Appendix 1

London Assembly Transport Committee – 11 February 2021 Transcript of Item 6 – London’s Post-Pandemic Transport System

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Can I welcome our guests joining us for today’s meeting? We have Alex Williams, Director of City Planning for Transport for London (TfL); Christina Calderato, Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, TfL; Emma Gibson, Director, London TravelWatch; [The Rt Hon] Norman Baker, Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport; and John Dickie, Director of Strategy and Policy, London First. Thank you, all.

We have a series of questions for you from the Transport Committee. As always, Transport Committee meetings are full and interesting debates and I trust today will be no different. However, without wishing in any way to stifle that discussion, it would be helpful if we can all keep our questions and our answers succinct so that we make the most of your time and get the richest information out. I will gently keep people to time if I need to, just to make that point at the outset. Thank you very much.

I would like to lead off. The first section that we are looking at is the impact of COVID-19 on Londoners’ travel plans and behaviour. My first question is for Alex Williams. How have Londoners’ travel patterns changed since the onset of COVID-19?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you for the minute’s silence at the start as well. I do appreciate that and I am sure colleagues in TfL do because it is a really tragic situation for the organisation and the city.

In terms of how it has changed, it has been a profound and unprecedented set of changes since March last year [2020] and there are key points I would like to get across. One is that there was a huge reduction in actual movement in the city. In a normal day you would get around 27 million trips in the capital. You will be familiar with our mode-share target to get as many of those by sustainable modes: walking, cycling and public transport. At the height of the pandemic, we estimate that the total volume of trips fell by roughly half in the first lockdown in March. We are dealing, in the various lockdowns, less so in the second lockdown but certainly in the lockdown we are in now, with a much lower level of movement around the city generally. That is the first thing to note: the big changes there.

If you look at it by sectors or by modes, the Tube is quite an interesting one. Pre-pandemic on a normal day, there were around 4 million trips a day. In the first lockdown, volumes went down to around 5% of normal and so that 4 million became 200,000. In the second lockdown in November [2020], Tube ridership was around 30% of normal and we are now at around 17% or 18% of normal. We have much lower levels of usage, but there is quite an interesting contrast between the relevant lockdowns. There was huge change in the first one and less change in the second one, but then we are back down to 17% now.

On the bus network, the level of change has not been as great. In the first lockdown, we were at around 20% of normal levels. In the second lockdown in November, it was around 50%. We are at around 30% now. There is not as huge a change, but that also reflects maybe a difference between the blue-collar and white- collar workforces. The white-collar office workers are being asked to work from home and they dominate the Tube use, whereas blue-collar workers are more on the bus network and they have to go to work, often.

On the road network, we have a very different set of circumstances and a reduced level of change. In the first lockdown, we had around 45% of normal. In the second lockdown, we went up to about 80% of normal. It was very much higher. We are at around 60% of normal flows on the road network now. There is this issue about big and profound and sustained change in the public transport usage levels, but a lower level of change on the road network, and that is a concern.

If you were to look at walking and cycling, for walking it is difficult to get accurate data from around the city. In central London, the levels are very low but that is partly because of what is happening in central London. In outer London, it feels like there is probably more activity in the town centres as people live and work more locally.

Cycling is probably not going up at the moment but, over the summer, there were higher levels of cycling. It was quite an interesting thing we did not expect because cycling is often dominated by commuting trips. There was a lot more leisure cycling. Santander [Cycles hire scheme], for example, went up as well. That is an overview of the key travel pattern changes.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much, Alex. I am going to move on to a question to Christina [Calderato] and I will pick up some of the things that I might have asked Alex about that because I am interested in that not only in workforce mode but also in differences across the city.

Christina, I was going to ask how the November 2020 and January 2021 lockdowns have affected travel patterns. Alex has laid out some of that and how it has differed from the first lockdown, but I would like to get a sense of how that has differed across the city - that will become relevant with one of our later sets of questions - and which modes of transport are important for different parts of London. If Alex wants to add something to that, he is very welcome, but I was passing that on to Christina.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Thank you. Yes, what we see are probably exacerbated patterns that we know were already there. Traffic has increased more quickly and has increased more closely to normal levels in outer London and inner London than it has in central London. That reflects what we already know about travel patterns in those areas. Inner London is more densely populated and there are more public transport alternatives, whereas in outer London some of those journeys - particularly since people’s daily travel patterns have changed - might be more of those ad hoc journeys. That is something we see more of with working from home. There are likely to be more ad hoc and more complex trips, which are more likely to be undertaken by car. Unsurprisingly, that has happened most quickly in outer London, but we are also seeing it in inner and central London.

Particularly looking at car traffic in central London, as Alex said, in that first lockdown we saw a really sharp drop-off. We have not seen that same impact in subsequent lockdowns. Also, it is interesting how quickly, even in that first full lockdown, car traffic dropped off very quickly but within about two weeks was tracking up again. Even while we were still in full lockdown, our car traffic levels were back at pre-pandemic levels. What we have seen is a really interesting shift in people moving towards car travel, unsurprisingly, particularly at the height of that first lockdown, but we see those trends coming back post-Christmas. The traffic is increasing even in central London again.

The spatial aspect of it is probably more or less what you would expect to see, but a take-home message is that across the board we are seeing those increases in car travel much more quickly than other modes.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): That was interesting. I think we would all recognise that there are some differential impacts around outer London, particularly around bus travel and some of the Tube lines being

busier than others. I do not know whether either you or Alex wants to comment on that before I move on to a question to John Dickie.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): No, it is fine. Christina has covered that. Thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): That is great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Christina. If I could move on to John Dickie, what will be the key impacts of more people working from home on London’s transport?

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): Chair, the first and most important impact for us to start to work through is that TfL will have much less revenue than it is used to having. TfL gets something like 70% of its total revenue from the fare box, which is a much higher percentage. In comparable cities it is around 40% in Paris and in New York. If we are to maintain a metro service, we are going to need to find alternative sources of funding.

The work we have done leads us to two rather simple conclusions. The first is that in the short to medium term, there is only one place to get that alternative funding and that is by central Government returning some of the substantial tax transfers that London already makes to central Government.

In the medium term, we need as a city to look at how we want to fund the transport network we have and the kind of transport network we think we want to have for the future. This is partly a set of issues to do with changing working patterns and we can spend a minute on those if you wish. It is partly about changing working patterns but it is also about grouping some of the changes that were already happening to the way in which people consume transport and the services they want from transport providers before we had the experience of lockdown. We think we need to start a big conversation in London to look at how we provide and fund transport through the medium and long term.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): That is really helpful, thank you, and sets the scene very well for future questions. Thank you very much, John. Norman, if I could ask you, what will be the key impacts of continued growth in active travel on London’s transport system?

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): On the key impacts of active travel, active travel is a very good thing and so we are very much in favour of that. If we are able to sustain the increase in cycling and walking that we saw in the summer, not just in London but elsewhere in England as well, then that has to be a good thing. The evidence is that there has been an increase in cycling across England as a matter of fact, notwithstanding the fact that there has been a decrease in transport overall.

London has done very well, I might say, in recent times on cycling and walking before the pandemic, including the cycle lane system and also the wonderful invention of these maps at regular points on the pavements to show you where you are. Certainly, if you are in a part of London that you do not know very well - and this applies to me - you would end up looking at the maps and walking rather than calling a taxi because you did not know where you were going. You are already very well set for an increase in active travel.

Even more could be done, if you are asking me that, for example, by encouraging people to note the architectural features and the impacts of the walk they happen to be engaged upon. There is more that could be done on that front. That is not a problem. It is not what you are asking me really, but the problem will be getting people back onto buses and the Tube.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Do you think there is scope for a more mixed approach to journeys? You have talked about walking at the end of a journey and some of the information that comes up on journey planners is really helpful in that context. You can recognise that it would take you 10 minutes to walk rather than changing a Tube line or whatever.

What sorts of things do you think would help people use active travel for part of their journey in different parts of London but, as drivers, get them back ultimately onto public transport or using part of their journey as public transport?

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): It is very important that people have the ability to understand the connectivity points to where they are going; in other words, to make a judgement as to how best to get from A to B. I would not recommend, for example, taking the Tube from Embankment to Charing Cross. That is rather a wasted journey.

It is very important that when either TfL or you or indeed the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Government looks at transport strategy, it looks at it in the round as a whole. We have a national bus strategy coming in, which we have argued for, but a national bus strategy, in my view, will fail if it just looks at buses. It needs to look at the connectivity between buses and light rail, for example. In London that would include the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and the Tube network. It needs to look at the connectivity between buses and cycling. One of the things we want to be able to do is to see whether or not there are cycle hubs at appropriate points in London, where there are Tube stations, where there are mainline stations. Can people feel with confidence they can change to active travel when they get to a train station or do they feel they are going to be stranded and will have to do something else?

The evidence I saw from the DfT was that if you do not have the answer to the last half mile, then you encourage people to take the car for the whole journey because they are not confident about the last half mile. That ability to move people along the last half mile is important.

The British Parking Association has done some good work on that, identifying that people park in carparks. They will be provided with information about active travel for their onward journey into the city centre. It is that sort of connectivity that is useful.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): In a sense, we are really focusing on looking at transport in London as an integrated system with everything from walking and cycling all the way through to use of trains. That seems like a really positive comment. I do not know whether either Alex or Christina would briefly like to comment on how we might maximise that integrated transport network aspect.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): I completely agree with you about the opportunities that this presents. One of the interesting things about the pandemic for me is that it seems to be accelerating trends that existed before the pandemic in some areas. We certainly have that in terms of freight and servicing and that shift to online retail.

One of the other trends that existed pre-pandemic was that coming into a mainline station, the onward distribution from those mainline stations was by foot. If you think about central London, 76% or three quarters of journeys in central London are by foot. Walking is the dominant mode in central London. That is partly because it does make sense to do that last bit of a journey if you are commuting in by foot in many cases, but it does also emphasise for me the importance of investing in the pedestrian environment and the public realm.

We are working with the Greater London Authority (GLA) on the future of the Central Activities Zone (CAZ) and a study with Arup, Gerald Eve and the London School of Economics (LSE). They do refer to that issue. If we want people to come back, we need a quality experience to get them back, quality offices and also quality public realm and quality public transport, to be perfectly honest, as well. Something that we will need to focus on is about how we encourage people to do that last mile by foot and we do that by having high-quality public realm that is great for pedestrians because they can take in the architecture, get fit and be healthier as well.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): We will come to questions later in the session about how that might be disseminated across other parts of London. Thank you very much for that and for starting us off with that. I would like to ask Caroline Pidgeon [MBE AM] to pick up the second set of questions in this section.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to pick up something Christina said before I move into my questions. You talked about the increase in vehicles. You may have said cars on the roads and Alex outlined that as well. Is it an increase in private cars or have you managed to do an analysis to see if it is an increase in seeing more delivery vans? Let us face it, we are all doing even more online shopping than we did before and certainly a lot of food shopping. Do you have any data or information around that, please?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes, I did talk about cars, but you are right. They are two distinct things. In the general traffic patterns and the car traffic patterns we are seeing something slightly different.

In terms of overall traffic levels across London, I was talking about general traffic, which - you are right - will include a different makeup including some of the changes in freight we have seen. The central London picture is particularly interesting because, although general traffic is down, car traffic is growing much more quickly than general traffic. While overall traffic is down, car traffic has at points been higher than pre-pandemic. Drilling into those numbers does tell us something really interesting and that is something we will certainly be keeping an eye on as we move through it.

What is very difficult with the changing lockdown restrictions is that they keep changing the patterns of who is moving and for what reasons, but the difference between the makeup of traffic and how overall traffic returns and how we see car traffic returning, which does seem to be following a different trajectory, will be really important as we go through. It is an important distinction and, yes, one to watch.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Yes. It will be interesting to see that analysis once you have done that work. Also, I am interested that in central London car use is going up given the extension of the Congestion Charge [Zone] to more hours in the day, to seven days a week and so on. Thank you for that.

My next question is to Emma Gibson at [London] TravelWatch. I know you have been doing a huge amount of work looking at future transport. Can you outline from your research - I know the final publication is out in a few weeks’ time - what Londoners want from their transport system over the next 10 years?

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Thanks, Caroline. Yes, as part of our research, we did a survey of more than 1,200 people in London representing every borough. Their thoughts focused on three different areas. The first one was around wanting more and better services. For example, there was a lot of talk about better connectivity in outer London. People talked about orbital and express bus services, for example, because people are moving around from borough to borough rather than there being a spoke-and- hub model. People talked about extra and more reliable services on both the bus and the Tube and things like longer trains to reduce overcrowding. That was the first cluster of ideas around more and better services.

