million of risk, which is about 30%. It is not allocated to a specific thing right now; it is to allow for the possibility of overrun. The higher number, the £650 million, contains nearly £600 million of risk altogether in our cost to go. We are trying to provide for all eventualities here.

David Kurten AM: Thank you. That is a comprehensive answer. I would just like to bring up one thing that was mentioned in Status Report 127. Jacobs suggest that the risk assessment conducted by Crossrail did not reflect the real risk. If I could read to you something, it says in that report from June and July this year:

“This period we have reviewed the phasing of CRL’s [Crossrail’s] risk register (currently CRL does not phase the risks) and we believe the current assessment does not adequately cover the future risks that may be encountered.”

How have you addressed that comment in particular, in that assessment?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That was from June/July, I think, David. We have valued - I do not know about “caustic” - their independent scrutiny of us and since June and July the project has moved a long way. In August we formed a Delivery Control Schedule which for the first time for several years formed a clear plan to complete Crossrail, and subsequent to that we have gone further into the integration. I would say those comments might be a little bit outdated compared to where we are today. If you look at the very latest Project Representative reports, they talk more of the challenge facing us.

I would say if you did - if you get a spare moment over Christmas - look at the Project Representative reports from October/November 2018, they are very clear that Crossrail did not have a plan to complete. Now, I think they are saying we are facing up to a very significant engineering challenge, and when Crossrail is commissioned I think we will look back on it as one of the singular engineering achievements of the age. I

think we have turned a big corner with the Project Representative and those comments might be a little bit outdated.

David Kurten AM: OK. I was going to ask you about something else from the same period in the same report. You might say this is outdated as well, but they brought up some issues with perhaps the risk to the trial running starting in accordance with the Delivery Control Schedule. Have you addressed that as well?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That is a good example. In June/July, we had thought of a trial running start between February 2020 to May 2020 start, and they were identifying in the summer that we were under great pressure. Really what you have seen is the real reason that we cannot achieve an opening in 2020 is delays to our trial running. That is a really good example where they were highlighting concerns. I would say though that the executive’s job is to push as hard as possible - safely, obviously - at the leading edge because everybody needs this railway open as early as possible, their job is to provide independent scrutiny, and the Board’s job is to wrap it all up into a considered position. I think we are working well together. It is a good example of us working well together.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I just want to emphasise that. They said, “These deadlines are under real pressure”. Those deadlines were driving a lot of very good work but they became unrealistic and well in advance we have shifted those. Middle of next year is when we expect to enter trial running. We are absolutely taking on board the comments that we get. We are heavily scrutinised from all quarters and we take those comments and advice seriously.

David Kurten AM: OK. Thank you.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Can I just pause you there before your next question? We are talking about trial running and the software systems. Assembly Member McCartney, you had a question on software?

Joanne McCartney AM: Just a quick question for Mark. In one of our recommendations from the report we noted that although you had had the right skill set for Crossrail at the start of the project, there really was not sufficient skill set for the systems integration at the end of the programme. I know last time we were here you were saying that you were aware of that. Obviously because you are now testing the system I take it that hurdle has been overcome but was that a difficulty?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes. An achievement in the year is that we have built the system integration facility. We call it the Plateau. A fancy name. What it means is a collaborative environment with Crossrail Ltd, the drivers, the London Underground people, and crucially Bombardier and Siemens. At Westferry Circus we have, I would think, a state of the art of software integration facility. At Chippenham in the West Country we have built our emulation facility, the laboratory, to be at a much higher level. Mike [Brown MVO] and I were just in Braunschweig [Germany] a couple of weeks ago at the Siemens facility and there is no doubt that Siemens and Bombardier are absolutely putting Crossrail number one in their pipeline. I think you would agree, Mike. It is really heartening. I think we have the right team, the right collaborative environment and the right support from the supply chain. The really good news with the software is that the systemic problems that we worried about - the transitions, the Network rail interfaces - are largely proven now. The problem is that they have to be proven hundreds of millions of times for reliability.

We have come a long way. In the world of railway signalling, there are not many people in the world who are not here doing this job. The software is being built in 20 facilities by about 1,500 people all over the world at

this very minute. It is probably the biggest software push in railways at this moment in the world, we have the best people on this and we are seeing the fruits of it, but it is highly uncertain until you start testing it properly because one safety bug can knock us out. I know everybody understands that. We have come a long way in a year in software.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): That is very reassuring. Just quickly before I move back to David, when is trial running going to start?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): The current range we have is sometime between July/August and September/October. That is our current range. We are going to take that to the Board. That is part of the scrutiny that the Board have asked us to do.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Yes.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That work is not exactly complete but certainly my ambition is this project desperately needs to define some date of trial running. It will be in that range. I am absolutely confident about that. Precisely when we do that and the narrowness or wideness of that window is a matter for the Board in January [2020], I think.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): But between July and October [2020] is when you start?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Previously you have told me it would take nine to 12 months from the start of trial testing before it can open, so you are realistically looking at the end of 2021 before you can open that bit of the railway.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): From the start of trial running, the conventional wisdom is nine to 12 months to shake it down. It is an enormously complicated system and we will find issues. The reason we might mitigate that and reduce that period is that if we get good quality software in February/March next year, while we are finishing the stations integration we could actually start the process of shaking down earlier. One of the things the Board has asked us to look at is opportunities for shaking the system down earlier than the defined start of trial running. There are complexities with that, we have to do it very safely, but there are opportunities to reduce the nine to 12 months, Caroline. It depends how mature the software is in February/March next year.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): So we need to be asking you how mature your software is in the new year, is that right?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): You can, yes, and we will have an answer for that. It is possible to reduce the nine to 12 months if during the spring of next year we do some reliability growth.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): If not, it will take nine to 12 months?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes, if we did not do that. Of course, the history of this project, including my predecessors, is to work creatively and agilely with every challenge that faces us. I think in the

spring of next year we will have good-quality software that might not be quite ready for trial running but is enough to start the shakedown process. That is where our focus is.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Thank you for that.

David Kurten AM: Thanks. Just one final question from me on the project reports. The monthly updates seem to indicate there has been a decline in performance in terms of safety and there have been numerous mentions of near-misses. Can you say anything about that? Why has that happened and what are your plans to deal with that?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I will start and maybe Tony could add to it from the Board’s point of view. When we were invited to take this challenge over, Tony and I took two stands: we would be fully transparent and we would own the whole of integration. But before that, the commitment we have made is nobody getting hurt on Crossrail and our full commitment to Target Zero. It is entirely possible to finish this project without a cut finger. We work really collaboratively with our supply chain and if you look at our safety performance optically it is very similar to where the Olympics were or maybe to where Mike’s [Brown MVO] Major Projects business is, which is a very capable organisation safety-wise.

The things you are looking at, David, are high potential near-misses. We measure things that could have gone wrong. In the year, at the beginning of this year, we had quite a rise in things that could go wrong, particularly around running the operational railway. We put a huge focus, probably more focus into high potential near-misses in terms of their root cause analysis than other things, than a cut finger, because a high potential near-miss is quite serious. The good news is that if you look at the trend from the early part of this year, which was really the mobilisation of a railway - we are now running trains at 100 kmph under 25,000v electrification - if you look at our high potential near-miss rate now, one’s too many but we have seen a positive coming down, and our commitment is to keep going with it. It is the product of quite a healthy culture.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): From the Board’s perspective, first of all, this is the first item on every Board meeting. Secondly, I and my deputy attend every monthly senior safety meeting. As the Board, all members of the Board go out and visit stations and discuss safety. I think we are doing a huge amount. Are we satisfied? Absolutely not. We do not want a single incident on this railway. It is a source of constant concern. If we have a very bad accident in the completion of this railway, we will have failed. We just do not want that to happen.

David Kurten AM: Can I just ask you, Mark, about figures? When was the high point? Which month, which period was the high point?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): In high potential near-misses, the period between January this year and March/April this year. I think we have had 50 high potential near misses in the calendar year and half of them were in the first quarter. I would look there.

David Kurten AM: What about the most recent quarter?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Interestingly, in the past period we have seen a rise, not to those levels but we have seen a little rise. The heartening thing is that the very concerning thing at the beginning of the year in starting an operational railway up, testing in among a construction site, we have seen a big improvement in eradicating errors and mistakes in the operational railway, which is the biggest risk that we have. We will see that relentless pressure but, as Tony says, one is not satisfactory to us.

David Kurten AM: When you say a period, is that a four-week period?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Four weeks, yes.

David Kurten AM: Therefore, the first quarter would have been about 25 but you divide that into periods so that would have been eight or nine for the period.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That is right.

David Kurten AM: What was the most recent period?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): During the spring/summer we were down to either zero or two or three. Interestingly, in the last period we had four or five. In other words, you have to keep absolutely relentless focus on this, which we are. The four or five we had last period were construction-related: people leaving their materials in the wrong place or something that was not right in the construction methodology. We have not seen the return, thankfully, of the operational risks. We put a lot of focus into the operational railway risk now. We have come a long way in a year. It is relentless and we do not take this in any way of complacency.

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): Can I say something on this? I know I have not said anything so far. In every single meeting that I have with Mark and Tony, we do not talk about progress on the project until we have talked about safety. I do not think there is any issue that is more important to Mark and Tony than safety. My understanding is that Crossrail has a new Director of Health and Safety in the last year and there have been a huge number of activities, your stepping-up weeks. Therefore, the focus on this, in both the Executive and the Board is very, very rigorous.

David Kurten AM: Thank you.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Continuing on safety, the latest project status report that we had through last night says that: Crossrail Limited:

“Crossrail Limited must not lose sight of the fact that the Tier 1 contractors are accountable for the safety of their workforce and supply chain, and we would have expected a more proactive approach from their perspective.”

Mark and possibly Tony may want to come in. Is there an issue with the contractors? Is that where the safety risks are sitting at the moment?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): We are allowed to disagree with the Project Representative, of course, in the context.

Caroline Russell AM: Of course.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): No, I do not agree with that sentiment. Every four weeks, and in fact tomorrow, we meet all of our Tier 1 supply chain. They are accountable mostly for our safety performance and I have not detected any lack of focus and push from all of our Tier 1 contractors. In fact, Siemens, who are doing the signalling and the hooking of CCTV, has just won an award for globally the best performance of

any Siemens team. My perspective and how I would read that is we need to have continuous focus by the supply chain on it. I certainly do not feel that I do not have the commitment of the supply chain, but it is a fair point to point to that we need to maintain that.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I add a small thing, or a big thing? This week, or it may have been the end of last week, under the auspices of Crossrail, we got together first-line supervisors, who are the real people who drive safety on site more than anybody. The first-line supervisors, 70 of them, from all companies right across the whole project for half a day in two sessions of safety workshop conversation training. There is a huge amount of effort being put in by the contractors with Crossrail to make sure that the people who direct the work on a daily basis are really on the case.

Caroline Russell AM: That is reassuring to hear. I am going to raise something else that is in the Project Representative Report. It says:

“The risk management process is still relatively immature, with a focus on risk accounting -- rather than on the identification and management of the risks themselves.”

Is that something you recognise?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I do. When we were invited to take this project over a year ago, the project had been hollowed out. The day I walked in at Canary Wharf there was no project controls team, there was no risk team, there was only a very small communications team. In the course of the year we have rebuilt, I would say, good-quality project controls, good-quality risk management. Having had such a dramatic demobilisation of Crossrail, there is inevitably maturity issues.

We are on the improvement, I think, and it is one of the big challenges of the Board, in the Audit and Assurance Committee, to make sure that we do focus on that. If you do look at our costs to go, our costs to go at what we call the P50 level, which is the £400 million level, the biggest cost to go we have is in risk. The biggest collection of costs is not with the contractor, it is in us mitigating and preventing things happening. Therefore, I do agree with the Project Representative. It is a consequence, though, of taking over nothing a year ago and building it up to something quite good, but not quite as mature as we want. There is much more work to do that in the first quarter of next year.

Caroline Russell AM: Can you tell us a bit more about how you are monitoring the impact of the safety initiatives that you are introducing, and tell us how effective you think they are at improving workplace safety?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes, we have a new health and safety director, Carole Bardell-Wise, who I think all of us would agree has brought a new set of impetus to us. We have refreshed our Target Zero Plan, so we have a very clear plan that involves our supply chain, the Board and our operators. The operators are one of the big changes in the year. The operators, London Underground, MTR and now TfL are now in our organisation and share the dashboard, which is a big change in the year, the collaborative spirit.

How do we measure it? As Heidi says, we have a dashboard that we publish every week. I would say, and I have been in this business for a long time now, Crossrail’s leading indicators is probably one of the better in the world. The challenge is how you assess the competency of the people doing it and the effectiveness of leading indicators. A leading indicator is we measure how many safety briefings somebody has given that day rather than counting up whether somebody has had an accident. Therefore, we have a focus. We have five golden rules on Crossrail and we relentlessly look at our leading indicators: how many briefings have happened,

how many times has a golden rule been reinforced. We measure it every single week. Every four weeks we get all the supply chain together, every four weeks we talk to our Board about it and it is a relentless process.

Every six months we have stepping-up week in which we close the whole project down to focus on safety. That is quite remarkable. Despite all the pressures that we have, we focus on safety for a whole week. We still get production done but the focus of the week is safety. That is where our focus needs to be.

The challenge is relentless and there is no game for complacency. The real risk to us is previously in major civil engineering you would have large groups of operatives, maybe 50 to 200 people, around a civil-engineering structure. We are now in this very, very vast, labyrinthine, technical infrastructure, where people are often working in small groups and in dark corners and small corners of the infrastructure. Hence Tony’s point: front line supervision and the setting to work of people and the absolute standing in their shoes and their health and wellbeing is our challenge, because often people are working in quite isolated spots. To date we are managing it quite well but there is more to do.

Caroline Russell AM: When the Project Representative Report suggests that interventions being made by to improve safety performance are not “flowing through to an improvement in results”, you would say that that is now out of date, or do you recognise that there is still an issue there?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I would say it is always fair to be challenged on safety and there is no competition for safety and I quite like the challenge. I would think, though, if you looked at our current safety performance, while not one accident or high-potential near miss is acceptable, since that was written we are on a stronger trajectory but there is no room for complacency, particularly at the stage of the project we are at with all this fine work in small corners of our organisation.

Caroline Russell AM: That sounds full of risk. Moving on more specifically to look at air-quality issues on the Crossrail project, I note that the Board has been asking you a lot of questions about air quality, which is presumably after the five deaths happened of people who had been working at Bond Street. What safety measures have you put into place to proactively improve the air quality at Bond Street and what were the findings of the independent air-quality survey that Costain Skanska Joint Venture (CSJV) and the 4-RAIL Services Limited completed?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): First of all it is very sad that four colleagues, on our records, passed away between February and August. Unfortunately, some of those deaths happened in very close proximity to each other. Obviously, we are not party to those people’s medical records except that it is very sad that our colleagues passed away and that had a big effect at Bond Street.

If you look at air quality, though, every site of ours has extensive air-quality plans. As you can imagine, when this was being built, air quality and dust -- if you go to Mike’s Bank Station now, they put a lot of effort into air quality and dampening down the dust. We are not in that situation any more. Our construction sites are no longer very, very dust prone but dust still does exist. Specifically, at Bond Street with our trade union colleagues, we have worked extensively in independently testing the air. The same person does Transport for London’s (TfL) air testing. At Bond Street we found no evidence of anything out of the ordinary. We have continued doing that testing at Bond Street and we are rolling it out now to every station and shaft and portal and the tunnel.

We have also asked the Tier 1 contractors to refresh their dust-management plans, because dust is an issue for construction workers but we are not at the situation we were in maybe four or five years ago with big civil

engineering. My commitment is to keep the Tier 1 contractors challenged to keep their dust management at the right level and also do independent reviews. To date we have found no problems with dust but it is very sad that four people died at Bond Street. We cannot find a correlation to it. All we can do is keep the air as clean as possible. At the moment our trade union colleagues would agree we have done the best we can in the situation.

Caroline Russell AM: Going back to the dust, the makeup of the particles, the Environment Committee here have been looking at Tube dust and the very high concentrations of particulate matter (PM) 2.5 particles that are in the Underground system. Presumably the dust on the Crossrail stations is more construction dust rather than the kind of dust that we are looking at in the Tube system?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): The offer I would make is we have a comprehensive report on the composition of the dust. Subject to our Board agreeing, which I am sure it would, I am happy to share the dust results.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): We would like to see that.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): You are exactly right, Caroline [Russell]. The Tube dust, as you know, is a much more complex issue, with brake dust and all sorts of things. In Crossrail we are talking about concrete dust, really, because there are not many trains running because we are only testing, and the braking systems on our trains are at the more modern side, unlike in the Tube where there are challenges. I will provide our dust-management plan and the results. You will find it is relatively minor construction dust. I will provide the evidence of that.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you very much for that. Before some other members want to come in, how do you think Crossrail workers are feeling about their safety, not just around the air pollution but their safety in general, also obviously following those deaths relating to workers at Bond Street?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): We work very progressively with the trade union there. At Bond Street there was a lot of concern to find four colleagues passing away, tragically, in a short period of time. Therefore, for a brief period of time at Bond Street there was justifiable concern and hopefully we acted with our trade union colleagues constructively.

Generally, on the broader project, having just come through stepping-up week, where all of our Board members and all of our Executive went to every single site and we probably had 4,000 people stepping up, I would report back that morale is high. People want to get the job done. There is a strong focus on safety and I have not detected anything other than a great bunch of people wanting to safely get the done.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I would add to that that there is also, within the health and safety arena, quite a focus on mental health as well. Carole Bardell-Wise, our new safety director, is a particular specialist in that area. You see on site workshops and programmes and things designed not just to make sure that people are physically safe, which is obviously the highest priority, but to make sure that they are in as good a mental shape as possible. It is stressful finishing any kind of major project. It is very stressful finishing this project. If it was not stressful, it would never finish. That is the paradox, but we are doing everything we can to look after people’s general wellbeing.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Can I start with Mr Mayor? I do not know if you saw the story this morning on City A.M., a very responsible newspaper. This was on the front page in terms of high-potential near misses, ie potential deaths or serious injuries. If I understand the story correctly, you picked up last December that there was a problem. Subsequent to that meeting, the figures became worse all this year. Would the Mayor himself like to reassure Londoners and, more importantly, those working on Crossrail, that there is not a safety problem in the culture of Crossrail?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): There definitely is not. Heidi’s experience with the reasons she has had are the same as mine in relation to every meeting. I have been to two Crossrail Board meetings and had meetings with Tony and Mark very frequently, every six weeks. The very first thing raised at a Crossrail Board meeting, in my presence but also whenever I meet these two is safety. If you think about it, it is a bit odd. If you are a layperson, you would have thought the first thing should be progress but it is not, it is safety. I want to reassure Londoners, through you, firstly.

Secondly, for obvious reasons, because of my background, which you know about and often make a political point of, the views of workers are quite important to me. You have heard the chief executive on a number of occasions talk about conversations with the trade unions, not in a pejorative way as some colleagues do in this Assembly, but in a way of demonstrating the relationship, the toing and froing. A good example was the chief executive hearing, by the way, as Caroline Russell said, legitimate concerns from workers because colleagues had passed away, vital concerns, and taking them seriously.

To reassure you, Tony, I saw the City A.M. piece this morning, and you are right it is a responsible paper. The very first thing I did was to get further reassurance that the reassurance I had received on many occasions is justified. The good news - and it goes to the question Caroline asked about suppliers and contractors - is there is a one-team approach when it comes to safety. What this team does not do is subcontract safety to the subcontractors, if that makes sense. If it is appropriate, Mark, I am sure you could give a briefing to colleagues about the stepping-up week and what that entails, because when I first discovered this I was quite impressed. It is quite impressive. There is a one-minute explanation that explains the priority these people give to safety.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): It is constant over the year, of course, but every six months we take a week and we focus on several topics. By “stepping up” we mean every single worker on Crossrail during the course of a lot of events during the week will step up into a safety conversation. It has been proven, and if you look at the data our stepping-up weeks have generally had a positive effect on the reduction of risk.

Just to say, Tony, the high-potential near misses in the early part of this year are different to the ones we are seeing at the end of the year, which is a consequence of the focus we put into the operational role. However, one is too many.

Tony Devenish AM: That is very reassuring. Can I ask two following questions? We were 50 minutes into the meeting before Mark mentioned safety first. It would be good if at the start of the these meetings we could refer to safety, but I am sure you are doing what you are saying you are doing. Finally, in terms of going forward, is there anything else that you think you should do in this area?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): The challenge on safety coming is in two areas. It is in the transition in trial running to an operational railway, because when we are in trial running we are running a railway and we are working extensively with Mike’s health and safety director, the London Underground safety

director, so a collaborative working with TfL will be important for when we transition into trial running because it is a sensitive time and we have to get that right.