The second cluster of ideas was around travelling safely. This covered quite a few areas. It involved having staff on public transport more visible to give reassurance about safety and also to provide information in the way Norman [Baker] was saying, “I do not know where I am going. Can you tell me how to get to this place?” People talked about a greater police presence on transport to deal with antisocial and illegal behaviour. There is quite a lot of talk at the moment about the need for social distancing and enforcement of mask wearing and talk about better cycling infrastructure to make it safer to cycle. There were also quite a few concerns around air quality, which seems to be a much bigger theme with much more awareness of the quality of our air because of the pandemic.

Then the third cluster of ideas was around the accessibility and inclusivity of the transport network. People talked a lot about having more accessible stations with more lifts and escalators, about drivers lowering their buses at bus stops, about having more toilets on the transport network and, again, about better communication and information for people so that they can work out where they are going with bus maps, better live travel information, next bus indicators and wi-fi on public transport. They also talked very much about the affordability of public transport being really important. A lot of people talked about the different concessions that were really important to them like the Freedom Pass, the Oyster Over-60 and the Zip card. Those were the main headings, Caroline.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. It always comes back to better communication and better information so you can make an informed choice depending on what journey you want to make.

What came out from your survey work on how the pandemic has changed the way that Londoners are thinking about their travel patterns in London? At the moment, it is very difficult. None of us are travelling really anywhere. On future travel patterns, what are people starting to think about when we go back to a ‘normal’, whatever that might be, and how they might travel?

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): There has been a lot of talk about people’s working patterns and of course work travel is only a relatively small number of the journeys that Londoners make. Even so, people are moving about much more where they live, as we have all seen and we have all experienced. I have talked about the hub-and-spoke model with everything going in and out of central London becoming less relevant to people at the moment.

Definitely every survey I have seen indicates that more people who can work at home will be working at home more in future, maybe halving the number of days they come into the office, for example. This might mean that people will be more appreciative of services being a bit more spread out throughout the day, for example, with less reliance on peak-time services and really taking advantage of the fact that employers are becoming more flexible about when people are coming in and out of the office. They do not necessarily need to travel at rush hour and might appreciate being able to travel at different times of the day or the night, even.

I would say in terms of how this has changed Londoners’ priorities, safety seems to be much higher up the agenda. I guess that is probably not a surprise because that feeling of safety and security has really affected all of us in every way about feeling safe on public transport. Younger people were telling us that that visible staff presence was really important to them to be able to feel that they could travel on the bus or the Tube without feeling worried about their personal security. Air quality, as I have said, was a really big theme. There is a growing interest in personal micro-mobility as well, which I am sure some of the other speakers will pick up later.

Just in terms of what has not changed, as we know, not everybody can work at home. Lots of people have been really keeping London going during the pandemic. A lot of those people have to travel at peak times or rely on those core services. That is not going to change. We have to make sure that we support those people in whatever changes in London’s transport system we make in the future.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you for that, Emma. That brings me to John Dickie. Thinking about the workforce in London, what will London’s commuters and workers need from a post- pandemic transport system in London, do you think?

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): This is a world of great uncertainty, but the first thing that they will definitely need is the maintenance of a high-frequency, dense, high-quality, high- capacity metro level of services. To Emma’s points earlier, there is always a challenge about more and better, but the critical thing for the CAZ and for the radial commutes that have driven the way business works in London for centuries is that we maintain what we have over the short and medium through to the long term.

It is really difficult at this point to say what will be the steady state of the new working week and the new working patterns for professional services workers in particular once we settle. It is worth reminding everybody - not that you need it - that of course a lot of workers have been coming in day in and day out. They are the 15% or 16% on the Underground and the higher numbers on the buses that Alex [Williams] mentioned earlier. As we know, Londoners have a much higher rate of homeworking than the rest of the country. For those people who have been able to work at home, as they return - whether that will be to a concentrated three-day week or whether that will be the same concentrated three-day week or whether it will be much more dispirit than that, whether the flexibility we see at the moment around when the working day starts and stops will translate into how people will come back into the office and so on - that is all really uncertain.

Beyond making the rather glib point that it will be different from the way it was in 2019, it is really difficult with any sort of confidence to predict how the market as a whole will settle, but that critical foundation of a high-quality, high-frequency metro service is the critical underpinning.

There are two things that come up in every conversation we have with business leaders as they sort of get their heads around what they think they will be doing in the post-pandemic world in London and that is the importance of their staff thinking it is safe to go back onto the public transit network and the public transit network providing a high-quality, reassuring, easy, comfortable, pleasant experience for people who want to come into the centre.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Do you think commuters’ attitudes will have changed to past serious overcrowding on the Tube and train services when they were squeezed in unbelievably? Do you think that acceptance of that sort of level of commute will be out the window now and workers in the city will change their modes of transport and working patterns partly around that linked to safety, I guess?

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): I do. That will be somewhat variegated. As with so many things to do with the pandemic, there will be an element of the choice that people have and the agency that people have. Those people who are more senior, more experienced and older are probably going to both be more concerned about getting on a packed Underground train and have greater ability to determine whether they have to get on a packed Underground train. There will be, I would expect, less concern but also less agency from younger and less experienced workers earlier in their careers. From a public policy perspective, we need to be sensitive to those pressures.

Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending how you look at it and depending whether you are the transport body responsible for running the network and collecting revenue - it is very difficult to see in the short to medium term the kind of demand pressures leading to, generally, the kind of familiar peak morning crowding pressures we experienced in 2019. It is likely there will be some localised peaks. We have seen one or two instances, for example, around construction workers getting onto some trains at some stations in east London and in south London where there have been some localised peaks. But it is reasonable to work on the assumption that there just will be in the round less demand and that demand will be somewhat better distributed than it used to be.

However - and I am going to return to my earlier point, Caroline - that is not an argument for saying that we need less service and we can cut our cloth more narrowly than we have done in the past. Firstly, we do need to build confidence that it is safe and that it is a high-quality, reliable, comfortable system to get people back into central London and to get them back into the offices. Getting people back into central London and getting them back into the office is what is going to drive both the country’s economic recovery and productivity in Britain.

We also need to be mindful of - what is the right way of putting this - the drag on competitiveness that transport has been in Britain for decades. London has seen very substantial improvements in its public transport network, particularly in the first decade of this century. We cannot afford to let that go back. That was a real hobbling factor on London’s competitiveness 10, 15 or 20 years ago and we need to be improving the quality and range of services in the city, not cutting them.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you, John. That was really helpful. I agree. I was rather shocked to find some of the rail services in southeast London cut to half-hourly services at the moment. There are still commuters going into hospitals and so on. It is really short-sighted. Thank you for that.

Can I go back to Emma? You have also been doing some survey work with Transport Focus. Can you tell us what the latest intelligence tells us about how safe Londoners feel about using public transport at the moment and returning to it?

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Yes. We had been doing a weekly omnibus survey until recently. It is now every two weeks. There are a lot of focus groups as well. If I could sum up how people are feeling in one word, it is ‘scared’, sadly. It is more so. People are more scared if they have not travelled on public transport during the pandemic. People who have travelled on it feel relatively safe, but the people who have not think it is going to be terrible. There is a real perception gap there and we are going to need to do some hard work to get people back onto public transport.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked the question: after you have been vaccinated or your friends and family and loved ones have been vaccinated, will you go back to your usual levels of using public transport? Again, only around half of people answered that question by saying yes. That points to a lot more reassurance that people are going to be needing.

What the research says is that the number-one thing that people are concerned about is the ability to keep a social distance. There is no indication that that worry is going to go away soon. That is going to persist for a long time and links to the question you were asking earlier about whether crowding on public transport has had its day. It might have. The secondary concerns that follow close up to that are about whether people are wearing masks and whether the bus, Tube or train is clean. Those are the things that are worrying people the most.

Of course, it is probably worth saying that the risks are not evenly distributed. People from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, older people and disabled people are more at risk. When it comes to our streets, a lot of disabled people are saying to us that they do not feel welcome back onto the streets because so many things have changed while they have been stuck at home. That is worth mentioning as well.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Emma. Finally, can I come to Alex? What steps has TfL taken to restore passenger confidence in the safety of public transport? We have heard the concerns raised through the work Emma [Gibson] has done and through what John [Dickie] was saying about business. What are you doing to reassure passengers?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Thank you, Caroline. Addressing the issue of perception of safety is the foundation for getting customers back. If they do not feel safe and feel that the network is safe, they are not going to come back. It is absolutely essential that we address that head-on.

It was interesting when Emma talked about the surveys of people who are using it or not using it and their views about that. We do regular poll surveys of 1,000 Londoners and 71% of Londoners consider the network is safe. That is quite a good start. It is going up. We want it to go higher. That hopefully indicates that people who have ventured out to use the network are experiencing a clean network. We are doing hospital- grade cleaning to kill the viruses and bacteria. All the touchpoint areas, poles and doors are wiped down every day. There are 1,100 sanitiser points. Often those are sponsored. There is enhanced cleaning throughout the whole network generally.

What we have to do is carry on with that work and build on that confidence that some people already have anyway - that 71% figure is good - and to really keep on with that intensive cleaning regime and keep on with that messaging out there to the people who are not using the network that, if they do go down there, they will experience a very clean network. It is not crowded at the moment. There are a few images of occasionally crowded trains at Canning Town and West Ham, but the vast majority of the network is not crowded.

Also, going back to John’s point about service frequencies, I do completely agree that to get people back we have to keep on with the current high-frequency services we are running. It is completely counterproductive for the recovery we all desperately need to cut services in the way that is happening on the National Rail network. It is probably different, National Rail to London but, in London, if you want a successful and vibrant CAZ to support the recovery, we have to keep those services going into the heart of central London at the frequencies they are currently operating.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Alex. The suburban rail services in London are critical in huge parts where we do not have the Tube. To have a half-hourly service is just unacceptable at any time, let alone now. Norman, you wanted to add something, please?

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): Yes, Caroline. I wanted to pick up on the challenge ahead, which is substantial if we believe people need to get back on public transport and out of their cars, which we certainly do believe at the Campaign for Better Transport. That is essential. A rather worrying report from the RAC, Report on Motoring 2020, showed that for the first time since 2002 only 43% of drivers said they would drive less even if public transport was improved. We have gone back 20 years in terms of perceptions.

Emma [Gibson] is absolutely right to say that the perception of those who are on Tubes and buses is much better than the perceptions of those who are not on Tubes and buses. I want to pay tribute on behalf of my organisation to TfL and other operators who have kept the buses and Tubes spotlessly clean. There has been a tremendous effort to do that. I for one recognise that.

We are going to have to have a campaign to persuade people back because the message from central Government, which was very effective last March [2020], was to not use public transport. That may have been quite right then and it is probably right now to say stay at home if you can, but unfortunately that has changed to almost demonise the bus or demonise the Tube or the train and to say that they are uniquely unsafe. Of course, any place where you bring people together is potentially a risk, but I would argue that there is far more risk in a supermarket than there is on a bus. That is not the message coming from the Cabinet Office and others in the Government. We have a huge mountain to climb to get people back onto public transport as and when it is safe to do so.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Lovely. Thank you very much. I will leave it there, Chair.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Navin Shah [AM] has indicated he would like to speak but, before he does, I would like to reinforce and pick up on Caroline’s comment about suburban rail.

We have had some correspondence leading up to the meeting from groups in the Enfield area looking at suburban rail there about the same challenge around frequency of service. In the context of that changing pattern of travel and people’s usage and spreading themselves out, the issue is around nonpeak travel again. I will just put that on record as part of the session, Alex, so that it is recognised and my earlier comment about that integrated transport system and both driving and responding to those different patterns of travel going forward. Thank you. Absolutely, Norman’s comment about getting people back on is really important.

Navin, you wanted to ask a question?

Navin Shah AM: Yes, thank you, Chair. Going forward, I want to raise two aspects of concessionary fares with Emma [Gibson].

The first is that I am particularly keen to see that the current restrictions on concessionary fares are lifted as soon as possible. We have restrictions on the morning peak for 60-plus and under-18 restrictions on concessionary fares still remain. That is one thing. When talking about what is a fair and accessible system for all age groups in London, this is very important.

The second aspect that is highly critical is that the future of concessionary fares is secured so that public transport remains accessible and affordable for age groups right from young to old who need that very much for their quality of life. Thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you for that, Navin. Emma, I do not know whether you have any comments to make on that.

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Just to back up what Navin was saying, as part of our research we spoke to groups of older people and younger people. Those themes came up again and again about how much people valued concessionary fares and about the issue of the restrictions currently on the Oyster 60+ in the morning peak still being a problem for some people.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you. That comes back again to the point that was made earlier about affordability on the system. I perhaps at this point should say that while they were not able to come as a

guest, Pret A Manger has given us a written submission. One of the points made there across the piece is around maintaining affordability on the system in terms of encouraging people back onto the system.