The second thing, as I mentioned to Caroline, is we are working in some quite small corners of this big infrastructure now so we are going to focus on supervision, setting people to work with the right tools and the right planning and minimising change. We can all recognise it in our homes when you are doing that final small job. It is prone to change because something gets in the way. Therefore, they are our two focuses: can we get the trial running absolutely at the highest possible standard - we will with our TfL and MTR colleagues - and can we protect our workers and make sure they are protected as they can be although the work is very fine and quite challenging. We have good plans in both those areas.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Finally, Mr Meggs mentioned morale of staff was high. How do you measure that?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I think it was me who said morale was high.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I agree with it.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): All of our Tier 1s measure their engagement at every site. That is how we know the health of the construction work. In our own organisation what we have committed to in the first quarter of next year, within our organisation - because there are 1,100 people in Crossrail - is to sample exactly where they are. 2020 will be a big year for Crossrail and I am confident we will enter trial running. To be honest, with the Christmas holiday coming we have generally encouraged people to take more time off leading up to Christmas because it will be quite an intense and challenging year. One of our big pivots will be towards the mental health and wellbeing of our staff. In the first quarter of next year Tony will be sampling and measuring that.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you, I will leave it there.

Shaun Bailey AM: To what extent has the rush to be ready in time impacted your safety? I have worked on building sites and when you are pressed to work quickly, that is when the mistakes are made.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Every cut finger, every serious accident, every near miss gets investigated very, very thoroughly and presented to our Board, presented to me. In every single case we have looked for this as a potential risk. It is an obvious risk, is it not? Are we pushing too hard? The truth is in all of our investigation of when things have gone wrong or nearly gone wrong, we have not detected rushing or pressure, interestingly. What we have detected is planning an unexpected change. It is of course closely related that somebody aims today to adjust that CCTV camera but when they get there, there is an electrician putting up the speaker of the public address (PA) system so they have to readjust their workload.

We are trying to create a culture of “nothing will get in the way of safety.” We will absolutely not tolerate a programme over safety. That comes from the very, very top. What we have generally detected during the year is the inevitable consequence of a major project at the very end, particularly one this size, of localised change: people doing jobs that they by necessity are now having to adjust their workplace. When we look at the coming year, a big focus on direct front line supervision, the planning of work, the dynamic risk assessment at the absolute coalface is where we are going to be. However, we have not detected any sense of too much pressure from us of the Tier 1s.

Shaun Bailey AM: You talked about the maturity of your risk-management processes and then we spoke about these four colleagues who tragically died of what in the context of this conversation seems to be the same issue. That would suggest to me that you are not developing your risk-management processes quickly enough if you can have the same thing happen four times.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Firstly, the tragic death of the four colleagues, in the evidence we have we do not think it is related to the actual work at Bond Street. As tragic as it is, there is no evidence that that happened because of the air quality at Bond Street. We tested the air and we do not know why those people have very sadly passed away.

Do not forget that while Crossrail Limited’s risk process was demobilised last year and we are building up, CSJV at Bond Street has always been there with the highest standards of risk. In terms of safety I am very confident in our Tier 1s that they did not demobilise their risk management. The issues are more in the guiding mind within Crossrail Limited, which is very important as the system integrates.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I make a point of clarification here? When we are talking about our overall risk-management system, it is talking about cost and schedule risk, it is not purely directed at safety. We identify safety risks. We have clearly identified safety risks and how those risks evolve. When the Project Representative criticises our risk-management process it is primarily referring to our ability to understand the risk of a cost overrun or the risk of a delay in the schedule.

Shaun Bailey AM: I am talking about safety here, safety of workers, on your site. You are suggesting that that part of your risk management is far more mature?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): It is, yes. The demobilisation of Crossrail last year was mostly in the cost and schedule areas of risk. There is no doubt that in the process the general rising tide of our risk competency we have improved in the year our assessment of risk and safety. There is no doubt about that, which is a positive. Broadly, Project Representative I think is talking about cost, risk and schedule.

Shaun Bailey AM: One small question. With this big transition into the activation of the wiring and testing, you are comfortable with your safety mechanisms for taking on something new, because your environment is about to change again. You have alluded to that. You are comfortable that you have the ability to do all that safety for the workers?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Very, very confident. We have a big year ahead of us. The transition to trial running is a serious matter but we have the right team. It is a transition from one rulebook to the other rulebook. We had the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) and the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) on a joint visit this week. We will continue with that collaboration. We will stay very close to TfL and MTR and we are very confident. All I am saying is we are taking it really seriously and I am sure our Board would expect us to.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Just in terms of language here, I would never be comfortable around safety. In fact, that is one of the things that we advocate against. Our biggest risk is complacency. We have, as a project, had quite a good track record, over all, around safety. Sadly one fatality a number of years ago. Complacency is the thing. I know you did not say that but I want to be clear. We absolutely have to think about this every single day and remind people every single day not to be comfortable with the safety performance or the safety risks on our project.

Shaun Bailey AM: Thank you, Chair.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Just to pick up one thing on the Project Representative, Assembly Member Prince, and then we will move back.

Keith Prince AM: Thank you. One other point, sorry, Chair. Mark, as you know, I have a lot of time and respect for you; I have worked with you before. You were saying that your risk management you believe is now mature. I am a bit concerned. Tony, you mentioned complacency or lack of it, but I think there may be a lack of reality going on here, not complacency but lack of reality. If we look at the latest Jacobs Report, it notes that, “Risk Management process is still relatively immature.” Not mature, its words are:

“Immature, with a focus on risk accounting ... rather than on the identification and management of the risks themselves.”

They go on to say:

“Management bandwidth is limited and only a certain amount of issues can be resolved at once.”

Maybe you should sit down with Jacobs and have a conversation about why it thinks you are immature when you think you are mature.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I make a point here, because I think we are at risk of getting a little confused? We have risk to do with safety and the physical and mental wellbeing of people, and then we have the risk-management processes that on any major project are very sophisticated ways of understanding the risks at certain elements of the project. We need to distinguish between those two. What Mark said, if I heard him, is we are mature in our understanding of safety risk, but in our ability in the managing of overall risk, having completely demobilised that part of the organisation last year, prematurely, and having had to rebuild it from scratch, it would be fair to say, in my own experience, it is not the most mature risk-management process we have ever had but it is maturing all the time.

Keith Prince AM: My next question is about the Project Representative Report and I suggest maybe you should have a conversation with Jacobs, because in the Project Representative Report for period 7 it suggests, “There has been a reduced level of engagement and access to documentation” for Jacobs. I find that very worrying because we have been talking about transparency and improved transparency. What reassurance can you give me and the Committee that there will be more transparency and that you will make these documents available to Jacobs and that you will instruct your teams to co-operate fully with Jacobs? Otherwise it is not going to pick up these things.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That is a good question, Keith. During the summer we did get to a point, when that was written, when we became separated a little bit at the very tactical level about Project Representative and our own teams. It was for a very brief period of time. It is a natural consequence of transparency and people driving to early dates. We, though, intervened, the Project Representative senior representative and me. If you ask them now, which I would encourage you to do, we recalibrated that around September/October time. The truth is Project Representative accesses all areas of Crossrail. It attends every single manage meeting I have and I have pushed right the way through the organisation, right to the front line, that Project Representative is to get every single document.

To be fair to the teams at the tactical front line, they are getting on with doing the job. I and James Hampson, the Project Representative, I think now if you ask, we have turned that corner and we have turned that back, at least for the last two or three periods.

Keith Prince AM: We can ask it that.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Perhaps we should write to the Project Representative. You have given a name, James Hampson, because it is always redacted in anything online for some reason. We might want to meet with the Project Representative next year.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes, I would encourage that.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): If I could make one point that might help as well, which is to reassure through you, Chair, the Committee, that I meet with the Project Representative coincident with very report being published, because the Project Representative is commissioned by the joint sponsors, us and the DfT. I meet with the Project Representative senior people every time with the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and we go through it in quite a lot of granular detail and inevitably have a conversation with Mark after those meetings to ensure there is absolute clarity on anything that is being presented by the Project Representative that I think Mark needs to make progress on.

Keith Prince AM: Do you modify those reports before they go to the Board?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): No, absolutely not. I attend every single Crossrail Board at the end of the Board and the Project Representative is already in the role and I know, as Tony alluded to earlier on, has played a full an active part in the full Board discussion prior to me getting the update that I get at the end of every Crossrail Board.

Keith Prince AM: One final point. I want to make the point and I do not necessarily need an answer. Also on that Project Representative on safety, it is suggesting that:

“The interventions being made by Crossrail to improve safety performance are ... not flowing through to an improvement in results.”

Caroline Russell AM: I have already mentioned that.

Keith Prince AM: That is its concern. You have given us answers to those.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): We have already covered that. Caroline [Russell] had already quoted that.

Keith Prince AM: Yes, but I am saying that is the point it is making.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): I am reassured to hear that you, Commissioner, are challenging these reports, because obviously we get them a lot later. It only was published the end of last week. The last two we only had up until August. The latest one, October’s report, said that that relationship was not quite working. If you are challenging that, that is of reassurance as well, as I am sure others are too.

We will move on a quick bit on Network Rail and where we are on that element and then we will move on to the next section.

Caroline Russell AM: This is looking at the Network Rail station enhancements: things like platform extensions, the new ticket halls, the step-free access and also the work they are doing on the traction power upgrades. How much is this package of outstanding Network Rail work going to cost and how much has that increased since December 2018?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I cannot talk for Network Rail on its costings. I do know there are cost pressures but I cannot talk to what its numbers are. I do not know them and it is not Crossrail Limited’s imprimatur around its budget. That is handled by it with the DfT. Our costs are capped in Crossrail at a certain level. Unfortunately, I do not know the numbers and I cannot speak to them.

Caroline Russell AM: The risk of cost overruns on that sits with ...?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Network Rail and DfT. It is outside of our ring-fence.

Caroline Russell AM: OK. What risk do you think there is that Network Rail will not complete its work by the completion date?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): Perhaps I could take that, if I may, because it is probably more appropriate for me because I meet with Andrew Haines, the Chief Executive of Network Rail, every four weeks. As you would expect with Crossrail, what we describe as On Network stations and infrastructure, is a key part of those discussion that I have with him. To give you some reassurance on step-free, which is one of the issues that you raised. On the east, of course, we already have Maryland, Manor Park and Seven Kings, where work is carried out by TfL. Ilford, which is a Network Rail station, work with a rebuild takes place during next year. On the west, Taplow became step-free yesterday. Hanwell, Iver, Langley, early in the New Year and Ealing Broadway during 2020 as well. There is a huge amount of process.

We are very happy to share the granular update of Network Rail progress but I certainly see, notwithstanding the cost pressures, which are real as you alluded to and Mark alluded to, and that is a matter for the DfT now for further discussions with presumably with Treasury to secure the necessary funding for the On Network Works (ONW), but I see from my updates no material risk as to it not being able to fill what is required.