Navin Shah AM: Chair, if I may very quickly interject, also the wider issue that there is some strong belief within the campaigners and various stakeholders that these current restrictions on concessionary fares could be the thin end of the wedge in terms of taking away these concessions from those who need them most. When looking at what public transport provides in terms access to all age groups, this is a very important issue that we need to bear in mind going forward for the future and what kind of public transport we will want that is right for Londoners.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): If I can call on Caroline Russell [AM] to ask her set of questions. Thank you very much, Caroline.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you, Chair. Before I go into my first question, I wanted to go back to something that Norman was talking about, which was that only 43% of people would drive less even if public transport improved. Maybe there is something about risk not being understood very fully by people. We heard at this Committee that one of the biggest risks for Crossrail workers becoming infected with the virus was sharing transport on the way to work. Carsharing with people outside your household is a risky activity. That is possibly not well understood and it might be helpful if it was better understood.

To get on to my actual questions, my first question is for Christina. What are the key implications of a ‘15-minute city’ approach for London’s transport system?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Thank you. In essence, being able to access services within 15 minutes of your house where you can do that by walking, cycling and active and sustainable modes is a good thing. When we look at including buses within that 15-minute catchment, we do see quite an overall positive story in terms of town centre catchments. Most people will live within 15 minutes of a bus ride from a town centre, but there are still gaps, particularly in outer London.

As I referred to before, with increasing working from home, we are seeing changes in the way people are making discretionary trips and trips by their own means. That can sometimes be by active travel, but it can also be because more of the trips are undertaken by car because they are ad hoc. They might not be so familiar. They might be more complex. They might not be so well served by public transport. There are benefits and challenges to that more localised living.

Even if we see employment patterns changing and some shifting out of central London, it is unlikely that everybody is going to work within 15 minutes of their home. Again, that leads to some different kinds of travel patterns. You might be more localised but that might lead to more complex, more difficult-to-make orbital commuting patterns that are harder to serve with public transport. It does throw up some challenges as well.

To summarise, a ’15-minute city’ does give us an opportunity to ensure that we are improving our town centres through recovery and also ensuring that we improve access to them as well. That is particularly important in outer London where we do not have as much good-quality infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

We also want to be careful that we do not move to a city of small villages because it does mean that we miss out on some of the benefits and positive aspects of living in a city. Perhaps we do not need to have access to everything within 15 minutes of our homes. If you think about things like some of the culture, the museums and the theatre offering in the West End, you do not necessarily want to move those away from being in the city centre where people want to visit and cluster and have access to those city benefits. But the positive aspects of a ’15-minute city’ are that our local high streets and public spaces become more inclusive and more diverse, will thrive and will help support London’s economy, as well as supporting air quality and active travel objectives. There are lots of positives in there, but we do not want to lose the positives of being part of a vibrant capital city as well.

Caroline Russell AM: It is certainly worrying with the increase in car use or the resilience of car use as a mode compared to what is happening in terms of public transport use. In terms of particularly the outer London piece, we heard Alex [Williams] earlier talking about the importance of a very high-quality public realm. That is not the same in outer London. We have huge hostile main roads that are difficult to cross, places that are inaccessible and not easy to get around if you are walking with a white cane or are in a wheelchair.

Do you think there is a need for work particularly in outer London to make sure that the environment enables people to get out on foot and by bike rather than automatically getting in the car? Those short car journeys are contributing to transport carbon. They are contributing to air pollution and to road danger.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes, absolutely. A positive to put on that is that we are seeing those increases in those car trips but we are also seeing increases in active travel. That is in all parts of London. We certainly see that there is the potential to increase that in outer London. As you say, improving the quality of that infrastructure, of the public realm and of active travel access particularly to town centres will help unlock that potential.

One of the strange benefits of us living these more localised lives during this year has been that we have seen that there is interest from different parts of the city and different types of people in taking up active travel and walking and cycling journeys that they might not have done before. What we really need to do in terms of building London’s recovery is building on those positives, making sure that we give people the opportunity to embed those habits and behaviours, rather than feeling like they have to switch to the car when life returns to normal, if you like. It is very much about trying to build on those positive changes that we have seen and make sure that people have those choices available to them.

Caroline Russell AM: Is there anything else you would like to add, Christina? Is there anything else you would like to tell us about what emerging research, both in tracking travel patterns and in terms of Londoners’ views, tells us about the impact of a ‘15-minute’ city approach?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): I have probably covered most of it. In terms of tracking patterns, again, given the changes of this year where we have started emerging and then going back into lockdown, it is quite hard to track patterns. We will really start to see that as people start to return to workplaces and see how those trends are changing. People have talked already about people not necessarily wanting to commute every day and how we will start to see those changes feeding through.

In terms of views, what we have seen is that there is definitely an appetite from people to want to build in better habits and to change their lives for the better coming out of the other side of this. A lot of that is about leading healthier, more sustainable and more local lives and spending more time with families and kids and being able to enjoy getting out and about together as well.

In terms of the trends, there is definitely an appetite for us building on the access and the public realm improvements as we have discussed, but in terms of trends it is another one of those things. We are planning for a range of different scenarios and trying to understand how it will go, but we are going to have to keep tweaking our understanding as we see what happens.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. My next question is for John [Dickie]. John, you were talking earlier about the elephant in the room of how we pay for it all, but you also talked about the need for a big conversation about how we do all of this.

I am wondering. We have this situation with more localised work patterns over the long term and the impact on transport demand. We have heard that we need to maintain a metro level of service on our public transport. I am wondering what the infrastructure requirements are going to be to keep all of this together. I wonder whether you want to say anything at all about road pricing and how that might help in this whole picture.

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): Thank you. I might start by saying that one of the things that would be helpful in this debate is to have a consistent sense of what we mean by a ‘15-minute city’. Where I can walk in 15 minutes is very different from where I can cycle, which is very different from where I can get to on public transit. A bit of common terminology might help.

One of the potential positives of different ways of working will be people spending more time and more money in their local communities and on their local high streets in London. There is a potential for the next few years of different working patterns to have much more of an impact on regenerating our high streets in London than 30, 40 or 50 years of public policy interventions. That is a good thing.

However, it is not likely nor in London’s interests for us to shift from a world where we have a really strong and vibrant core in the CAZ. That is what drives London’s productivity. That is what drives the economy of the whole country. We do want to get that back. We can expect more fluid working patterns and more working from home. We can expect London to have a much wider labour market. If we are in a world where people come into the office two or three days a week or a fortnight, they are likely to be willing to have longer commutes for that two or three days a week or a fortnight and that of course may mean that we find ourselves having as many people in central London but a slightly different mix of people over the course of the week. Maintaining that service is really critical and getting back to that level of agglomeration is really critical.

How do we pay for it? How do we pay for the maintenance of that service and new services in orbital London and outer London? Looking at the way in which we charge people for using road infrastructure has to be part of this and building on the work that is already in train around extending the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and looking at a more sophisticated way of road pricing. There is a whole range of ways we can do this. We set out some of our thinking in the report we published last month. There is a whole range of ways we can do this. There are two-part tariffs. The Mayor has proposed a boundary charge.

There is certainly a more sophisticated approach to congestion charging and road pricing. Being able to, once you are in, drive as much as you like for as long as you like if you pay a fixed cost is not the right way forward. We do need to look at a more sensitive and variable set of charges taking into account actual distances travelled and actual impacts on congestion and actual alternatives. Clearly, we want to be in a world where, if we are going to extend road charging in London, we charge differently for people who are making a journey that can realistically only be done by car or is very difficult to do sensibly by public transit versus journeys that can easily be done by public transport. We need that level of sophistication in the mix.

We need to spend the next year or two thinking about how we build consensus around this. The way in which these schemes fail is that they are top-down. They are seen by motorists as an attack on motorists. They are seen as being detached from the realities of people’s commuting, travelling or leisure experiences. We need to get a greater sense of understanding as to the costs that road surface transit imposes on the city and the ways in which we can provide alternatives to it as part of this conversation. What I fear is the Manchester experience with a big top-down scheme that is ambitious and will drive public transit investment but fails to capture popular support and so fails and sets the whole cause back. We need to approach this from the perspective of building consensus among Londoners as to the best way of giving us the 21st-century transport systems we need.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Certainly people are experiencing a lot of congestion at the moment when they are driving and possibly people might be quite open to having that conversation.

I am going to move on to Alex Williams and look at how changing travel patterns are going to affect London at a sub-regional level. We have very different situations in central London, inner London and outer London, each of them experiencing very distinct challenges. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that, Alex.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Yes. Thank you for that question. It is worth letting you know that we completely recognise that the pandemic has had a seismic impact on how people move around the city. One of the things we are doing is we are looking at a bit of work called scenario planning, which is to try to understand and to try to map out various scenarios of what this could mean for the growth of the city and also how people move around the city.

We have five scenarios. One is a standard return to business as usual. Another one is a remote revolution, which involves a much bigger commuter belt. It goes back to John’s [Dickie] point about how, if you are commuting in only three days a week, you might choose to go further. There is a London decline scenario, which is where we do not get the support from the Government and London diminishes in its status in the United Kingdom (UK). There is also a low-carbon localism scenario. This is about more local living, which is akin to the ‘15-minute city’ you referred to earlier, Caroline. Then at the other end of the spectrum is agglomeration plus, which is when it goes even faster.

To answer your question, we are looking at all those scenarios to try to understand about how London could change over the longer term. This is a much bigger shock than in the 2008 financial crash or in 2001 after 9/11. Then we had a very quick return to normal. We are looking at this issue about whether we are going to see much more longer-term and much more long-lasting changes in how the city functions.

If I go to your question about what it means for those various sub-regions, for the central London region, this is the area of London that has seen the most profound change and the most significant change of all of the regions. With the area around Heathrow as well, those are the two that have seen the most profound impacts with huge reductions in footfall and huge reductions in commuting.

We have this work underway with the GLA, with Arup, the LSE and Gerald Eve to do some analysis about what it means for the CAZ in the short term and the medium term. That interim report is out and is a very interesting read. I would recommend reading it. What that is saying is that they expect a bumpy ride for the CAZ over the next two years. We all are. On the long-term trend towards the vibrant, successful, busy and brilliant CAZ that we were used to before the pandemic, they are confident that that will return, but they do emphasise this issue about the need for quality public transport, quality public realm and a higher-quality office environment to encourage people there.

In terms of inner London, it is a more confusing position there. So much of the inner London economy is dependent on what happens in the CAZ. A huge number of employees in the CAZ are from inner London. If that is successful, you would expect inner London to be successful, but you would also expect to see more active travel in inner London, more people choosing to walk or cycle into the centre rather than using public transport and those kinds of trends continuing.

In outer London, one of the issues that we are most concerned about is what it means for the bus network. You will see probably a slight rationalisation of rail movement into the centre, but one of the things we are very concerned about is what that means for bus passengers in outer London. The continued success of the bus network is fundamental to our transport strategy and getting people onto sustainable modes. That is the area of London that is most at risk if there is this car-led recovery because a car-led recovery will mean more congestion and a less attractive bus network. We really do need to focus on how we continue to make the bus network in outer London attractive with high-quality bus lanes and high-quality service so that it does compete with the car and does help with that ‘15-minute city’ that you might well get in outer London.

That is a summary from my perspective about what it means for outer, inner and central, but there is so much uncertainty at the moment that we are tracking this all the time. We have this hybrid scenario that we are working on. We keep that up to date every quarter to help us in our business planning work and our discussions with the Government as well.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. That was really clear. Yes, it will be interesting to see what TfL comes up with in terms of making the bus network in outer London retain its attraction because certainly seeing the congestion and the number of car journeys that are being made even while we are in this significant lockdown is worrying. Yes, it will be good to see what plans TfL has to keep those buses moving through our streets.

Christina, could you say a bit about the implications of growing active travel on London’s transport system in central, inner and outer?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Sure, yes. Since May [2020], through the Mayor’s Streetspace programme, we have delivered more than 90 kilometres of new cycle lanes, almost 90 local low-traffic neighbourhoods and over 330 School Streets. Providing those safe alternatives to car use for those who can walk or cycle helps us to prevent people from turning to those private car journeys that we simply do not have space for. That in turn helps protect road space for buses, essential journeys and people who cannot use public transport.

What we are seeing is that those changes are really working. Cycling rates are over 20% higher than last year, despite us having fewer journeys being made overall. We are seeing, as I mentioned before, not just in central and inner London but also in outer London that active travel is increasing.

In terms of the implications of growing active travel, it is obviously a positive, especially when it is replacing trips that were previously or would otherwise have been made by car. It is good for public health and activity. It is good for emissions and essential traffic, which in turn makes public transport and buses faster, more reliable and more attractive to people who might otherwise be in cars.

However, what the scenarios are showing us, as Alex [Williams] has just been talking through, is that even with increases in active travel - and it has been tempting in the past to think about increases in active travel equating to decreases in car travel - we can see both an increase in active travel and a growth in car use. What we need to be really mindful of is ensuring that our active travel and our public transport offers are both really

positive and that what we are trying to do is make sure that we have sustainable alternatives both through active travel and public transport.

In terms of the implications for the transport system, our long-term objectives and the objectives of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (MTS) are the right ones. We still need to be heading for that 80% sustainable mode share. It is really positive to see that we have been able to make these gains in active travel, which has grown more slowly. What we need to do is to continue to plan it holistically in the round to ensure that we get the outcomes that we are planning for.

Caroline Russell AM: When we are talking about active travel, we need to think about making sure that that is inclusive. I was really struck by what Transport for All said in its report, Pave the Way, which came out the other week. It is clear that they are saying that the way changes are being made is not quite right and they want some change. I spoke with them during lockdown last year and I raised issues on accessibility of Streetspace with the Mayor as well.

One of the things said in the report is that the way our streets were not good enough. They were not accessible enough. It is not a question of taking the Streetspace measures out but it is a question of making sure that they are as accessible as possible. When we get back into a situation where we have more chairs and tables outside, we need to have tapping rails so that anyone walking with a white cane can navigate these extra obstructions on the pavement. We need to make sure we have the tactile paving in the right places and pavement widening and those kinds of measures that are legible to everyone because we need our streets to work for children, the elderly and disabled people if this stuff is not just going to be about getting the young, the fit and the healthy out cycling and walking more.

I wonder if you have seen the Pave the Way report and what TfL’s response is to it in relation to all this work around Streetspace.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes, we have seen the report and it is incredibly interesting and, as you say, provides some really rich insights into the experience of disabled people over the past year and how they have been affected by the pandemic and the response to the pandemic.

In terms of a TfL response, we are considering what all the recommendations are and we will come back individually on them in due time, but what we can certainly accept is that the lack of opportunity for engagement over the past year has created issues for several stakeholders including disabled stakeholders. The scale and pace of change in the last year has been really challenging for everybody.

What the report highlights forcefully is the need to make sure that we are listening and also, in order to be able to listen, we need to make sure that we are in touch with the right people and are hearing a diverse range of views from across our disabled stakeholders. We totally agree on the need for investment in making public transport and the streets more accessible. Financial constraints make that challenging, but in terms of sharing the outlook about just taking things out and returning to the pre-pandemic ‘normal’, we want to be better than that. I totally agree that we want to continue to improve our services and the street space for people using it to make sure that that is a fully inclusive space.

In terms of the specific engagement point around Streetspace, we accept that the way we had to deliver it so quickly last year meant that that engagement did not happen in the way that we wanted it to. But there have been really welcome updates to the DfT guidance and we are filtering that through to the boroughs and making sure that we are setting up our own new processes for any of those Streetspace schemes going forward

to ensure that there is proper, thorough public consultation and engagement so that we can hear that range of views.

It is not just a case of putting schemes in and taking them out. What we need to do is, once they are in, hear people’s views and be prepared to tweak them and take feedback and amend them so that they do work for everybody.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Chair, I can see Emma has her hand up.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): I am about to do that. I am about also to make the point that we are running over on this section and so I was going to take Emma but I will start to move on. I wanted to say something at the end of the section.

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Yes, thanks ever so much. I wanted to reinforce that point about how important it is to make those street changes accessible to everybody and to properly consult with disabled people and their representative groups. Certainly in the last guidance I saw in January [2021], that was not included. The obligation to include disabled people was not in the guidance being given to boroughs. I am hoping that TfL is going to improve that and change that guidance. Then we could have some really successful schemes out there.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): That is really helpful. Thank you very much, Emma. I did originally have an indication from David Kurten [AM] that he might want to come in on a question. Bearing in mind we are very pressed for time, David, is that what you would like to do or are you happy to leave that until your later set of questions?

David Kurten AM: No, I am fine, thank you, Chair.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Before we move on to the next section, I wanted to float a thought for people as they answer the next set of questions about where the balance lies for TfL between responding to those changing patterns and being a driver or perhaps an enabler of what we might call a vibrant central city with a city suburb model and thinking about that in the context of that broader economic footprint. That is a question I would like to ask but not specifically. I am sure it will come out as you answer the next questions.

If I could move on now to Keith Prince [AM], he is going to take the next set of questions, followed by Murad Qureshi [AM].

Keith Prince AM: Thank you, Chair. Quickly, before I start my section, I would like to go back to Alex [Williams] on a point he was making about buses, especially in relation to outer London. The bus service in outer London is important but it is not really that adequate. It is a bit unfortunate, Alex - it is not a personal criticism - that you did not give any indication of TfL thinking outside of the box and thinking beyond buses.

We have emerging modes of transport. Clearly, we have the Boris Bikes [Santander Cycles]. There are not any in outer London and that is a shame. That would be an option that could encourage people not to use their cars quite a lot. Of course we have the emerging mode of scooters. It is a shame that London is about a year behind everybody else but, nonetheless, I am sure that like most other things we will get there in the end. I understand the issues around having 32 different boroughs - or 33 boroughs, whichever way you count it - and probably twice as many egos to deal with when you are dealing with those issues. I have been one of those egos myself or two of those egos, probably.

It is a shame, Alex, that you are not thinking outside the box because it is those last 15 minutes or the first 15 minutes that make the difference. To give you an example, last week I had to make some travel journeys, which in my car would have totalled one hour and 20 minutes. The journeys I made using buses - because the trains were not running - took me five hours. I spent five hours using public transport, whereas, if I had had one of my cars available, I would have been doing it in one hour and 20 minutes. That is the problem. If I had had a scooter to ride on or a Boris Bike, which I would have used, I could have done that five-hour journey in under two hours.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): To respond to you, Keith, I do not take it personally. I never do from you. That is fine.

We certainly are looking at emerging modes and other modes of transport. On satellite cycle hire, we have a big central London scheme. It is expanding. It has expanded recently. But we have never really cracked the issue about whether there are opportunities to do cycle hire in satellites outside of central London, for example a town centre in Bromley, Romford or wherever. We have never really cracked that. The difficulty with that is the affordability challenge but, if there was a way of cracking that issue, we would certainly be up for that, presumably in partnership with the local authority as well. We will continue to look at it.

Keith Prince AM: I just wonder, Alex. Obviously, the bus service is subsidised in my understanding, even more so now.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Yes.

Keith Prince AM: I just wonder how much less it would cost to subsidise pushbikes than buses. I am not suggesting you subsidise scooters because they will be self-financing, but certainly in relation to pushbikes I suspect that cross-subsidising them would be far less than running a bus with a few people on it. It certainly would have made a difference in my case, a significant difference.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): What I will do after this meeting is I will get a note sent to you on subsidy by mode. Certainly, if you look at by trip, the bus network is relatively efficient in terms of the level of subsidy by trip compared to cycle hire. That might help you in terms of answering that question and might help me in terms of that issue about the debate with boroughs about a satellite suburb. We are not discussing --

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Alex, if you could circulate that to the whole of the Committee, that would be really helpful.

Keith Prince AM: Of course, yes.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): I am seeing some nods across the Committee.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Yes. Absolutely, yes. Also, we are looking at other areas of innovation. We had the GoSutton on-demand pilot in Sutton and Ealing. Again, that was well used and well respected locally, but there was an affordability challenge that meant we could not carry on with it. E-scooters are different. You have got this national trial and we are working with the boroughs to look at how many boroughs would be part of that trial. That is moving on and our Director of Innovation [at TfL], Michael Hurwitz, is working with London Councils on that. In fact, there was a briefing on that last week with them.

Part of the issue there is, as you will know, Keith, that some boroughs are really up for it and want to be part of it; others are saying, “Absolutely no way”. It is a bit like what we had with dockless bikes as well where there is this kind of patchwork arrangement from the customer’s perspective, but we are actively working on e-scooters, definitely.

Keith Prince AM: Yes. I understand 11 boroughs have signed up, 12 in total, but there are going to be 11 that are physically taking part and another one is going to allow it to happen. It is about a third of boroughs that are signed up, from my understanding.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Keith, it is a number of notable outer London boroughs that have not signed up and that reflects the challenge.

Keith Prince AM: Absolutely. There is no doubt about that at all. OK, let us move on, shall we? Thank you, Alex, that is very kind of you.

Alex, please can you outline TfL’s current thinking in considerations for London’s post-pandemic transport system?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Post-pandemic transport system: we are still working towards the MTS and that North Star of 80% of trips to be completed by sustainable modes, walking, cycling and public transport. That is still there. Pre-pandemic, we were around the 63% level and during the pandemic it has been very volatile, as you would expect, and with big reductions in public transport use. That North Star is still there in terms of what we want to achieve to support the growth of the city and more people using walking, cycling and public transport.

There is a more immediate challenge, which is the Recovery Strategy. There is not a published document to that regard, but there is a big challenge for us in terms of the recovery and the core of that is getting people to feel comfortable about coming back on to our public transport systems. We talked about that earlier about how the foundation of that is the perception of safety and how we deal with that head-on. Regular users do feel safe, but we are a long way from where we were before when there were, what, five people per square metre on a Tube train. We are not going to be anywhere like that for a long time. The North Star in the MTS is still there, but in the next two years the focus has to be about how we get people back on to the public transport network.

In terms of our conversation with the Government, one of the things we do need to avoid is in the short term - if people are not there - to reduce services because that is so counterproductive to the long-term aim, which is to get people back on public transport to support the growth of a great world city.

There is a lot more art in there in terms of active travel, supporting more people walking and more people cycling, but Christina [Calderato] and others have talked about that anyway, yes.

Keith Prince AM: OK. I am sure I know the answer to this, but has TfL produced a new business plan then for all the potential transport projects in order to assess how cost to benefit ratios have changed as a result of COVID-19 and the shift to home working? Historically, the investments that we have been looking at have been around capacity and increasing capacity on the networks. Now we should be looking more at choice and connectivity rather than capacity.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): There are two parts to that question. First, in terms of the business plan, as you will know, we have funding certainty until 31 March [2021] because we are being supported by Government, which we are very appreciative of because it is a lot of public money to keep the show on the road, but we do need longer term funding certainty. You cannot run an organisation of this scale on six-month handouts. Everybody gets that and that is what we are in negotiation for. That is why the Financial Sustainability Plan that was published in January is so important.

We have a plan for the end of this financial year and in the GLA budget we will set out what we expect or what we want to spend next financial year. That will be pretty similar to the current financial year’s arrangements and it will probably be some sort of top-up mechanism from Government we are aiming for, which is, we assume, a certain amount of return to the public transport network, but if it is lower they would help us with the difference. That has worked well today and we are appreciative, but we do need more funding certainty.

In terms of your question about business cases going forward, that is a really interesting issue that we need to grapple with as an organisation. One of the things we are doing is we are going back to the scenario planning work that I talked about before. The old way of justifying a scheme would be to say that we expect this amount of pressure in the morning peak and therefore the travel time savings and the business case is really strong because we will address the morning peak. We have not had a proper morning peak since last March [2020].

One of the things we need to reassess is the case for the schemes going forward. Is it about capacity upgrades? Is it about more connectivity? We need to reassess the business cases in light of the scenario planning we are doing.

Part of the difficulty we have with this is that the range of uncertainty is huge. Business cases for new Tube investment, for example, may not come on stream for three, four, five, ten years. Who really knows where we will be in that period of time? Are we going to still suffer the effects of COVID then or will we be back to normality then? It is a very difficult time to make a judgement on future investment decisions, but that is where the scenario planning is absolutely fundamentally part of it and that is what we are doing going forward.

The final point I would mention - and John [Dickie] made the point earlier - is that we know that more people will work from home. One of the challenges of working from home is that people may have that mixed economy of working from home and coming to the office, but if they all want to come in Tuesday to Thursday, we are back to square one. There probably is going to have to be some management within the major employers about when people do work from home, including TfL from that regard as well.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Could I just caution, Keith? Remember that a subsequent set of questions deals with some of the business planning.

Keith Prince AM: No, that is all I wanted to do. Thank you for that. Yes, I just wanted to make the point that where in the past we were on capacity going forward, if we want to encourage more people to use public transport it is about choice and connectivity. With my example I gave earlier of my five-hour journey, which would have been one hour something with a car, had there been better connectivity between the points I was travelling to and from, that would have been a better choice for me, not that I had much choice. OK, let us move on because I am also conscious of time.

You may have answered most of this actually, but I will ask it anyway. What specific work has TfL done in the last month or so to consider and respond to the longer-term transport challenges facing London?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): There are two areas I would probably highlight. One is the work we are doing with Arup and the GLA on the CAZ and the report on that was published a week or two ago, the interim report. The final report will be done by mid-March [2021]. That is looking at a whole range of issues about how we get that part of the capital to recover because it is fundamentally important to the economic output of the country as well as the capital. There is a lot of work there on what it means for central London and what the recovery strategy is there. As I said, the report was very interesting and does highlight a bumpy ride for the next couple of years, but there is long-term confidence there, which is good. That has been a specific activity in the last month or so.