Indeed, you will have noticed that as from the weekend we started running the services to Reading out of Paddington on the east as part of what we current called TfL Rail, with our staff on stations. Although there was a bit of a signal failure yesterday at Slough, everything was running on time this morning.

Caroline Russell AM: What about the electrification progress on that? Is that progressing in a way that you feel is going to be fast enough?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Do you mean in the east? Network Rail was considering whether the frequency of trains could be provided without completing all of the autotransformer electrification. That work is not completed yet. I will reassure you, though, that if it is not sufficient we will ask for it to be done. It is modelling it as part of a value engineering to see if it could just not do the final bit of it because it was over-engineered. That modelling is still underway and not complete. That is a fair question to hold and ask Andrew Haines and DfT.

Caroline Russell AM: We could write to Network Rail with some of this as well.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): That might be a good idea, yes.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Having spoken extensively to Network Rail, it will not take it out if it cannot make it work. I support it in doing the modelling so it does not waste money. That is not quite finished yet, I do not think.

Caroline Russell AM: Is there a problem with supply of engineers to be able to do that kind of work? Do they have a pipeline problem?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Mike would know better than me. You have your dealings with Andrew Haines.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): It has not mentioned any resource constraints on what it is planning to do. I would say that the leadership of Network Rail that Andrew Haines has brought to this has shone a spotlight and focus on this project. I feel there is a spirit of collaboration and common cause that is exactly what we need at this stage of the project.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Members, we have three more sections to get through. Let’s pick up a little bit more pace. It is fascinating finding out the latest on this. Let us look at communication and transparency. We are picking up sections of our recommendations from our report.

Navin Shah AM: The report has very, very clearly defined that there are serious concerns with channels of communication and obviously resultant concerns about transparency. If I can start with Mr Mayor and the Deputy Mayor, how are you currently kept up to date on the progress on Crossrail, given that in the past it was clear from the comments we had that on your weekly reports some of the risks, for example, were downplayed? Can you comment on what the current situation is?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): I will ask Heidi and Mike to come in in a second. I meet the Chair and Chief Executive every six weeks, roughly speaking, and I have been to two of their Board meetings, one in September and one in November. The previous regime, there was no open invitation to go to their meetings. It was very much, “These are our toys, our trains, don’t come near us.” It is a very different atmosphere now.

Separately, my Deputy Mayor and my Chief of Staff meet on a two-weekly basis with Tony and Mark. Separately I receive dashboards. If you remember, the issue previously was the weekly reports. There is a balance between these people giving us a whole wad of documents or TfL simplifying that into one. Therefore, what we receive now is the same dashboards that are shared so we are looking at the same information, but it would be worth Heidi and Mike talking about the changes they have seen.

Also, Chair, in agreement with you, the Chair of the Transport Committee is written to regularly and a number of other colleagues as well. Separately I should add, before Mike comes in, the DfT has a similar candid relationship as joint sponsor with Crossrail Limited as well.

Navin Shah AM: Maybe you can now pick up all the changes that have happened of late, please.

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): I would say that the quality and the volume of information that I receive directly from Crossrail is in a completely different league to that that I received in the first three months of being in the job last summer. As the Mayor has said, I meet on a fortnightly basis with Mark. The Mayor’s Chief of Staff attends that meeting, Mike attends that meeting and sometimes Simon Kilonback, the CFO, will also come, and equally the TfL Board members who are also part of the Crossrail Board are also invited to attend those meetings as well.

At those meetings I get to see the data on progress with software, on progress with getting all the bits of testing and signoff done, whether it is the stations, the shafts, the portals, the track and the routeway. That is the information that the executive team in Crossrail use and it goes to Crossrail’s Board. I get the Project Representative Reports at the point at which they are sent to the project and then we have organised, as you will know, for those Project Representative Reports to be published alongside the report that goes to the Programme and Investment Committee. Therefore, I am not short of information, to put it that way, about everything that is going on with Crossrail.

To be honest, the way I would characterise it is I do not think that there is more than two or three days that go by where I do not have a conversation with Mike about something in relation to Crossrail.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): Perhaps I could add, if I may, Chair, a couple of additional things. Tony and I talk every single week for a detailed run-through of issues that we think are useful for us to talk about. We do that every single week without fail. I talk to Mark at least once a week on an ongoing basis, often face to face, sometimes just catch up by phone. Mark already mentioned the visit last week from the global chief executive of Bombardier to the joint team at the Plateau, as it is caused, at Westferry Circus.

Mark also mentioned the fact that at his invitation and at the Mayor’s suggestion I attended a meeting with Siemens out in Germany at its factory. That was important. I am not a signalling expert in the way that Mark is but nonetheless it was extraordinarily important to demonstrate how joined up and absolutely aligned we are in the approach to Siemens. That worked really well as well.

I have already alluded to the fact that I meet with Project Representative senior people as its report is published, to review issues around that. In terms of within the core of TfL, we have had something called an Elizabeth Line readiness meeting, the new Managing Director of London Underground who, as well as being an operator of considerable experience is an engineer as well. He has asked for a reconfiguration of that meeting to ensure that it is absolutely fit for the current phase of the project in terms of grabbing in the operation of the Elizabeth Line as it becomes commissioned, as it gets into the trial running phase and everything else. There is a huge amount. I would say probably Crossrail occupies around about 25% to 30% of my time, in support, of course - I am not trying to do Mark’s job for him - of what Mark, Tony and the Crossrail Board are doing.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): One other thing, Chair, if I may. If you remember, you were concerned about two particular issues on the TfL Board. One is under the previous regime the Crossrail Board, some things being discussed in part 2 in confidence, which meant the public was excluded. Secondly, Crossrail as an item being discussed way down the agenda when members of the public may have lost the will to live.

We have done two things. Since Mark has been chief executive and Tony has been Chair, I cannot remember an occasion where we have needed to go into part 2. That is a credit to the openness and transparency of the new team. Secondly, as you know, the Crossrail update follows immediately after the Commissioner’s report,

because it is important that we shine a light on Crossrail in the view of the public and Assembly Members as well.

Navin Shah AM: Are you able to confirm that you should not find yourself in a situation like you were before whereby you were not fully briefed in terms of either delays that may be in the pipeline or cost escalation and so on? You are given the information well in advance so that you are not caught unawares and create further issues?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): That is a good question, Navin. Just to give you a compare and contrast, it was only in August 2018 that Mike [Brown MVO], Heidi [Alexander] and I were told that Crossrail would not open in December, four months in the future. Compare and contrast that in August, Mike attended a Crossrail Limited meeting and was told there were concerns. There were new risks and new assurances in August. This was way in advance of Crossrail opening. In September I attended the meeting and asked many questions. Tony and Mark were very candid, as were other members of the Board, saying, “We need to do some further testing. We think we may not need the six-month window. We are not sure, though. We think we can do it, we’re not sure. Can you give us two more months to come back with some answers to questions we’ve asked, the Board has asked?” Lo and behold, at the November Board meeting they were very candid saying, “Although this is well in advance, it may not materialise, we may well meet the six-month window. Because you want maximum transparency and you want a change of culture, we’re notifying you we could miss the window” and you have seen a complete transformation.

By the way, November 2019 is significantly more than four months in advance of central section opening. Why is that important? First because we need the information but if you are a business or if you are a resident, if you are somebody who will benefit potentially from Crossrail, you need to know because you have to make plans. We need to mitigate, so we are working together to make sure we can mitigate. I should include as part of the equation the DfT has been very collaborative. It is also part of this new relationship as a joint sponsor with the new team at Crossrail.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): It sounds like every part of this puzzle has upped their game since what has happened. It is a different league. Fortnightly for you to be forensically going through stuff is quite extraordinary. I am sure it is taking up more than 30% of your time, Heidi, at the moment.

Shaun Bailey AM: This is to Mark and Tony initially. What good practices have you adopted to encourage a culture of transparency and openness across the whole organisation?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): If I could start that, we made, as Mark said, our stand right at the beginning of this year. After safety, working as one team and being open and transparent has been key. What happened last year, apart from anything else, was a disconnection between what was happening on the shop floor and what the executives may or may not have known. We have worked very, very hard to join that up. Internally the information that we are getting, that Mark and the Board are getting, is reliable information straight from the stations, using various systems that Mark has put in place. Externally we cannot tell anybody any more. We have created an environment where the expectation is that you will be open, you will be honest, you will be transparent. That is the culture that Mark and his team and the Board have created.

I would say it comes at a cost. I have worked on many projects in the public sector and the private sector. What you want to do in a project is you want to create a little bit of a pressure cooker, especially when you are

trying to get it finished. If every wart and wrinkle has to be and is exposed - you know more about this project than I do, or as much - maintaining that pressure cooker -- maybe that is the wrong term.

It is the right thing to do and we are proud of the way that we have opened our soul and our window to the world but it comes at a little bit of a cost. When the Board is thinking as it is now about windows and how and if we are going to revise those windows, we have to bear in mind two considerations. We are slightly between a rock and a hard place here. We want aggressive targets to drive performance within the project with our contractors and so on but we do not want to let anybody down. On the one hand we would like to be super conservative, on the other hand we would like to be very optimistic. That is why we have a window and that is why a lot of deliberation goes into how to set that window to achieve all of these objectives. It is quite hard to do, to be frank with you.

Shaun Bailey AM: Mark, do you think these systems are working? How do you test them? Because there were massive failures beforehand and we need to be reassured that you have made a change. Listening to the conversation it feels like it is. I do not believe this level of conversation could have gone on before, but there was such a big failing. We have talked at length about did the Mayor know, what did he know, why did he not know. How are you testing these systems? How can you reassure Londoners that there are words from the very coalface, from those electricians right up to the Chair?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): The proof is in the pudding. We have metrics now with everything left to do in this job. I cannot put a number on it but there would be more than 15,000 tasks still to do on Crossrail. Some of them are quite minor, some of them are major. We have spent a lot of time cleansing the data. The Project Representative has looked at it, the Project Representative has audited it. We have also put our own second line of assurance in, target assurance on our data, and we have come a long way in the granularity of understanding where we are.

The challenge then is what is the future going to be. How many of those widgets will you get done? It is still a challenge for us to define our outcome because the productivity is a challenge on this job, but we are very confident on our dataset now. It was very helpful for the management team to be allowed to be so transparent. We get scrutiny and it is quite tough but nobody is complaining about it because we are all in it together.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): There are three lines of assurance, which is top-quality project management we have put in place this year. That means that we have people at the front line obviously doing assurance and using the right professional qualifications and the right standards and so on. Then we have people at the second line who are independent of us, looking at that and making sure that those systems are good. Then we have people in the third line, who are even more independent, for example our independent expert advisory panel. Then, to make darn sure, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), a fantastic institution, came in a few weeks ago and checked that our assurance system, that three-layer system, was effective, and have made some recommendations as to how we can improve it. It is hard to imagine more scrutiny.