The other activity is keeping up to date on the scenario planning work and this hybrid scenario and whenever there is some research work out there, we are looking at that and making an informed judgement about how accurate it is. I am going to give you an example of that. There is quite a lot of debate about the size of London and the population of London. The last Office of National Statistics (ONS) data was 8.9 million. There was a report about a month or so again saying the population had fallen by 700,000 and there is another report saying around 200,000 to 300,000. We will not have absolute certainty on this until the summer until the ONS provides the estimates then.

What we are doing is looking at a whole range of other measures to try to understand the size of London’s population, so looking at school rolls, which are pretty stable, looking at rental levels, which are slightly down, which does not indicate a huge reduction in population, and looking at general practitioner (GP) registrations, which is pretty stable as well. What we are doing is because of the uncertainty we are just tracking everything that we can, not from a transport perspective but from other metrics to give us an indication about what is going on. We are in very uncertain times and that is why we have to carry on with that analysis on a regular basis.

Keith Prince AM: OK, thank you. My final question then - thank you, Alex - is to Christina. I would like to know how TfL is contributing to London’s Recovery Programme, specifically to ensure London’s post-pandemic transport needs are embedded in the approach.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Thank you. We are working really closely with the GLA on the Recovery Programme and feeding that into our own TfL Green Recovery for London Programme. A sustainable transport network is going to be key to securing the London recovery from the pandemic in general, but we do have a particular role to play probably on three of the missions, A Green New Deal, High Streets for All and Healthy Food, Healthy Weight.

On A Green New Deal, much of the work that we have already got underway will support that mission, including the planned expansion of the ULEZ in October [2021], support for active travel and public transport through the Streetspace for London Programme and our general investment, and implementing green infrastructure. Then you look at electrification of buses alongside that and the investment in walking, cycling and the bus networks. That is going to be a really key component of A Green New Deal. The work that we are doing is very directly related to that mission and we are feeding directly into that.

On High Streets for All, again this goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the low carbon localism and the ‘15-minute city’, looking at how we can enhance our public spaces, parks, urban greening, cultural engagement in high streets so that they become more thriving local centres and that they have good active travel connectivity, as you have highlighted, is a crucial need. We think there is a role in there for the healthy streets indicators in supporting and assessing that local high street development, so again feeding directly into that to make sure that the changes we make help Londoners safely visit their local high streets, that it supports

local economies and that we can improve and increase the levels of town centre walking and cycling access and improve those facilities.

In terms of Healthy Food, Healthy Weight, it is being led by the GLA Health team and some of the links to TfL are perhaps not quite so direct. Active travel does actually play a really important role in healthy weight, ensuring that Londoners can get their daily activity and there are a number of policy areas that probably overlap with that as well. School Streets and low-traffic neighbourhoods overlap with the School Superzones Project. Even just the acceleration of the Streetspace Programme, which is providing more space for active travel and enabling people to get that daily activity, supports the Healthy Food, Healthy Weight mission and there are links between that and the High Streets for All as well. We are working really closely with the Transport, Environment, Regeneration and Health teams in the GLA, feeding in the transport work and also making sure that our recovery work is informed by what is happening in the wider missions. Yes, that is just very close working and making sure that the work is complementary and informing each other.

Keith Prince AM: OK, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): If I could now invite Murad Qureshi [AM] to come in? I just prompt both Murad and our next questioner that we are beginning to run behind on this session and so just keep things succinct.

Murad Qureshi AM: Yes, I hear you loud and clear, Chair. I have similar problems and issues when I am chairing the Housing Committee and so I am sympathetic. I will cover the ground and not cover what has already been said really, but I will address the following questions in this section to Christina [Calderato]. Like I said, we have touched on this, but it is an opportunity to put your input into this.

How are you assessing the long-term impact of trends like the greater working from home and depopulation on London’s transport system?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes, we have covered this and I will try to be succinct because Alex [Williams] has covered some of this already.

Essentially, through that scenario planning and trying to anticipate what this might mean in the longer term, we are looking at what that could mean in terms of population. We are planning for slower population growth, but those urbanisation trends still look to be quite strong, so slower growth in line with the four-year trend but still expecting London to grow. We are expecting to see decreases in blue collar employment rates in central London and slower economic growth overall. We have talked quite a lot about more working from home in jobs, particularly for people in office jobs and on higher incomes, particularly in central London, and the impact that will have on commuting trips into central London. We have touched a bit on the attitudes to public transport and car ownership and car travel. We are also considering how that will impact things like leisure and shopping and whether larger shopping centres are as attractive as they once were or whether there is going to be more of a shift to online, more local shopping.

Really, that scenario planning work that Alex [Williams] has been explaining is a big part of how we are trying to understand what the changes in population and changes in travel plans will be. We are trying to understand then what that means for, for instance, sustainable mode share in different parts of London, for active travel mode share, what it means for, for instance, the bus network, as Alex has already touched on. That is one of the key ways that we are planning for those future depopulation or lower population or slower population growth that we expect to see in the coming years and the impact that will have on travel.

Murad Qureshi AM: OK, that is useful. On the follow-up, for example, change in working patterns: I can see people making less of a distinction between peak and off-peak travel and I certainly am doing that already. People are not only going to go possibly to a four-day week and do as much work at home and what have you, they are going to stagger their work and when they go in and what have you. I would not be surprised and that is something you do need to look ahead.

The depopulation: we in the Housing Committee have done work on that and we did a survey earlier in the year, last August [2020], which suggested that at least 14% of Londoners were considering moving. We are going to do the survey again in the next week to ten days and look at whether that movement is out of London or from central London to outer London. There are two different types of moves.

In the meantime, as Alex [Williams] suggested, there have been other studies. There was one by the Economics Statistic Centre for Excellence, which suggested we may have lost already 700,000 Europeans and who knows if they are going to come back in the post-COVID world. Actually, we may be looking at a scenario of not so much limited growth but a population rather reducing. Who knows? We may be going back to the 1980s.

Christina, is that something you are going to take on board now or are you going to stick to your suggestion that population growth will be less so than we anticipated?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): No. The scenarios Alex [Williams] has outlined. There are five different ones. Some of them show that London could be growing and some of them show London’s decline, as you have outlined. In a sense, each of those scenarios is equally likely to happen at this point. Any of them could happen and in order to try to make that simpler for us - well, not simpler for us, but to simplify it for everyone, rather than trying to think of five parallel futures at the same time - we have tried to develop a hybrid scenario. The hybrid scenario does recognise that more recent trend means that there will be a change in the short-term future, but by 2030 - so looking a bit further out - that we could see slower growth in the population and it could still grow. That is what the hybrid scenario says, but we are absolutely looking at a range around that and that different scenarios are in play as well.

I absolutely take the point, but looking at the longer-term changes, it is going to be what happens beyond this point where, as you said, in the current time there are lots of people considering their options and what changes they might make to their life, about how that feeds through, whether that means that there are new populations incoming to London. The hybrid scenario just takes a view that by 2030 you might expect that there has still been some growth but slower growth, but we continue to plan for a range of scenarios.

Murad Qureshi AM: OK and just the last thing. One thing I have certainly picked up in the neighbourhoods I know best - W2, W9 and NW1 in Westminster - is rents have gone down in the private rented sector, and this is the first time in 30 years, I would say. This just has not happened and it is not because the Airbnb market has been blown out of the water. There are quite clearly movements there and I just hope TfL keeps an eye on that one. I am not sure how it is going to affect house prices, but certainly in the rented sector that has been the case.

Christina, can I just go a bit further? How are you engaging with Londoners and transport groups to develop a longer-term vision on this front? We need buy-in as well and the public has got to buy into the scenarios that you are planning ahead on.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes. As they stand at the moment - Alex [Williams] might want to say a bit more about this - the scenarios are less about the scenarios that we are trying to create and more about the way that things may unfold. The interventions that we might want to take in the event of any of those scenarios unfolding is the really important thing that we would want to have that engagement on and where we need to be focusing our efforts. That goes back again to something that Alex and I have both mentioned already about the North Star of the MTS and that 80% mode share. Our long-term objectives and what we are trying to achieve actually have not changed. In fact, if anything, the public health crisis that we are facing now in a respiratory disease pandemic demonstrates that we need to really double down on our efforts to meet those objectives.

In terms of the long-term vision, that is very clearly there. In terms of how we get there and how we accelerate, as I mentioned earlier, there were definitely things that we have done in order to get changes in very quickly, which has meant that we have not engaged and consulted as well as we would normally and as well as we plan to in the future. We do have new plans for engagement and consultation on those new schemes. I can briefly talk through the way that we plan to do that engagement if that is useful or, in the interests of time, I can leave that for now.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): If you would see whether we can pick that up. There is a set of subsequent questions that cover some of those aspects.

Murad Qureshi AM: OK.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much.

Murad Qureshi AM: Yes, thank you for that offer and we will take it up later on. OK, can I come to Alex now? It comes to something Keith [Prince AM] mentioned. What do you anticipate will be the key impacts of the e-scooter trial on the wider network or is it just a quirky little thing that we are just going to notice in odd bits of London? Tell me.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): We are working on the e-scooter trial with the boroughs and, it was mentioned earlier, roughly just over a third are engaged in that trial. That is a trial that is about a kind of hiring system for e-scooters to be used in those trial boroughs and there will be a whole way, a mechanism, of tracking the data about where it is used and seeing how those worked.

One of the challenges we have got from e-scooters, particularly from those boroughs who do not want to be part of it, is that e-scooters are there. They are out there on our road networks and whether we like it or not. They are currently not legal, but they are out there. There is value in the trial to actually get a better understanding of how useful these new modes of transport are going to be and how well taken up then from that. One of the interesting things is if you compare what happened with dockless bikes. Two/three years ago, you had oBike and Mobike coming in and they were going to change the world and Santander was on its knees. In reality, they came and went fairly rapidly and Santander has had its record year in the last year, but there are some better quality, higher quality dockless bike systems that are still surviving and still working well.

It feels to me as though with e-scooters they may be on a similar journey, but I do think that we need to get the trial going, get the approval for that and monitor and track it as best we can. That is one of the lessons to learn from dockless; is that we did not know. There were all kinds of venture capital schemes that just wanted to come in with big promises, but we did not know what was going on for many things. With the trial, it gives us the opportunity to get a well-rounded set of data to make informed judgements and informed judgements

for the boroughs who are in it but also the boroughs that are not in it because they will want to know what the effect is just across the borough boundary.

It is the right way to do it, but I am not convinced it is going to change the world in terms of how London functions. We are still dependent on big, heavy rail and the bus network and greater public realm for walking and other schemes. The trial is the right way to do it going forward actually, definitely.

Murad Qureshi AM: OK. Can I make a plea though? I just want them to be regulated. That is my main concern, particularly when they are clashing with pedestrians. Can I just add a final question, Alison, because I will not get an opportunity to ask this?

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): OK, swiftly.

Murad Qureshi AM: It is appropriate under the post-pandemic transport system. Can we, in future, continue with an annual retail price index (RPI) plus 1% increase in transport costs? I hear what people are saying - safety and security are people’s main consideration - but ultimately the choice between other modes of transport is price. That is what we are seeing with car travel. Petrol has kept cheap and there are people with families that still find it cheaper to travel around in cars around London. Is that something we can foresee in the future continuing?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): John [Dickie] had a very good phrase about the need for a big conversation about how transport is funded in the capital. If you carry on with it, as planned, with RPI plus 1% or plus 2% or whatever, then the network becomes less affordable and people will choose to use other modes. In many ways, the Financial Sustainability Plan is the start of that bigger conversation, a big conversation with the Government, but in some ways we need a big conversation with Londoners. Road user charging might become part of that as well actually. The pandemic has exemplified the fragilities of our funding model, 72% of our income coming by fares and then we are told not to use the transport network. It just shows it just does not work at the moment. Having a big conversation about different funding models and different fare arrangements is what we need, definitely. Norman [Baker] wants to come in on this, actually.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Yes, he does. Thank you very much, Alex, and just to caution everyone, there is a section at the end around budgeting and finance. Thank you very much.

I will bring Norman [Baker] in, but I also have a request, Christina, in terms of how you will engage with Londoners. A written briefing to the Committee would be really helpful on that and we will follow it up in our follow-up letter.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): No problem.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Norman, you wanted to --

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): Yes, just briefly, I wanted to make the point that that question is very germane, but it is also one that is to a large degree outside your control and outside the Mayor’s control. We have seen over recent years, over 20/30 years, car travel become disproportionately cheaper than travelling by public transport. That is totally at odds with the Government’s stated policy of decarbonisation, of climate change being tackled and, indeed, of air pollution being tackled and it makes no sense. We have had a freeze on fuel duties now since 2011 at the same time as public transport fares have gone up. That makes no sense whatsoever. As we move towards electric vehicles, the Treasury is in danger of losing £40 billion a year income if it does not do something else. There is both a need to make sure the central Government and indeed TfL do not discourage public transport use by artificially raising fares and artificially keeping car costs down. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that we have to move toward road pricing, both in cities and nationally because, if we do not do that, the Treasury are going to end up with a £40 billion hole in its finances.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you, Norman. You made that point earlier and it is well taken. We will pick up the other finance bits under the final question, so thank you. If we can just move on to [Assembly Member] Shaun Bailey’s questions, once again, I need to prompt people - and Shaun particularly - about being succinct because we already have people who have signalled they might want to ask follow-ups. We will run over on this section and it will squeeze the final section.