Shaun Bailey AM: Mr Mayor, can you remind us how regularly you see these dashboards?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): I see them every two weeks but they could come to us every week, I am not sure. I see them every two weeks.

Shaun Bailey AM: Who prepares the dashboard?

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): It comes directly from Crossrail.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): We do.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): There is one dashboard for everybody. We do not filter it. There is not a Mayor’s dashboard and an Assembly dashboard. We just create the one.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): It is just data. It is not interpretation; it is data.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): To be fair, more useful than the dashboards are the face-to-face meetings because I can then ask the sorts of questions you are asking. I can ask that face to face, because a dashboard is one way.

Shaun Bailey AM: I understand. I ask because one of the major criticisms or one of the real cultural breakdowns was the difference between the filter - let us call it the filter - between what was being said at one place and what was being delivered to another. Crossrail’s take on what is going on and TfL’s take on what is going on caused much confusion. I ask you directly, Mike, where are you in this new culture? How are you contributing to this new culture? Is there anything that you think you could be doing more of?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner, Transport for London): No, other than spending 100% on the project, but I do have to give Mark a little bit of capacity to deliver the damn thing. One of the things that is a relevant point here - because it is a very valid point and Tony has talked about three layers of assurance and how important that is - at a very granular level one of the questions that I asked both the Project Representative and then I asked Mark was whether there was any risk that somehow false positives were being communicated, so that there were some greens on the dashboard that were not real greens, based on the evidence at the ground of what was going on. The Project Representative gave me a very categorical assurance that it did not think that was the case and it had done quite a lot of digging and probing into that. I asked Mark exactly the same question and Mark also reiterated that.

There is always a risk in these projects that something emerges that people become convinced is the reality when it is not the reality on the ground. However, I do think that the processes that Mark has put in place in terms of what you might call the production control, the control schedule, the visualisation process of having a very robust reporting mechanism, again with the Mayor and Heidi and I attended down at the offices at Stratford, demonstrate that this is real. These dashboards are reflecting the reality reported from Crossrail, but you will understand why I have asked for some additional reassurance as to the validity of them.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I add a small thing? Each of us, as non-executive directors of Crossrail have taken on a station to sponsor. I, for example, spend a day every month hanging out at Liverpool Street. I go to every one of their meetings, I go down into the station. All of my colleagues do the same; I am not special. We look at what is really going on. You cannot get closer to the action than to have your non-executive directors on the Board regularly visiting and interacting with sites that they get to know and, strangely, love.

Shaun Bailey AM: While that is very useful and signals some change, listening to Mark speak, when he came on to the project there was utter horror being hidden and nobody could see that. Unless you are an expert -- again Mark talked about these being very exciting edifices. If you look at Bond Street, for instance, it looks great but behind the scenes there is an awful lot to do that needs an expert eye. That is about culture and

that is about understanding. I do take your point that attending is very important and it sends a message to everybody that we are in this together, but I am very interested in making sure that the detail is there, the reality is there.

We had a long conversation in the press, in this room, in our report, about what the Mayor did or did not know and it was very opaque. If we are going to get past that point and believe that your risk register and what you tell us is going to happen for a delivery day, we have to understand the change in culture. I tell you this because many years ago I spoke to an ordinary person working at Crossrail, where I get on because I use the Shenfield Line. He told me it was not going to be ready in time, yet nobody bothered to tell us. I hope that the different feeling in this meeting is correct but I am very interested in the actual culture change. What questions are you asking and who can you ask, “Will this line be ready”?

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Just briefly and then we will move on to the next bit.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Let’s start at the top. We have adopted that spirit of transparency, we audit it and we are going to keep going with it. I cannot say more, really.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): We have a section on corporate culture at the end, so let us pause that there, thank you.

Léonie Cooper AM: Obviously there has been huge public interest, not just because of the level of public resources going into the project but also because of the impact on people’s lives which the Mayor referred to, hopefully positive finally when it all gets opened. Therefore, it is encouraging to hear that you are discussing communication and improvements that have been made. Deputy Mayor Alexander said since last summer there are distinct improvements.

However, one of the things in the report that the Transport Committee did was also about transparency. Assembly Member Shah referred to the period of time when we seemed to be having many a slip twixt cup and lip and it seemed to be a bit obscure as to who was saying what and where to who and when. One of the things that was a recommendation was that the Crossrail Board meetings should be made fully public. Is that something that is going to happen?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Let me address that, because that is the one recommendation that we looked hard at and, frankly, did not accept. The reason for that is unlike, for example, the Board of TfL, which is looking over a vast array of public services, we are focused on a very, very specific project. Our Board meetings are working meetings. They contain a huge amount of commercially sensitive information. We publish very extensive minutes. We try to reduce the redactions to the minimum possible. It is my professional opinion as the Chair that it would be impossible for us to conduct the kind of meetings that we have, which are very open, very candid, very direct --

Léonie Cooper AM: What are the kinds of things that you are still saying need to be kept commercially in confidence? We are being webcast now and most of our proceedings are completely in public. Lots of people around the table have previously been councillors and have part of a meeting that is then done in camera, in private. I do not understand why you cannot restrain the elements that are commercially confidential. The project is underway. It is not as though we are talking about people bidding for new contracts and bidding against each other and the pricing is confidential. It seems unreasonable that most of it, absolutely the vast

majority, could not be in public. Yes, my question was addressed to you; that is why I looked at you as I asked it.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I am afraid we are just going to have to respectfully, hopefully respectfully, disagree. I just believe that the quality of the conversation that we have, the type of conversation that we have, would be very, very difficult indeed if it were to be done on camera.

Léonie Cooper AM: Give me an example that would be awkward.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): It is an overall kind of tonal thing, but, yes, we are dealing with 40 or 50 different contractors here. A lot of our conversations have to do with individual contractors or groups of contractors and I believe what would happen is that more and more of the Board meeting would be squeezed into a private session, which I believe has happened in the past.

Léonie Cooper AM: We are reasonably well aware that this is a complex project with an awful lot of complexity attached to it, but you will also understand that both this Committee and also members of the public across London have seen delays and also have felt that there has been a lack of transparency. That is why I am asking this question.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): It would be wrong to say there has been a lack of transparency. It would be impossible for us to provide any more information than we are --

Léonie Cooper AM: I said that is what people feel.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I regret that but there is an enormous amount of information available about this project and I genuinely do not think the public interest would be served, or the interests of getting this project served, by having our Board meetings held [in public]. I just do not think it would be in anybody’s interests.

Léonie Cooper AM: I have probably pressed you as far as we can go on that. You talked about the minutes being published. The Mayor responded to a question in Mayor’s Question Time in May of this year saying that he felt having minutes published was a good thing. Obviously having minutes then published in a timely fashion is something that we are pretty keen to see. Do you think that two months from the time of a meeting to the minutes coming out is a timely fashion in any size, shape or form? Could they not be produced more quickly?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I have pressed quite hard on this and I would like them to be done more quickly but right now they are quite extensive minutes, we have quite a few committees, and we have a very small staff looking after the Board and the Board committees. The process is that the minutes are reviewed and confirmed or agreed upon at the subsequent meeting, so that if have a November Board then the minutes are reviewed by the Board in December, and then they have to be scrutinised for redaction. That is done by ourselves in consultation with our sponsors and that just takes a little time, but I have looked at it. We have moved it from three months to two. I am happy to see if we can do better.

Tony Arbour AM: We could not get away with “reviewing” minutes.

Léonie Cooper AM: It would be very helpful if it could be sooner rather than later. It has been exacerbated for us. Perhaps this is one for Mark [Wild] to comment on. The Transport Committee has been informed of

progress through monthly updates and the first few of those in May, June and July, all came through on time as expected, but August was late, September was late, October was late, November was late, and I think we have just received the update almost on time, but not quite, for December. It is because there have been these issues that I am pressing you particularly on this. I do understand the organisational constraints but public confidence in this project is crucial.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): We have not had a good record of producing the monthly update on time, so my commitment is next year every one is going to be on time, I guarantee it.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Thank you.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Because we have logistical --

Léonie Cooper AM: A lot of people have just heard you say that, both in the room and on the webcast.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I can guarantee it will be there because I will make sure it happens.

Léonie Cooper AM: That would be very helpful.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Can I just make a remark to clarify from a comment over here?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): He is always heckling. Do not worry.

Tony Arbour AM: I am not heckling. We could not get away with it.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Obviously the Board writes the minutes or the secretary writes the minutes. The Board approves the minutes. There is no change to those minutes made by anybody. The only bit that gets scrutiny is redaction, to make sure that nobody is being compromised commercially. That is all. I think I misled you or you may have misunderstood.

Tony Arbour AM: “Review” is not a good word. “Review” is a synonym for “revised” or “altered”.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): The minutes are not revised by anybody except myself or members of the Board.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Thank you for that clarification.

Léonie Cooper AM: I review the transcript of all the meetings that I chair, Tony, and I can tell you it is quite a lengthy process but it does not necessarily mean “revised”, it does mean “review”.

It is really important that we are talking about this because it is important for us to know that the public are assured that we are assured, but also that the correct information is coming to the Mayor and Deputy Mayor from Crossrail. Getting all of that properly transparent and good communication as part of that is really important to us.

My final point is about the public engagement side. You have apparently been producing some videos, which you have been putting up on the website, to try to improve peoples’ understanding of the complexity of what is being done at individual stations and on the project as a whole. I just wondered if you could set out for us

the impact of these videos in terms of public engagement. How many people have looked at them? Have you had comments back on them? Has it been useful?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): Yes. When we inherited the project or we were asked to take the project over a year ago, we had no media team at all, really. We had some good people but the media team - that was quite a machine in Crossrail - had been demobilised. In the course of the year we have re-recruited a small team but a very capable and competent one, and we would say one of our main objectives is to educate people on why there are these delays and why we have such uncertainty.

We have a series of films. We do a quarterly update - the next one will be in January [2020] - and the reach is quite extensive. I posted one on my LinkedIn profile just a month ago and I got 100,000 views. There is a great appetite and interest in this project and we are going to keep going with that. We have appointed a new communications director, Alex Kaufman, and she will be leading quite an extensive programme of transparency. Yes, it is back to the transparency. We would say it is an essential thing to educate around why this is a complicated job. Any feedback people have, just drop me a line, whether you have more or less. I think we have made big progress in the area in terms of our communication.