Shaun Bailey AM: I hear you, Chair. In my small attempt to aid you, I am going to drop the first question because I believe it will be covered in the subsequent questions.

Can I start with Emma, please? Emma, based on your investigation and intelligence you have gathered, what should TfL prioritise in its longer-term work programme?

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Thanks very much for that question, Shaun. It was really interesting to hear both TfL and Keith [Prince AM] and a bunch of other people talking about how important the bus is to London’s future recovery and to that target of getting 80% of journeys made by sustainable modes. For us, a new bus strategy is needed. TfL are already doing some work to give the bus more priority. We want to see that really stepped up and extended as a way of increasing ridership on the bus. That would be the first thing I would mention.

The other thing that has really come up is around better accessibility and inclusivity. Basically removing the barriers that stop people from getting around London. On the street changes, as I have said, that might be about consulting disabled people and other people whose voices are less heard in these debates. It is also things like making sure that the option to pay by cash is retained at all TfL ticket machines. For us, it is also about keeping bus fares low, buses being the only fully accessible form of public transport.

Another thing I would mention has already been talked about, orbital routes in outer London. Again, using the buses, the easiest way to fix that, it is the quickest way to add new routes into our transport system.

Something that I will also mention, we talked about the importance of keeping service levels up. That is not totally in TfL’s control because it is partly about funding. Keeping service levels up at core times is still going to be really important. The night-time economy is really important. There is a question there about could alternative service patterns serve Londoners’ needs better, is a question to ask. There has been a lot of talk about street space changes. Those are really important schemes.

As Alex [Williams] was saying earlier, the main way that people get around London, certainly in central London, is by walking. Having better pavements and a better environment for people to walk in is really important and sometimes gets forgotten. Uneven, poorly maintained pavements and roads that are difficult to cross are real issues for Londoners that we would like to see some more attention paid to, not just street space changes.

I will probably leave it there. I have a few more things to say but in the interests of time I would say those are my key points.

Shaun Bailey AM: Thank you for that. If I can come to John [Dickie] and Norman [Baker] with my next question, what new proposals should TfL consider to meet the potential change in travel demands post- pandemic? If I just say to John in particular, we have had a conversation about road pricing and all the rest of that, but do you think it is viable to have road pricing inside London and not outside London? For instance, in outer London in particular, to what extent do businesses rely on customers from outside of London? How many Londoners travel outside of London or very close by? What effect would it have if we had road pricing inside and they did not outside? Is there any work being done on the potential loss of custom if this outer- London tax were to appear?

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): Let me just take that first point, if I may. You are right, Shaun, to identify that there are some issues around those businesses in outer London, which do a lot of business outside of the M25. Any scheme we put in place to bring in road charging needs to be very sensitive, as I said earlier in this hearing, about the travel patterns of Londoners and the alternatives they have to the travel decisions they make. It is much easier to think of the way in which you would charge somebody driving from one end of the Piccadilly line into central London than it is to think about how you can fairly charge somebody for driving in an orbital journey in outer London where there is no plausible public transport alternative.

Some form of road pricing across London is a likely part of any viable way of continuing to fund London’s transport needs through the medium to longer-term. Therefore, the question we should be really focusing on is how do we do this well and fairly, as opposed to is it part of the mix? Because it is very difficult to see a world where it will not be part of the mix. Of course, through both the inner London Congestion Charging Zone and the extension of the ULEZ, it is becoming more in the mix now in one form or another. That is very much part of the future.

As I said right at the beginning, Shaun, one of the things that TfL needs to think about looking a bit radically and laterally at is the way in which we provide transport services. One of the things we are very interested in is whether or not this situation we find ourselves in, where demand is a bit lower than it has been, gives you an opportunity to do something radical around looking at common modal pricing across London. Is it time to bite the bullet of not charging some people less for buses and some people more for the Tube and moving to a common pricing mechanism?

This is fraught with operational difficulties. We talked a minute ago about buses in this context. That is absolutely right. The aim of the exercise must not be to make it harder for people on lower wages to get into London to work. That is what we would risk doing if we simply moved to some kind of average pricing. We need to think, as part of this conversation, about how we use concessions in a rather more-focused way. It is always easier to expand than to rebalance concessions. It makes no sense to be giving people in their 60s going into work free transit and not giving people on below the London Living Wage support in their travel patterns. We need to be a little more creative about this.

We need to bear in mind that now is the time when we could do some adjustment of service patterns. Again, I take Emma’s [Gibson] point that we need to be thinking quite radically about whether or not we are providing the right bus services across London. We do have some, not a huge number, but we do have some buses, which replicate Tube routes. When I go into work I can get the bus from outside my door in Kentish Town more or less into my office in Fitzrovia, or I can get the Northern line from Goodge Street to Tufnell Park.

That is the kind of area where we do need to be looking a bit at whether we have the right mix of services, given current demand. If we could save a bit of cash on the provision of those services and if we could look to have a better pricing structure so that we are not simply offering people on lower wages long and difficult

commutes but that are quite cheap and perhaps offering them commutes that are also affordable, that is part of the mix too.

Those would be the two areas I would focus on. I would add I guess a third, which is that we must not lose sight of the need to continue to think about how we upgrade networks. Crossrail 2 for understandable reasons, partly to do with Crossrail 1, is on the backburner for the moment. It is what it is.

Schemes like, for example, the Bakerloo line extension are not just vital to connecting parts of London to the centre and providing greater connectivity and choice for Londoners. They are also really important to driving housing delivery in London. Whatever has happened to London’s population through last year and whatever the immediate trends are likely to be for the next year or two, we can be fairly confident that we are going to continue to need to deliver many more homes each year than we have been delivering for the past couple of decades. Schemes that unlock housing in London are going to be a critical part of maintaining the cohesion of London and London’s competitiveness.

Shaun Bailey AM: Thank you for that.

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): Shaun, to answer your point, the move towards road pricing is, not only important, but it in the medium term it is probably essential for London. The congestion charge system, which is very innovative in London when it first came in, is - to our mind - looking a bit tired. It is a bit tired because it is inflexible. It has been said before today, so I will not repeat it in great length, but if you come into the centre, you cross a boundary, you can drive as much as you want and there is no differential charge. A charge that is based on per mile and also based on emissions of the vehicle has to be a better way forward. It will come nationally and it will have to come in cities as well. Therefore, London may as well get ahead of the game rather than being behind the curve.

The key will be how it is sold. The evidence on polling is that road pricing can be sold to the population if it is presented in the right way. In particular - and this is a matter for your budget considerations - if it is revenue-neutral. If it replaced the existing charges and the net take was the same, but you charged it a different way, that would be quite easy to sell. If you are using it to improve public transport as well, then that is more difficult to sell to someone in Manchester. It can be done. But it needs to be carefully calibrated in terms of how you present it to the public at large.

The last point I would make is that there is a lot been said about if you wanted to charge that somehow this affects the economy adversely. The evidence I have from the Department for Transport was that is not necessarily the case. If you look at Nottingham and their workplace charging scheme, for example, they charge employers per parking space in the centre. That was said by Boots and other big employers in Nottingham, it was going to drive the economy in Nottingham into catastrophe. Nottingham has done rather better since workplace charging came in than say Derby, which is quite close-by. If public transport were right and constrained the car that is not necessarily going to affect the economy of a city adversely. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.

Shaun Bailey AM: You may be right. But, of course, we would be looking at charging the customers, not the employers, and that is where the economic threat seems a little bit more direct. I am very interested in this idea that we could have road pricing inside London but not outside London because surely that is just presenting Londoners with an additional cost for living in London because they would still be expected to pay vehicle excise duty (VED) to exist in the country. That is where the difficulty lies for me in the selling of it to

the public. Because I agree with you, the Chancellor at some point is going to have to address fuel duty going one way and his income going the other, if you take my point.

Let me move on. Let me come back to Emma again quickly. Emma, how should TfL engage with Londoners in the development of long-term transport planning? Because even our conversation about road pricing, it seems the public are not involved in this conversation. How do we say to Londoners, “If your lifestyle is going to change, what would you like to see your transport system do to match that?” How do we involve the public in that conversation?

Emma Gibson (Director, London TravelWatch): Thanks for that question. I have a really radical suggestion here, which is that TfL need to ask people what journeys they want and need to make and how they want to do them. Then base our future transport system on those answers. I appreciate there are great uncertainties in our lives at the moment. But that to me is absolutely the starting point, is find out what people need. Then try your best to deliver those. If you find out the answer to that question then you will be much better at delivering the services that people need. For example, it is very important we talk to people more in outer London where car ownership is higher to see what it would take to get them back on to public transport. What changes need to be made in terms of making better connections out there in outer London? A lot of people we spoke to talking about extending bus services to hospitals, colleges, places like that, so that they can get around more.

We need to consider the needs of people who already face barriers to accessing cycling and walking. People on lower incomes, women, people from BAME backgrounds. We need to engage much more with people whose voices are not heard so much, as well as consulting with people, as I have said before, and really co-creating plans for these changes to our streets. I would say just thinking, being much more creative about how you engage with people. Not just sending emails or putting notices in a paper, but really thinking about how to reach out to people, especially people whose views get missed out. Then you can take those on board.

Shaun Bailey AM: Yes. You might be right because, when I speak to members of my community and they hear about mode shift, they have not heard about mode shift. Certainly, the whole cycling debate is irrelevant to my community. They do not feel they have even heard it, forget being involved in it. Therefore, you may have a strong point there.

Can I just come back to John for this question? For me, John, the question I am about to ask you is one of the real challenges going on for us here in London. How should TfL and the Mayor respond to the possible long-term shifts in business activity across London? This for me seems the crux of the matter. Earlier on in the conversation, we talked about overcrowding on the Tube. Of course, the overcrowding that we traditionally know was almost an efficiency, because it meant that the network we had was being used at its maximum in generating the revenue. If there is a shift in that, what do we do? For some people that is quite a scary thought. We would just be losing that huge amount of income.

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): Can I just pick up, Shaun, on the earlier point you were making about putting up the cost of doing business, the cost for Londoners relative to those people outside London? You are right to highlight that. There are - it is worth saying - really important public policy benefits from road pricing around air quality and around congestion and around net-zero carbon. But we do need to think how we do this in a manner that is sensible and that does not deter people from doing things that they should be doing and can only do if they have to get in their cars, to get in their cars. Also that we do not do anything that makes it difficult for people to run their businesses in outer London.

I would return you to the points that the current Prime Minister made when he was Mayor of London around devolving a little slither of London’s tax resources back to London so that we can fund some of our essential infrastructure. As you know, something like 7% of the tax raised in London stays here, whereas that is over half in New York. A lot of these issues would become much more tractable if we just gave London government some of the resources collected in London to enable it to meet the challenges we face.

To the working patterns point you just raised, our view is that the centre of London, the CAZ, or roughly the same area as defined in the London Plan as the CAZ, will continue to be the driver of the London economy. We are going to see different patterns coming in and out. We are going to see people come in less frequently. We have discussed many of those issues this morning. We are also going to see people come in from a larger geographic area. We are going to see more people coming in but less often. That is the most likely end game.

Therefore, we need to be planning for two things: one is we need to return to this issue of the ‘15-minute city’ and think what do we mean by 15 minutes? What are those things that we really want to see locally available? The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers, all those sorts of things. But also what are the things that we want to see provided at a global city level? You cannot have a Tate Modern every 15 minutes away from where we all live in a city of 10 million people. We are going to need to have a think about what this new localism means. But we also need to be thinking of how we combine that with different working patterns, different leisure patterns, different visitor patterns, around the centre.

I just really re-emphasise this point. The reason why London is - on most studies - the most successful and effective economic city in the world, is because of the agglomeration that takes place in the CAZ. It is the range of sectors that, at scale, work there. We have something like the same number of people working in tech, outside of hard tech, outside of manufacturing, as California has. The big difference between London and the greater southeast and California is in central London you can walk between people doing your public relations, the people doing your marketing, people doing your finance, the people doing your coding and so on, whereas in California you are doing big drives or indeed in some cases having to get on a plane and go out of state. It is that agglomeration that really drives the London economy. We need to safeguard that at the same time as thinking how we adapt what we are doing to meet some of the new demand patterns.