Léonie Cooper AM: Thank you, Chair, I am finished.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Thank you. I just want to make a point before I bring in Assembly Member Devenish. In terms of public engagement and the reputation of the project, you have to be a good neighbour. There are issues, I know, on the Network Rail end out in Abbey Wood which the Crossrail Complaints Commissioner is involved in, but there are also issues which Mark [Wild, Chief Executive, Crossrail] is very well aware of, about businesses like the London Gin Club in Soho, closed for ten months as a result of contractors from Crossrail. Everyone hides behind insurers, loss adjusters, but this is a business unable to survive at the moment, unable to operate. I know Mark is dealing with it but I just urge you all, with your different hats on, to see what you can do to get liability sorted here and the works done so this business can open. There may well be others as well, but this one I particularly know about. It is your reputation as a project as well.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): Chair, if I may, Mark and I have talked about that even in the last ten days, and we have just agreed a further course of action to try to do exactly as you suggest, so we are absolutely on it.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Perhaps you could write to me outside this. I just wanted to put it on record because they have been in the press as well.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): It is very important and we have talked about it.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): It is, because reputationally the project has generally worked well with neighbours and I want to make sure that continues. Assembly Member Devenish, you wanted to come in here.

Tony Devenish AM: I wanted to, for probably the first time ever, agree 100% with Assembly Member Cooper and what she said.

Léonie Cooper AM: It had to happen sooner or later, Tony.

Tony Devenish AM: Indeed. I have to raise with the Mayor and the Commissioner a culture point, really, because I think we can all agree that TfL’s culture is not the most transparent and we need to always try to improve as we go forward. I would like to particularly make the point to Mr Meggs that part of the specialist expert feedback on the communication hoop, really, in terms of freedom of information, is that if you have part of your meetings in public -- not the whole meeting, of course, for commercial reasons. We do this with Westminster Council with planning meetings. If most of the meeting is in public and literally hundreds of specialists watch this, sometimes they will come up with an idea better - dare I say it - than anybody in Crossrail or TfL. Therefore, can I urge the Mayor and the Commissioner to go away and think about what AM Cooper has said, which I agree with 100%, and reflect on that? I do think that TfL and Crossrail will be a better organisation if you do open up further, please.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): OK, brilliant. Thank you for that point. We will put that in correspondence as well following this meeting. Let us move on to looking at governance and assessment of risk.

Tom Copley AM: Our report made three recommendations in relation to governance and assessment of risk. If I could start with Tony first and then maybe ask the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and Mike to comment, can I ask how you have taken our report’s recommendations around governance on board?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Let me make sure I find the right page. Broadly, without referring to the specifics, we have transformed the governance of Crossrail over the last 11 or 12 months in the following ways. First of all, we have essentially a new Board and we have expanded the Board to bring in a little bit more expertise. Everybody on our Board, with one exception, has been on the Board only since the middle of last year. We have brought in several new [Members] this year. The purpose of that is to make sure we have the right skills but to also make sure we have the right level of challenge. These are fresh eyes on the project.

The second thing that we have done is we have put in place the three lines of assurance, which is best practice and was not in place before. That is the technical and commercial people on the ground, then people looking at the system, and then people above that.

The third thing we have done is either set up or reinvigorated the committees that either were in place or should have been in place before. We have now an Audit and Assurance Committee, we have an Investment Committee, which we took over from the executive and we run it at the Board level, and we have a Nominations and Remuneration Committee. Those are now all fully effective.

Then finally we have opened up in terms of our governance, we have opened ourselves to a lot of external scrutiny and we are communicating widely on the progress of the project, the problems of the project and so on. We have responded very positively not just to your recommendations, but to the numerous recommendations made by KPMG at the beginning of the year and to numerous interactions with our sponsors in particular, who have assiduously followed up on every single recommendation to make sure that we are running the company in the best way we can.

Tom Copley AM: Yes, and of course the recreation of the Audit and Assurance Committee was one of our recommendations. Do you think this Board is providing more challenge to management than the previous Board was? Perhaps Mark can comment on that because you are the Board member that has been on [both].

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I would say it is a completely different situation. The executive team get a lot of constructive challenge; the Board is very comprehensive now in its skill set. It has individuals who have great experience of doing these works and different genres and we get a lot of challenge. The Board previously - I do not want to particularly talk about it - was in a totally different league from where we are. I value the Board. They have really helped us. It is not an entirely comfortable situation sometimes, but the scrutiny has been good.

Tom Copley AM: Absolutely. Sadiq, Heidi and Mike, do you want to comment on the recommendations?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): I had a couple of things. First of all, when I go to the Crossrail Board as a senior sponsor alongside either of the Permanent Secretary of the DfT or one of her senior director-general staff, what I find really encouraging is that the Chair, Tony [Meggs CB], gives an update first of all on where the discussions are going, but then - I think very importantly - he calls on every single member of the Board to give their own assessment of the issues that have been discussed at the Board and their perspective. Those are slightly different perspectives because they come from an area of different specialities, different areas of focus. Some of them sit on the Audit and Assurance Committee, for example, or even chair it. Some of them sit on the Safety Leadership Group. Wherever they sit they come from that different perspective and I find that extraordinarily rich and valuable in getting that wide perspective. There is no sense, by the way, of Tony leaping in and cutting them short in their opinions or in their perspectives; it is absolutely open. Then Mark [Wild] gives his perspective at the end of that list of non-executive directors as well.

In terms of other things on governance more generally, if I could just give some further updates on the recommendations of this Committee, the assignment of lead ownership of strategic risks relating to the opening of the line from a TfL perspective has been allocated specifically to the Managing Director of London Underground and I discuss that in my regular monthly Executive Committee meetings with my executive colleagues at TfL. We have had a co-ordinated strategic workshop between Crossrail Limited, Network Rail and TfL to ensure a common understanding of the risks to completion and interdependencies in that process. We have given further consideration for the arrangements for the practical and operations handover from stations and infrastructure into TfL asset ownership and maintenance and management. We have given further strengthening of the management oversight of the preparations for the handover and operational readiness from within TfL for the Elizabeth Line.

The fact that Crossrail has reviewed the capacity and capability across its programme overall, establishing a Systems Integration Team to ensure greater transparency and openness as to what happens there, their visual management process - which, as I talked about before, originated even before Mark was in London Underground and is a direct lift across as a process - demonstrates real openness and proper dialogue within the team. As Mark said, colleagues from my team attend those meetings along with the Minister for Treasury and Resources (MTR) and other key people.

Not only did we take very seriously that recommendation that this Committee made, a very helpful recommendation, but we have continued to evolve the thinking behind that recommendation even as recently as the last few weeks.

Tom Copley AM: Thank you for that. That is very comprehensive. We also recommended keeping governance restructures periodically under review as the project moves into different phases. Is that something you are doing to make sure that the governance is right for the particular stage of the project?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): Absolutely. I do not want to overplay him because he has only been here four or five weeks, but the earliest discussions I have had with the new Managing Director of London Underground are about him seeking to pull this project into TfL’s core. Now that we have somebody permanent in that position that is a real step change, given the stage of the project and where it is.

We have talked quite a lot about trial running in that phase. It is really important and an imperative that, as stations get ready to be handed over, we properly review the effective moment for handover. Some of that handover may be still with some snagging items that might be better placed for the TfL teams and the London Underground teams to pick up and deliver, to allow Mark and the team to focus on getting the routeway and the trial running processes in place without being distracted with some of these continuing risks. We have to work out how the money transfer and the commercial issues sit with that, but I really do get the sense - and I am sure Mark could echo this - that Andy Lord [Managing Director, London Underground], he sees this as his railway that Mark happens to be building for him, which is exactly the right approach.

Tom Copley AM: Thank you. Finally, just back to Tony and Mark, is there any element remaining of the governance structure of Crossrail that you feel needs to change?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): There is always room for improvement. In fact right now we have commissioned a review of the Board and an independent assessment of how it is doing. That is not really just the Board, it is the Board and all its committees. Effectively it is a governance review that is being undertaken.

Tom Copley AM: Who is conducting that review?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): I cannot remember. It is an independent contractor that we brought in from the outside that specialises in that. They will report back to the Board during January [2020] and in February we will decide what to do with their recommendations.

One of the comments that they have made already - and, by the way, I am not overseeing this because it needs to be properly independent; it is being done by one of our senior independent directors - is that this process of wrapping up at the end of the Board meeting with our sponsors, they have never seen before. First of all, they wonder how the chairman can focus on doing that. I say I do not really focus on it; it just happens. Secondly, they think it might be best practice that they might want to use elsewhere or recommend elsewhere.

Tom Copley AM: Excellent. Unless there are any further comments on governance, I am happy to leave it there.

Joanne McCartney AM: I want to ask about the role of the Project Representative if I can. They originally set up the structure to be an independent voice to give advice to the Sponsor Board and that advice would then allow the Sponsor Board to challenge the Crossrail Board.

However, for example, KPMG in their report earlier this year stated that although the Project Representative had highlighted risk, that was not taken on board by the Crossrail Board. They also mentioned that the terms of risk were extremely vague and that there was no actions for the Sponsor Board to be able to then take to the Crossrail Board and challenge. Has the tone of that advice to the Sponsor Board changed? I notice from the Mayor’s response to our report that it is stated that resources have been enhanced for the Project Representative. I was just wondering if you could tell us about those, how that advice has changed, the tenor of it and what you do with it.

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): It is the latter two points, really. It is the tenor of it and what we do with it, to be honest, Joanne. Where we were before was that issues were being highlighted to the Sponsor Board, but the Sponsor Board was finding it extraordinarily difficult to get any traction with the Crossrail Board in its previous incarnation. Issues were being raised and, to be honest, to some extent were being dismissed as being alarmist, inappropriate, ill-advised or ill-thought-through.

The difference now - and I alluded to it earlier on, Chair, through you - is that I now have discussions with the Project Representative directly where they are able to give some context around the reports that they are producing, the fact that these go to the Crossrail executive team and indeed to the Crossrail Board and are given proper air time and proper consideration, the fact that when I walk into the Crossrail Board at the end of its meeting the Project Representative has already been there and has sat through the deliberations, the review and the discussions within the Crossrail Board; this is an entirely different relationship. They never got anywhere near the previous Board in terms of being able to directly communicate the issues.

Frankly, that is why I have been very keen to ensure that I have a proper effective meeting with them alongside the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) before every Crossrail Board, so that we have this absolutely collective common perspective of the issues they are raising. Sometimes there are points of clarification you just need to ask them, for example, picking up the point that was raised earlier on around risk, “Is it a safety risk you are talking about or is it an overall financial project delivery risk that is being discussed?” Those are the types of things that often you need to have a conversation about. It is an entirely different tenor and an entirely different way of dealing with it. The Project Representative is hugely important, not just to sponsors, ourselves, and the DfT but I know also to the delivery team.

Joanne McCartney AM: The extra resources that have been put into the Project Representative team, what do they consist of?

Mike Brown MVO (Transport Commissioner): The Project Representative is the person that Mark alluded to, whose name had been not revealed before. He is a very senior, very competent project delivery person within the Jacobs team. He is extraordinarily well thought of within the industry and he has all the resources at his disposal from within Jacobs to enable him to do the job. In fact I did ask him at our last meeting if he had enough resources to ensure that he was doing what he needed to do. If you look at the comprehensive nature of their reports, it is demonstrating that level of competence.

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): I just wanted to add that those Project Representative reports also come to the Programme and Investment Committee of the TfL Board. I think I referred to it earlier. It does enable then the Members of the TfL Programme and Investment Committee to have a huge amount of very rich information to draw upon to ask their own questions, and Mark [Wild] comes along to those meetings of the Programme and Investment Committee. The fact that it is shared more widely as well now is a really positive thing.

Joanne McCartney AM: I take it, as far as Tony and Mark are concerned, it has been very useful for you to have that more detailed scrutiny?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): It is my observation that the better the project team, the more they invite and welcome scrutiny. One of the things about this team is that they welcome and invite scrutiny because, even if it is not always comfortable, it provides opportunities for improvement. I do not think they could do a better job.

Joanne McCartney AM: Mark, when you are assessing risk, the advice or the comments that the Project Representative gives to you, can I ask, are you always in agreement or are there some issues where you are not? If you are not, what steps are you taking to ensure that, as the issue progresses, you are reviewing and checking back?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): We have not done this. Maybe we should do this. If we did look back at the Project Representative’s reports, there would be 10 to 12 instances where their ideas have prompted executive action. We could definitely evidence a case where the Project Representative has pointed us to an area, and we have improved on it.

Generally, our disagreements with the Project Representatives are more tactical, probably station by station. There is very little disconnect - I am sure they would say this - between ourselves and the Project Representative on the strategy. We of course have disagreements. If, for example, they disagree with something in Farringdon Station, what happens is the Project Representative comes to every single meeting I have and we always give the Project Representative airtime to challenge us. That is a really big change. When I was on the Board of Crossrail previously, the Project Representative did not have the access that they have now. They are right through the organisation and we have found it very valuable, probably best practice.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): It is not a caveat, but I would just say their job is to identify all the things that might go wrong, could go wrong or are going wrong, not to talk about all the really great things that are happening. Therefore - I suppose that is our job - it is a particular perspective on the project.

Joanne McCartney AM: In the Mayor’s response to our report, we were told that the sponsors have appointed a technical advisor to provide insight on railway systems delivery. I was just wondering where that technical advisor sat, who they advised and what use that had been.

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): This is a big move forward in the project. Previously in the National Audit Office (NAO) report, your report or maybe KPMG’s report the lack of competency and capability of the Project Representatives for the challenge ahead was cited. They have appointed a very notable person who joins the Sponsor Board, somebody we have worked with for many years with great experience in railway systems. We had the Sponsor Board last week and this person was a very active participant in it. That person is going to come with us to the Romford Control Centre in the New Year. This person advises the Sponsor Board and the Project Representative. It has been a really big move forward.

Joanne McCartney AM: Thank you. My last question then is to the Mayor and Deputy Mayor. There has obviously been a lot of learning in this project and we are all familiar with, when the next project comes along, a lot of that institutional learning having been lost. What are you planning to do with regards to this project to write up the lessons, so that when we get Crossrail 2 there is a reference document to look back on and to say, “This is the way you go about doing this”? Obviously, things change, it will be a different world we are living in, but there will be lessons that we can learn from this that should be applied elsewhere.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): It is worth reminding ourselves that the precedent used for Crossrail was High Speed 1 (HS1) and the Olympics, an independent body given the autonomy and responsibility to get the thing built. It worked in the past and until relatively recently it appeared to be working now. What is clear is that for the clients - and that is what the sponsors are; the DfT and the TfL are the clients - there was not the level of control or the levers that there should have been. There are many lessons we have learned.

The NAO report that Mark referred to is very good. Not to spare the blushes of the Assembly, the Transport Committee’s report was very good. Therefore, there is now an evidence base in relation to improvements that can be made and we are now putting into practice many of these improvements going forward. You are right, hopefully we will have further infrastructure where there will be a role for an autonomous independent body.

One thing I will say - neither Mark [Wild] nor Tony [Meggs CB] have said this and I am really pleased they have not - is that the balance we have to strike is allowing the professionals to get on with the job, having light-touch accountability, but bearing in mind this is a huge amount of taxpayer money and money from businesses. They demand scrutiny, regular updates, and almost watching during the course of the work being done. Tony has huge experience and in Tony’s experience never before has he seen a project like this. As I said to the Board when I went to address them in September, “I am afraid that is part and parcel of spending a huge amount of money building an amazing Elizabeth line”.

There is a lot we have learned, Joanne, and I am hoping that the most important thing is that it is possible for a Government of one political persuasion to work closely with a regional government of another. It bodes well for Greater Manchester in relation to High Speed 3 (HS3). It bodes well in relation to some of the exciting plans they have in northeast and northwest.

Mark and I are always keen to make sure we have the institutional learning passed on. One of the things we are doing going forward is making sure that when it comes to lobbying the Government for investment in infrastructure in London, they have confidence that we have a track record of delivering. I accept the point, additional expenditure and delay. All I would say is to put it in context of what has gone on around the world with other major infrastructure projects. In 2010, a decision was made to reduce in billions the cost of Crossrail. Arguably we are now going back to the original quote for Crossrail. My concern is that businesses and residents were expecting this to open in December 2018 and it has not. Lots of lots of lessons have been learned and we will make sure, going forward, they are used in future projects.

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): The one additional point I would make is that there are a lot of hard yards still to go with the delivery of the central section and what we have not talked about as yet today - and I do not know whether the Committee will be coming on to it - is that stages 4 and 5, when you connect the central section out to the services that are now running from Paddington to Reading and from Liverpool Street, are going to be a very complex piece of work as well. The mistake of the previous regime was to start talking about the legacy and all the things they learned during the civil engineering project, losing sight of the reality that was confronting them at that point in time. While it is really important that we reflect and capture the things we have learned about the process over the last 18 months, let us not forget the fact that we have a real job of work to do to get this whole new railway open. We need to do that point of work at an appropriate point in time.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): May I add to both those excellent points? We have 650 commercial technical papers out there from the past which are widely referenced around the world when people start up new projects. We have reinitiated, Mark and myself, that learning legacy, as it is called, so that we can capture this next set of detailed lessons that come from what we are doing right now. They will be extraordinarily valuable, possibly more valuable than the ones we had before.

For me there are three big lessons to take away from this. There are many, but three big ones. The first: simplify. The project is too complicated. Simplify, simplify, standardise. The second is that all projects now are systems integration projects and they ought to be owned and run by systems integration people from the get-go. The third thing is that deadlines are important but beware because they can cause anomalous

behaviour. Let me just put it that way. There are many lessons to learn and we are capturing those as we go along now.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): That is very helpful. I have met with the Chief Executive of HS2 to go through our recommendations and to challenge him and his organisation to learn from some of the things we picked up. I have been trying to do that with our work as well.

Siân Berry AM: Some of the questions I wanted to ask have been covered already but just in terms of our own scrutiny, obviously I am here today I am not a member of the Transport Committee but we have had a number of special meetings about this. Is there a case for us continuing to have some kind of working group or something that meets quarterly? Obviously, we have changes to our own structure so this might be for discussion outside. I would also just say that we should be doing this for any big project, I would have thought, in advance.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): That is something for us to look at more widely as an Assembly. The Transport Committee will be wanting to look at this. There may also be other things, whether it is meeting the Project Representative in public or having a briefing to then feed into one of these, but that is something to take outside.

Siân Berry AM: Yes, where things get really major. We have had a Brexit Committee [EU Exit Working Group], for example, and part of the reason I am here is the budget performance.

A question to the Mayor as well, on a similar note. Obviously, we are presumably not planning to bid for the Olympics again but there are other projects outside of transport where this might be borne in mind in terms of transparency, governance and those kinds of things. As Mayor, are you making sure this goes outside of the transport bubble in terms of how projects are planned? The only equivalent I thought of is the Olympics and possibly the Mayoral Development Corporations as well. We have had trouble with scrutiny and some of these transparency and honesty, warts-and-all kinds of lessons might be well learned in other areas of governing London.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Of course in transport we are hopefully successful with Crossrail 2 and it will be important we learn the lessons. The Chair mentioned HS2 but I think with Crossrail 2 we can make sure these lessons are learned.

Next year we are hosting the Euro 2020. We are not building stadia for the Euro 2020 but it is arguably the biggest sporting event in our city since the Olympics 2012. How you manage people and all sorts of working relationships with other parts of the London family is really important. We have made sure that the institution that is City Hall has learned all the lessons for this and whenever there is any big infrastructure projects or any big projects we understand the need for scrutiny.

For the Olympics one of the things that the Public Accounts Committee did, I know as a former Member of the Public Accounts Committee, was to look in real time at the cost. Rather than, after the project was finished, looking back at any issues, did it in real time. One of the things, Chair, we could be thinking about doing, or you could be thinking about doing as an Assembly, with reference to Siân said, is thinking about real-time scrutiny. Again, Chair, I make the offer I made last time. I am really happy for us to come here again in six months’ time to give more information and to answer questions, because it is important we do so and it is important Londoners get the information that you elicit through this conversation.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Next year that will be very useful for the new Transport Committee to hear from you at the right moment. Whether it is in the autumn maybe next year. That would be very helpful, thank you.

Let us move on to the final section. We have covered a few bits of it. It is leadership and corporate culture.

Keith Prince AM: Thank you. Obviously, the problem being the tail-end Charlie is that most people have walked all across your pitch, but anyway I am going to ask the question. Mark, you have pretty much covered it so just add anything you want to add rather than repeat what you have said. You said previously that the undue optimism that occurred in the previous leadership came from a place of not knowing. Are you confident now that the executive team understands the risks that remain in the project and that you have the skills to address this?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): I stand by that. I think the previous team were very experienced but their lack of understanding of the work to do led to some decision-making that was not optimal. For me, I think we do understand how to complete this job. I do think we have the right skill set. There is no barrier, I do not think, to getting the right people on this job. I would say, yes, Keith, we have a grip on this job and we can see pretty clearly what’s to do.