Shaun Bailey AM: I see you nodding in agreement. Is there anything that you could highlight that we should be doing in London? We have a lot of talk about working from home. I sense on one side some people love the idea of not making the big commute. On the other side, for instance I spoke to the British Bangladeshi Caterers Association yesterday. They are absolutely terrified of the notion of working from home. Nearly all of their business is based on commuters who come in or are in London. What would you be saying to them and what would you be asking the Mayor to do to revitalise central London with this whole idea that the pandemic has fundamentally changed things?

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): Unfortunately, some of the answers are for people other than the Mayor of London and other than TfL and the London Assembly. They are matters to do with, for example, making sure that there is - what the Treasury is talking about apparently - for example taxes on absent retailers, online retailers, to try to even up the challenge that the high street faces. That is a major problem.

Another issue will be the nature of ticketing on heavy rail, which again is outside your control here. But we need to get flexible ticketing on rail. We need to get single-leg pricing. We need to get incentives for people to come in for three days a week rather than zero days a week by rail, which is unfortunately what we are going to do if the Treasury sticks to the existing season ticket arrangements.

Therefore, what the Mayor can do is limited apart from lobbying. You can look at your ticketing structures to see whether or not you can flex those. I knew Caroline Pidgeon [MBE AM], for example, was very useful in her hopper bus suggestion. You could see whether the hopper bus suggestion could be applied to bus and Tube or bus and heavy rail. If you get one ticket that covers every mode of transport, which helps the interoperability, and therefore ties in with cycle hire as well, those sorts of things can help. Ultimately, the big levers are unfortunately outside your control at the moment.

Shaun Bailey AM: OK, thank you. Alex, one last question. Is there any work that is being looked at as to pricing? I have a very expensive annual card that quite frankly now feels like a slight waste of money, when in normal times it would have been the right thing to do. Is anybody looking at changing how we price? Of course, I spoke to a number of people who are worried about a completely cashless TfL. That is something that a number of people are worried about as well. Are we looking at flexibility and are we looking at retaining cash?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): There are two questions there. In terms of the pricing arrangements, there is a big difference between how we run our network within TfL and the national rail system. In many ways, you have great flexibility within the pay-as-you-go system already. You only pay when you use it and you have price-capping there. There are a lot of people talk about flexibility, but they forget about the flexibility that already exists in the system.

There is a bigger debate and more of a national debate on that issue about flexibility of ticketing and the issue about whether you pay for a large annual pass, which assumes that you come in five days a week, or whether there is some greater flexibility there. We would be very happy to engage with the DfT on that about whether they can use some of the pay-as-you-go approach that is inherently a very flexible system.

On the point about cashless, we have to revisit that as we come out of the pandemic. If we go back to the start of the meeting about the tragedy of how many people lost their lives on our transport network. Our staff do not want to have a cash-based system at the moment. That is not the right thing to have in a pandemic. When we come out of the pandemic, clearly there has to be a debate about the extent to which we go down the trajectory of more cashless or whether you have some cash in there as well. Where we are now, in a pandemic, retail, transport, everything is moving to cashless, which is entirely appropriate. When we come out of it, there is a debate for us to have with TravelWatch and other stakeholders about whether some of that returns.

Shaun Bailey AM: You may well be correct, but people have been talking about cashless as a permanent situation, not just with the pandemic. Chair, I understand your pressures. Back to you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): To be fair, Alex Williams had answered your question. If we can move on, I had indications of several people who wanted to come in at the end of this section. We are very pressed for time; therefore I am going to read names and they can either say, “Yes, I have a brief question”, or decline. Keith [Prince AM] has already bowed out. Caroline Pidgeon, you had a quick question, and I do want to move on within the next couple of minutes.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): I have a very quick question to John. You touched on earlier from your recent excellent report that you did with Arup about this idea of this flat universal fare structure, which is very interesting. There are some people who just will not get on a bus and who might get on a train or Tube. We have called in the past for things like wi-fi and express buses. What additions do we need to see to the bus network to get that modal shift?

John Dickie (Director of Strategy and Policy, London First): There are two big things we need to see that will affect bus ridership and people’s enthusiasm to go on buses. One is we do need bus speeds to go up. We do need measures, whether it is through bus priority, whether it is through dedicated lanes, whether it is through the signalling, whether it is through congestion charging, a whole range of measures needed so that we get the speed of buses up and the journey times down. Anybody who has got on a bus in zone 1 in normal times will know exactly what I mean.

The second thing is we need to improve the data. We talked about this earlier. But I am mystified often when I stand waiting for a bus that I get the display on the dot board on the bus stop telling me when buses are coming, which is - how shall I put it - often not wholly connected with when buses are coming. Despite the fact that each bus has got a bunch of people on it who have a global positioning system device in their pockets that would tell you where the bus was. That kind of information ties in with the earlier discussion about multimodal information, so you have options around routes. We can move to a flat fare, non-modal-based, form of charging. We want people to have as much flexibility and fluidity in which kind of mode they use and when, that requires them to know what is happening in real time when they are making decisions.

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

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): I am going to ask Tony Devenish to pick any question he had up in his next section because he will be the questioner. Can I thank everyone? That was a really interesting session and I do not want to curtail debate but thank you for moving on. Tony Devenish, it is your question.

Tony Devenish AM: Thank you, Chair. I will be quick. I can cut a couple of questions anyway and merge a question. I am going to start with Alex. Good morning, Alex. How will TfL need to reprioritise and change the way it operates to respond to the post-pandemic transport challenges? I am also going to ask you my second question at the same time for you, which is almost linked to that. To what extent is TfL ready as an organisation culturally to think radically and change its approach to transport planning in response to the pandemic?

If I can just make a brief comment first, what always worries me in these discussions, Alex, we have not mentioned the really big issue, which is we all know that TfL is great at one thing, managing a Victorian and onwards transport system, a very elderly transport system. But you do it with a gold-plated workforce. If you could refer to those two points and answer my questions, I would be grateful.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Post-pandemic changes. We have touched on this as we have gone through the discussion today in many ways because we live in a period of huge uncertainty and that is why it is really important that we have all those planning exercises underway and we do keep track of it. We do take as much information as we can on a whole range of indicators about population or return to office or different working patterns. The key thing is to keep on top of the analysis that is happening at the moment so that we plan for the recovery as best we can because the recovery of this city is so fundamental to the national recovery as well.

But we are not precious within that planning about saying we are going to carry on as we always have done. If you look at the Financial Sustainability Plan, there are plenty of areas there where we are recognising the need for reform and change in the way we are working. For example, on the major projects, we have accepted that now is not the time for Crossrail 2 or the Bakerloo line extension, but we will progress on safeguarding. On the capital prioritisation, we are reviewing our capital projects to try to work out which ones should carry on at the same pace and which would see some change. We are looking at modest changes in services in terms of the bus network, which is probably a redistribution from central to outer London.

In terms of whether TfL ready to change, the Commissioner [of Transport for London], Andy Byford, has been in front of this Assembly a few times. He has made the point, one of his phrases, “You don’t get owt for nowt”. He completely recognises that we as an organisation cannot go into negotiations with the Government and say, “We want to carry on as we are. Just write the cheque and let us carry on”. We are open for more reform about the scale of the organisation, about how we reduce our costs. You will see in the Financial Sustainability Plan that was issued in January, commitments there to do just that. Mike Brown [MVO CBE], the previous Commissioner [of Transport for London], did reduce our cost base substantially. The new Commissioner is equally committed to do that as best we can.

We are not going into discussions with the Government and Londoners to say, “Just let us carry on as we have been before”. We do recognise that we will need to change. As part of that change it is about reducing our cost base, but we do need to be open and have a conversation with Government about what that means and how quickly we can do that as well.

Tony Devenish AM: Just remind me, what percentage of the workforce are at the moment furloughed or off sick?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Furlough I know the answer to because it is zero. Off sick, I am afraid I do not know the answer to but I can get that for you. It is worth noting the reason why it is zero with furlough, in the first bailout we had from Government at the start of this financial year, they said, “Take advantage of the furlough scheme”. We put circa 7,000 staff on furlough and they gradually came back over time. In the second bailout, the Government made it clear that they did not want us to use the furlough system and they wanted it to be through one all-embracing funding deal for TfL rather than us going for two funding deals.

In terms of sickness levels, I do not know the numbers, but we are clearly suffering from the pandemic, as the wider population is suffering. Sickness levels will be higher than normal, absence levels will be higher than normal because of the issue about test and trace. If we get a ping to say that someone has been in close proximity, then everyone that is there has to self-isolate. We are following the Government guidelines on that.

However, we are bringing in more rapid testing for staff. I will give you an example. If one person gets a ping from track and trace in a control room, that is a big issue for us because we need the control-room staff in there to run the Tube line. One of the things we are working with Government on is to get more rapid testing available so that we can keep the critical services that we run going.

Tony Devenish AM: I will leave it there, Chair. I am not going to get much more clarity. A lot of this has already been covered and so back to you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Of course, those last comments would strengthen the case for frontline and control staff, TfL workers, to be one of those priority groups in vaccinations. That is really important to bear in mind. Thank you very much. If we could move on to our final section of questions, which will be asked by David Kurten.

David Kurten AM: Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, everybody. My section is mainly about finance, but again a lot of this has been covered elsewhere.

My first question I would like to ask to Christina. What is TfL’s strategy to bridge its funding gap and reprioritise investment to meet London’s future transport needs?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Alex [Williams] has probably covered some of this already. But the Financial Sustainability Plan outlines our key priorities between now and 2030 and how, with Government support, we can deliver them. That includes, as Alex has talked about, some reprioritisation and cost-cutting reviews. It includes things like requiring some level of VED devolution or VED monies or, if not, exploring the potential for a boundary charge. But that plan is still being discussed with Government. Once those discussions have concluded, we will be able to say more about what the post-pandemic priorities are in terms of what is funded.

As Alex said, the Commissioner has been really clear that our two key tasks in the short term are recovering from the pandemic, which includes a fair funding deal for transport, and safely opening the Elizabeth line as soon as possible.

David Kurten AM: Thank you. I will move on to Alex and if I could ask you about something related. There was an independent review done in December 2020. We have talked about a lot of the recommendations from that review this morning. But there are a couple of others that we have not spoken about. Which of those recommendations does TfL expect to take forward?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): It is worth going back a bit in terms of the independent review. Over the summer there were two reviews for TfL. One was by the Government and KPMG. The second was by us, the independent review on behalf of the TfL board. It was a group of four eminent people helping us shape that review. The independent review was published and we have set out how we respond to it. The KPMG review, the Government decided not to publish that and we have not seen all of the detail there. Having said that, we fed into both reviews very similar sets of information.

In terms of how we are going to progress the actions from that, most of that is within the Financial Sustainability Plan that has gone to Government. That is part of a live discussion and negotiation with Government as to what we should do. There are various themes there. One is about how we cut our costs, as Tony Devenish [AM] was referring to, which we will do. We need to discuss it with them as to how we do that. As part of that, we will be looking at a pensions review and a body to review our pension arrangements.

We are also reviewing the capital programme. That is a very interesting area for me because it is quite easy to say, “We will just turn off the tap on the capital programme and that will save a load of money and we can just move on”. But one of the ways we are positioning this with Government is to say, “Think of the supply chain and what you want to achieve for the country and see TfL and its capital programme as part of the solution”. If you want a quick COVID recovery, investing in public transport to get people back into central London is part of that. If you want decarbonisation of the transport sector, investing in measures to shift modes and electrify the bus fleet is part of that. If you want a levelling-up agenda, investing in new trains that are made elsewhere than London or new buses that are made elsewhere in the country is part of that. A very interesting debate about the capital programme.

Then the final area where we are taking it forward is that debate about paying for road use. We have the first ask of the Mayor, which I am really pleased that the Assembly support as well, that is VED. London is paying for that but not getting anything back. That is an example of a tax without accountability because we are not getting the money back on that. If we do not get that, we are working on a feasibility study for the boundary charge. On that, we will look at a whole range of impacts, including economic impacts in outer London, and we will report on it in the summer.

David Kurten AM: It is more on the finance and you are talking about the road charging. That is more to do with the operating costs rather than the capital costs. But I know something the Government has done, this present Government, over the last few years, is to cut the direct grant to TfL down to zero, but it has replaced it somewhat with retained business rates. Are those retained business rates enough? How do you see the retained business rates in the future as sustainable and a key part of financing TfL?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): You are dead right, there was that shift away from direct grant and subsidy to business rates. But there is still a net overall reduction in the level of support from Government. I do see business rates as fundamental in supporting our operations going forward. But what the pandemic has highlighted is that we have an overreliance on fares income. Around 72% of our income is from fares and the rest of it is from congestion charges but also mainly business rates, as you highlight. We do need a wider range of income sources to help us become more resilient to these kinds of shocks going forward. That is why VED, the circa £500 million that Londoners pay but do not get anything back for, is a great example about where you could get a different income source that diversifies our income sources. It is a genuine tapping into money that Londoners spend within London. That or the boundary charge are the things that we would be looking at, definitely.