Why do we have uncertainty? We have uncertainty because, as you are testing something, or you are testing software, you find things that are wrong and you have to fix them. That is the guts of where our uncertainty lies. The process of testing reveals things that need to be fixed.

Keith Prince AM: I accept what you said, Mark, and it is really reassuring. It is fair to say that you are trying to do something that has never been done in relation to the software.

Just a quick one, Mr Mayor, if I may. Credit where it is due; congratulations on your anniversary last night, and for foregoing part of that and giving us a wonderful carol service. It was very enjoyable, thank you. I thought your speech was good too. Sometimes it is questionable as to how partisan it was, but it was a very good speech. The content was good.

Mike [Brown MVO] has quite generously told us he is spending around about 30% of his time on this project. I have no doubt in my mind that Heidi [Alexander] is giving a lot of her time to this project, hopefully a little bit to Gallows Corner but a lot to this project. Mr Mayor, I would be interested to know what sort of percentage of time you think you are giving to this project.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): A lot of time, much more time than was in the previous regime, not just face-to-face meetings but reading. Obviously when Heidi, David [Bellamy, Mayor’s Chief of Staff] and Mike meet with the team I get debriefs and such. There is a lot of time.

In reference to the “Have we got the right expertise?” point, Keith, just to reassure you, not only have we got the best and the right expertise in the country, but we also request in a polite and courteous way of contractors, whether it is Siemens or others, “We want your best from the world working on this”, just to reassure you that we have that reassurance.

As part of the work I do on Crossrail, I check with Mark and Tony, “Is there anything I can do to help?” Let me give you an example. If, for example - I will give you a hypothetical case - a tier 2 or tier 3 contractor is not doing what the team want, but we do business with them, other business, I can simply pick up the phone or

meet with them and say, “Listen, that is a priority for us. You have these other contracts with us. The sensible thing to do would be to focus on that so we can get that finished”. That is the sort of stuff where I rely upon Mark and Tony to let me know how more I can help, aside from the transport stuff as well.

Keith Prince AM: Not in a bullying way of course.

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Always polite, always courteous, Keith.

Keith Prince AM: Do you want to give me a percentage?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): I could not. I work seven days a week, unlike the previous two holders, so I am not really sure if my percentages are equivalent to the previous two Mayors.

Keith Prince AM: I am not going to rise to that.

Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor for Transport): I just wanted to add something about this time question. I think it is the wrong way of looking at it because it is what you do with the time that you are spending on it. The only way I can characterise my engagement with people like Mark and Tony - and it characterises the Mayor’s engagement as well - is that we are constantly impatient with them and we are permanently a little bit sceptical and challenging. It is what you are doing with the time, the questions that you are asking and how you are providing support to the team who have a really difficult job to do. I am not sure that is exactly the --

Keith Prince AM: It is only that Mike kindly offered a percentage so I thought I would go for it. I am conscious of the time, Chair, so I will not rise to any of the bait that was put out earlier.

This is to Mark and to Tony, but really to you, Mark. You probably can answer this one. In the monthly updates, as late as October, you stated that you were still on track to meet the October 2020/March 2021 deadline. When did you realise that this deadline would not be met and what changed in the course of one month?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): We monitored demonstrated performance, as we have said before, all of our key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. It is kind of an early warning system, you would say. We were really challenged around late September and early October about the rate of testing, particularly in the stations and the routeway assurance. Then of course there is validation and you try to mitigate this. To Tony’s point, the reason for my job is not just to let the slippage continue, it is to act. It was obvious by September/October that certain trends on assurance were going in slightly the wrong way, compared to the construction which was going in the right way and the software which was going in the right way. It is around that time, Keith. Then that has culminated in lots of extensive work and ended up with the announcement that we had.

Keith Prince AM: Mr Mayor, if I can just ask a question of you, when were you made aware that situation had changed?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): On 7 November [2019]. We were concerned in August, as I alluded to. There were some concerns that the Crossrail team had, but, as Mark said, mitigations take place. In September I attended the Crossrail Board meeting and the Crossrail team wanted to do further work, the testing that Mark has alluded to. Then I attended a Crossrail Board meeting again on 7 November and that is when I was informed by the Crossrail team that they did not think they would do the first three months of the window. To

err on the side of caution it was important for TfL to let the markets know and for Londoners to know as well. One of the big lessons from last time was for there to be maximum transparency.

There is a tension because Mark wants to carry on applying the pressure to the contractors, the suppliers and others, so if you let them know there is slack they will work to the slack and so we need to be honest about the tension there is, but I would far rather Londoners know that there is a potential of us missing that window rather than the alternative, what happened last time.

Keith Prince AM: There is that risk, as you indicated, of letting them off the hook if you say it is not going to happen. But you are saying, Mr Mayor, that you had an indication around about August time that things were not quite on track?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): I think the --

Keith Prince AM: It is not a question to you, I am sorry, with respect. Mark, you were saying in October that it was still on track?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): No, in August there were some elements of the handover and the integration that we always needed more work to do. By the time we got to late September and early October we had evidence that we were struggling with it but we were still mitigating, mitigating. It is very important on these jobs that you do not accept every single slippage. The manager’s job is to mitigate. It was not really until 7 November. I am sure Tony would agree. We had our decision point was at that point, which is a culmination of a lot of scientific work. We did not decide until 7 November.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Let me just add to that --

Keith Prince AM: I will accept that, Tony. I accept what Mark is saying so I am going to wrap the next question up because I am conscious of the time.

Mark, obviously we are concerned about how the risk of the deadline being pushed back further will be mitigated and I think both you and Tony have given us a number of examples of where that will happen. Really the question I would like you to look at is: what lessons have you learned from the risks that have caused the project to be delayed most recently? What lessons have you learned from that?

Mark Wild (Chief Executive, Crossrail): That is a good question. We have factored in the rate of acceptance of these large stations, the rate that we can test. We have found more defects at the bottom of our pyramid than we expected, so the real reason for the recalibration of our window is that we have taken all of our demonstrated performance in what we term “the nursery”, which were the first five stations: Victoria Dock Portal, Pudding Mill Lane, Custom House, Mile End Shaft and Tottenham Court Road. We did that deliberately, I think a smart move. We took a small shaft and portal, then we built that up and what we found in the nursery, the learning ground, was probably at the much more adverse end of we would have expected.

There are many reasons for that, which would probably take up another two hours. It was really lessons out of the nursery that we have now factored into the other 25 elements. The window we have now and the reason we are confident this railway will open in 2021 is based on our demonstrated performance, which we hope to improve. We have come a long, long way in understanding the trajectory of this project and what is left to do. It remains a very large challenge, but compared to this time last year when there was no plan and nobody knew then volume to do, we now know the volume and through what we call “the nursery”, the first five sites, we

have a clear trajectory and that is what is informing the window. The question for the Board in January is what that means and what the executive should be challenged with.

Keith Prince AM: Thank you. That is very helpful. Just a quick one, Tony. We could do it offline really. You mentioned earlier the list of sponsors for the different stations and I would be very interested to know who is sponsoring my five stations, especially Harold Wood and Ilford. We can do that offline. Thank you for all that.

I think we now come to the Colombo moment, I think they call it. In the recommendations we had recommendations 4 and 5, which we have covered about role of sponsors, but in recommendation 6 we talked about chief executive’s remuneration. Recommendation 6 in the report was:

“The remuneration packages for chief executives in large infrastructure projects should be benchmarked against those for other projects. Additionally, the process for setting and accessing performance bonuses should be revisited periodically to ensure the remuneration of programme chief executives adequately reflects progress towards the successful delivery of a publicly-funded project.”

Our Mayor I believe said that KPMG’s independent reviews recommended that the sponsors and Crossrail should agree to changes to the procedures around remuneration of senior staff members. My question to Mark and Mike and Tony is: what changes have been made to setting the remuneration packages?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): We have reconstituted the Remuneration and Nominations Committee. Secondly, we have invited our sponsors to be a part of that Committee so that they are fully apprised of and indeed engaged in any decisions made around that. Thirdly we have set a bonus structure against our original Draft Charging Schedule (DCS) and that will be subject to external scrutiny. Our remuneration policy is in very good shape.

Keith Prince AM: The changes you have made is to the people on the panel, you just said that, yes? The question is what changes are you making to the package and when will we learn about that?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): What changes are we making to what, sorry?

Keith Prince AM: Changes you are making to the packages.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): No, Mark’s remuneration, for example, is set by TfL because Mark is a secondee from TfL. The bonus package is formulated by ourselves in Crossrail and it is very reasonable and furthermore it is tied to actual performance and it is tied also to long-term performance, which is a difference from in the past.

Keith Prince AM: You have made changes to the Remuneration Board but not made any changes to the packages?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): We were not asked to make changes from existing packages. These are references to historical events and nobody has asked us --

Keith Prince AM: KPMG’s report says that sponsors and Crossrail should agree to changes to the procedures around remuneration of senior staff.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): We have done that. We have done that by ensuring that we have invited the sponsors to attend out Remuneration Committee and be involved in any decisions around remuneration, so we have changed the processes.

Keith Prince AM: Yes, that is the point I am getting to.

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Certainly, the levels of remuneration are quite - I am sorry to say this, Mark - but significantly less than they have been in the past, including myself, I might say.

Keith Prince AM: Thank you. I will leave it at that.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Yes, it is the performance-based element that I am interested in, what you have just said. The issue for us was that previous chief executives and others were able to take their bonus when they clearly were not delivering the project. Do you want to clarify that element?

Tony Meggs CB (Chairman, Crossrail): Let me be clear. We have first of all a very challenging set of performance metrics which starts with safety, moves on to cost and then hits 11 specific milestones, some of which are being hit, some of which I have to say are being missed as a result of the change to the schedule. The second point is to say that senior executive team bonuses will not be paid until, not just at the end of this year when they are due, but until stage 3 is up and running.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): That is very helpful and reassuring, thank you very much. Thank you all so much for your time. It has been a long meeting but it was very worthwhile for us going through where we were with our report and updates. Is there anything else any of you wanted to add, any particular things you are going to focus on in the next year, anything you are wanting to add?

Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London): Just to offer again, Chair, when the new Transport Committee re-forms after the election, the team is very happy to come again to the Transport Committee to give this information, and other Members of the Assembly also are more than welcome to come and ask questions.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair in the Chair): Lovely. I am sure we will make sure that is ready to move forward and if some of us are lucky enough to be re-elected it will be fresh in our mind. Thank you very much, Mike Brown, Heidi Alexander, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, Tony Meggs and Mark Wild, for your time this morning.