David Kurten AM: I have a technical question on that. You say £500 million is how much Londoners pay in VED and so that would go to maintaining and sustaining the roads in London. How much of that would relate to TfL roads and how much of that would relate to roads run by the 33 boroughs?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): We have not got to that level of detail at the moment. Part of the problem at the moment is that this Mayor and the previous Mayor, and now Prime Minister, were asking for VED. We have not had any kind of traction in that regard. There has been a firm “no” thus far. We do think this is the time to change that. How the money is spent and the balance between what is spent within TfL and what is spent within the boroughs; that is a debate that we would be open to with Government as to how we do that.

It is worth noting that, while the money comes to us for transport investment in the capital, quite a good chunk of that is allocated from us to the boroughs through the local implementation plans funding. Some of that includes highway maintenance in terms of the principal road network. We are open to a debate about the balance between what comes to us and what goes to London boroughs. At the moment, we have a flat no to anything.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): David, can I just point out? Norman Baker has his hand up and he might like to add something here.

David Kurten AM: Yes, fantastic.

Norman Baker (Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport): Just very briefly, David. Without wishing to be unhelpful, I do not think you should hold your breath waiting for VED to come back from the Treasury. First of all they are looking at road pricing as a national thing anyway. I know they are doing that. Therefore, VED may disappear as a concept in any case. To give it to London would inevitably lead to people in Manchester and Newcastle and Scotland and Wales demanding the same sort of thing. They are not going to go down that road. However desirable it might be, it is not going to happen.

The other thing I am going to say briefly, if I may just quickly, is that 72% of your money from the fare box is completely unsustainable in my view and way out of line with other European capitals, as someone said earlier on. I think it was John Dickie. The point is that other European capitals are not inefficient, but they take the view that effectively producing lower-cost public transport is going to deliver a whole load of other benefits, economic and environmental and everything else. That is the argument, which we make, Campaign for Better Transport. It is also the argument you need to make with central Government that this is not a subsidy, this is investment in other aspects of life.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you. That is a point well made. If you would like to carry on, David.

David Kurten AM: Thank you. Alex has covered one of the other questions I was going to ask. I will move on to the final one that I have to ask. If the worst-case scenario happens, such as a permanent significant drop in fare income, what contingency plans does TfL have to deal with that situation?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): The Financial Sustainability Plan sets out various scenarios there in terms of declines in London, decline at a quite an accelerated state. So there are a whole series of detailed analyses there about the impacts. They are pretty bleak, to be perfectly honest. If you do not get the money in, the most straightforward thing to do is to stop the money you spend on your supply chain. That is through the bus contracts or new capital projects. That has an impact for our sustainable objectives.

The other area where we would inevitably come under pressure is some of our maintenance regimes, to be perfectly honest. If you think about Hammersmith Bridge, that is a kind of borough structure where it has been shut for a couple of years now and they are still working through a strategy for that. If that bridge were outside of London that issue would have been fixed by now, in my view. That is partly down to the issue about VED and not having the funding sources available to do that. The concern is that other structures might well become a problem, Rotherhithe Bridge or Gallows Corner in Keith’s [Prince AM] patch, where we are struggling to keep very old structures going.

The other point we need to be mindful of is, if you look at the Tube, while we have some very modern and great new trains running on some of our lines, we also have some of the oldest. The Bakerloo line trains will be 50 years old next year. The oldest running operating trains in the country. The Piccadilly line is 40 years old. Without the investment in new rollingstock or the commitment to that, then you have to make do and mend, keeping very old rollingstock going.

I am not sure if a contingency plan is the right answer in many ways. But we are looking at some of the consequences of not getting a funding deal. It is pretty bleak, I have to say, in terms of what we do for our supply chain and also what we do for boroughs as well. Borough funding, all of these areas, are at risk. There are real negative impacts that go with that. That is what we have set out in the Financial Sustainability Plan and it is what is part of that live discussion with Government at the moment.

David Kurten AM: OK, thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much, David. I am conscious I have a couple of people who want to come in but I am going to exercise Chair’s priority and just make one comment and ask one question that was not asked earlier. You have partially answered it but I would like to give you the opportunity to expand a bit.

The first is to express frustration about the lack of publication of the KPMG report. Obviously, it presents challenges for you in terms of your negotiations and knowing where your goalposts sit. But, from the Committee’s perspective, that lack of transparency is a frustration to us in our ability to scrutinise and

challenge you and the way you are working. I just thought that was worth putting on the record that it presents problems for you but we see that lack of transparency as a particular challenge for us in our role.

If I might go back to a question that was not asked earlier, although you covered some of it in your final answer. It touches on that importance in investing in the network, the integrated network, and extending out into areas that are less-well served. What are the key challenges in TfL’s capital programme over the longer-term period?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Over the longer-term period our key challenge at the moment is we need longer-term funding certainty. I completely understand why we have funding that was in six-month chunks, but the reality is we have no funding certainty beyond the end of March, beyond the end of next month. Given the scale of the operations we are running and given the need for long-term funding certainty, and given that many of the decisions where the projects we are working on take years to deliver, that is the starting point is you need some greater certainty over the longer term about what we need to invest in the city.

One of the things we put in the Financial Sustainability Plan is, “Why do you not treat us like you do Network Rail or Highways England, which is you look at control period, a funding agreement?” It does not fit a political cycle, but it is a five-year funding window, so Highways England and Network Rail know what their budgets are for the next five years and they plan according to that funding envelope. We think there is merit in us looking at that arrangement. But clearly respecting the fact that we are accountable to the Mayor and there are political decisions to be taken on that. But just to at least give us that kind of funding certainty over the long term.

But, within our capital programme, as I say, there are many risks if we do not get that. For assets, for what we want to do on decarbonisation, which I have touched on both of those. The other area is about how we want to increase connectivity to support housing delivery. John [Dickie] referred to that with the Crossrail 2 scheme, but also Bakerloo line extension, where we know the appetite for that extra housing, thousands of new homes, is there. The planning consents are there, the developer interest is real. But we cannot provide that connectivity to allow that housing to happen.

That is the other debate we are having with Government is, if you want us to help you on the housing agenda, then invest in transport and those homes will certainly come. It is a very complicate picture but the foundation for it is longer-term funding certainty. If we get that, we can plan for it and debate with Londoners and everyone about how it should be used. But we cannot really do that unless we have that certainty.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): In that concept of being able to flex going forward and either lead or respond to those changes, it is a key part of that process.

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Exactly, yes.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much, Alex. Now, Caroline Pidgeon has indicated she would like to ask a question. Caroline Russell indicated she might. So, Caroline Pidgeon, if you would like to lead off and I will leave that for Caroline Russell to consider.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Chair. Alex, we have had a lot of discussion this morning about road pricing. You may recall four years ago this Committee produced a report saying we needed to start looking at that. In some ways, as John [Dickie] has said, it is inevitable. Norman [Baker] as well has indicated Government is looking at it. But with the contract that has now been approved for the

ULEZ, is the technology futureproof? That is something this Committee called for. Has it been futureproofed? Will you need further cameras or further technology in order to be able to bring in a form of road pricing in London?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): There is an active discussion with TfL on that very issue. The current work programme is to deliver the Ultra-Low Emission Zone expansion - we call it ULEX - by October 2021. That will have all of the cameras we need on the boundary to make sure it is enforced, but also the right camera density within the zone. Those cameras are being implemented. We have all the borough approvals just coming through to get all of those put in. In terms of a camera network, we have all we need in inner London. That can be futureproofed if you shift to a different form of technology at a later date.

The area where we have further work underway is that, if we look at a greater London boundary charge, that is clearly a different scheme to the ULEZ extension. We are doing further work on what is the camera infrastructure you would need for that scheme, or variants of that scheme. That will be part of the feasibility study that we are looking at, which we will publish in the summer.

I might want to bring in my colleague Christine Calderato. I am not sure if there is anything I have not said. She is leading on that area, so she is more on top of the detail than I am.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Wider futureproofing for wider road pricing that we have been discussing. Have you got active work going on? Is the technology futureproofed?

Alex Williams (Director of City Planning, Transport for London): Christina?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): What we are doing and what we have been doing, so the MTS sets out that we will consider the future for more sophisticated schemes that could replace what we have now. We have looked at and have been looking at that and that is part of what informed the conversations with the independent panel and with KPMG. Obviously, now we have been asked to take forward the feasibility study on the boundary charge. But the work is ongoing.

We understand what the potential options are for future road user charging in London and being cognisant of what all those potentials are. Looking at the feasibility study, we will be looking at how you can build those back-office functions, what the tech and data would be, and looking at the current charging landscape where you have congestion charge and ULEZ and expansion and potentially a boundary charge. If you were to look to simplify those things, that is part of our thinking in terms of looking at development and feasibility and how you build a system for any future scheme. How they would fit together could be improved in future as part of that current thinking.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Caroline Russell, did you want to come in?

Caroline Russell AM: Just very briefly. Caroline basically covered most of the stuff that I was going to ask about. Just on the timing with the boundary charge work, you said some of the work, you were going to be reporting in the summer, does that mean that is reporting on the feasibility of whether that could be delivered? Also, will that include timings for how it could be rolled out?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes. What we have been asked to do is a feasibility study. That is going to take us the next few months. Alex is my boss so if he says summer it is summer. But it is certainly later this year. It will take the next few months. What we will be working through is the impact on traffic, emissions, health, equality, the economy, local businesses, what a boundary would look like and what that means for local traffic, diversionary routes. What the impact on town centres might be. What infrastructure you would need, what the back office could be. We are trying to understand now at a reasonably good level so that we can come back and report on how feasible a scheme like this would be. How effective it would be in achieving policy objectives. What it would cost to implement. What it would cost to operate. How long it might take to get such a scheme up and running. We are hoping to come back with that study, well we will come back with that study later this year, over the next few months. Hopefully by the summer. In all likelihood we have said it will be about two years to get a scheme of this nature up and running. This is new and we have not done it before. They are the questions that we will be teasing out in the feasibility study over the next few months.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Just one final tiny question on privacy. Are you looking into the privacy implications of these smarter road-charging systems?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Yes, we will consider the privacy of the boundary charge within that feasibility study. Then any other separate proposals, if they were to come forward, would also be subject to that kind of assessment.

Caroline Russell AM: Thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Thank you very much for that, Christina. I am assuming as part of your work you will be looking at what mitigations you might be able to put in place around a boundary for those local short-journey issues that are around community traffic. Thank you very much.

One very final question of a couple of minutes from Shaun Bailey and then that will be it. There you go, Shaun.

Shaun Bailey AM: A fairly quick question, Christina. Are you saying that camera technology is a technology we would be using to implement road pricing if that ever happened?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): In terms of the boundary charge and that feasibility study, we are assuming that a boundary charge would be camera- enforced, yes. Whether a future scheme would use cameras or would use something different or some combination of both, you would have to look at what your proposals were and what infrastructure would be needed.

Anything that was per-mile based or was going to be looking at real-time movements, you would not necessarily be relying on a camera network. But you may still need a camera network for anybody who does not have that technology or is coming from somewhere else and does not have the technology. It is likely that some level of camera infrastructure would be needed whatever scheme you were looking at operating. But certainly for the ones that we have planned now, which is the ULEZ expansion and we are looking at the feasibility of a boundary charge, they would be camera operated.

Shaun Bailey AM: OK. To me, futureproof sounds like beyond those two points. That is why I make the ask, is a camera technology adequate for those things? In my humble opinion it is not, but I just ask that point.

There is a difference between the plans we have and the future around road pricing. Thank you very much for your answer.

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): I was just going to add that some of the futureproofing will be around the back-office systems. The infrastructure is one thing, but it is also about how we set that up to run. It is thinking about making sure that the systems we have in place could flex and develop in the future if they need to, slightly separately from the infrastructure point.

Shaun Bailey AM: OK, thank you, Chair. Thank you.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): Finally from me, just a reflection. Presumably, what we are looking at here is what is short and medium-term potential solutions, which have a potentially fairly clunky approach to them, developing a back-office system that would serve a much-more sophisticated future potential system. Where you are able to look at vehicle types, journey types, timing of day, numbers of people in the car perhaps, and certainly levels of emissions, a whole set of more sophisticated things that you could. But that is longer-term future at this stage in terms of technology, is my understanding. It is an aspiration perhaps but it is going to wait for some of the technology. Am I right in assuming that?

Christina Calderato (Head of Transport Strategy and Planning, Transport for London): Broadly, yes.

Dr Alison Moore AM (Chair): OK, that is fine. Thank you very much to everybody who has attended today. The Transport Committee has lived up to its reputation of having a long and interesting and challenging debate. For that I thank you, particularly John Dickie and Norman Baker, Emma Gibson from London TravelWatch and Alex and Christina [from TfL]. Thank you all very much for coming and giving us a lively debate today.