Q31 Keith Hill: Network Rail is going to produce 1,300 extra carriages over the period?
Dr Mitchell: No, the Department is.
Q32 Keith Hill: I beg your pardon. And then we see the TOCS are going to produce, I deduce, an extra 700, something of that order?
Dr Mitchell: That is coming from the franchise promises of the TOCS, yes.
Q33 Keith Hill: Why are the train operating companies producing so far fewer numbers of vehicles as a result of the franchises than the Department?
Dr Mitchell: I suspect that it is because the train companies have bid to a price for the franchise and what we have done is we have overlaid on top of that what we think the demand required is. In the case of Cross Country, which was won by Arriva, for example, they have by themselves proposed a fairly large increase in capacity, prompted, I would have to say, by ourselves. The reason for that is because outside the London area, the Cross Country service, that is a service which runs, broadly speaking, Bristol, Birmingham, Derby, Sheffield and to the North East, is very heavily overcrowded between Birmingham and Derby particularly, so we were very keen to do something early on that.
Q34 Keith Hill: One last question back on London. We see in paragraph 3.12 that the unregulated fares on the so-called shoulder peak have been subject, in some cases, to very significant increases. Does that not give you an anxiety that it may, in practice, incentivise people to use the more crowded peak services, thus adding to the problem of overcrowding?
Dr Mitchell: It is important to know that 60% of fares are regulated and therefore subject to the retail price index plus one price control. The fares that are regulated tend to be the ones which we fear might be abused by a monopoly operator otherwise, so they are there to protect the public. Having said that, the Secretary of State has asked the train operators, particularly in the current difficult economic circumstances for the ordinary people, to bear that in mind in setting their unregulated fares. He did that in early January this year.
Q35 Keith Hill: Although a couple of years ago they raised it by 20%. Is there any evidence of people shifting from shoulder to peak?
Dr Mitchell: No.2
Mr Curry: Dr Mitchell, I represent a North Yorkshire constituency but I commute, I do not have a London house. My house is near Saffron Walden and, therefore, I commute in daily from Audley End. On that line you have the Stansted Express, trains which are laughingly known as express trains, or used to be called those, and then you have ones which stop at every single station, and they are all on the same track. What that means, of course, is there are constant delays and constant overcrowding because half the world seems to live in Broxbourne as far as I can see who commute into London, so the minute you hit Broxbourne you cannot even open a newspaper because you get walloped in the face by somebody with a backpack on their back standing. The daily travelcard is £32.70, it has gone up quite substantially, and that does not include the car park which is now over £5.00. It would always be more economical for me to drive into central London, even with the congestion charge, than it would be to take the train, and it would almost always be quicker door to door, even though I live 50 miles almost exactly from the House of Commons, than it would be to take the train.
Chairman: This question is almost as long as the train journey!
Q36 Mr Curry: Oh no it is not, Chairman. There is something wrong with that maths, is there not?
Dr Mitchell: I think I can give you some comfort on that particular line. We have been negotiating with National Express East Anglia as one of the first of the High Level Output specification interventions, these are the 1,300 vehicles that I spoke of, to put an entirely new fleet of vehicles and an increased number of vehicles on the Stansted line and, indeed, on a number of other lines in East Anglia.
Q37 Chairman: But, Dr Mitchell, the problem is that you are not putting any more track down, so if you get stuck behind a Hertford East train which stops at every holt and thicket there is along the line you cannot get past it, and that is true of the Stansted Express. We can the most super-duper environmentally friendly, with in-house entertainment, train but because of the track we are not going to get there any faster.
Dr Mitchell: Let me solve one problem at a time. We expect to conclude a commercial contract with National Express East Anglia very soon to put new and additional trains on the service in East Anglia. As far as the Stansted line is concerned, we are developing ideas for how we both can meet the growth in East Anglia and if necessary, subject to what happens with the Stansted expansion, deal with any potential expansion of the airport. We are on this case.
Q38 Mr Curry: Can I ask you, when you do your franchising deal with the companies, is there anything in that deal which influences the level at which companies can charge for car parking at stations?
Dr Mitchell: Not normally, no.
Q39 Mr Curry: Would you agree that the increases in car parking charges at stations, particularly for those who commute into London, have gone up at a multiple of the rate of inflation over the last few years?
Dr Mitchell: I will accept what you say.
Mr Curry: For example, National Express at Peterborough has gone from £10 to £12 and when asked why they said "We have not had an increase since we took over the franchise"; that was the entire answer for the increase. That is utterly abusive, is it not, the increase in car parking charges? We want people to use the train and yet the companies put up every deterrent possible by increasing car parking charges.
Chairman: We have to go and vote now; just say yes.
Mr Curry: And they go up several times a year, not even annually.
Q40 Chairman: You cannot shrug your shoulders either, for the sake of the record, you have to say something.
Dr Mitchell: I am waiting for a chance. The answer is that we do not control car park charging by the train companies and the train companies are expected to price them according to what the market is. Having said that, another issue that you may have observed as well is that the amount of car parking space is too small and we are looking at how we can increase the number of car parking spaces. We would not be pleased, for example, if train companies were using pricing to reduce the demand for car parking at particular stations.
Mr Curry: They use it to reduce the number of passengers because they say so.
Chairman: We will have to break for a moment.
Mr Curry: We will park that for the time being if you do not mind.
The Committee suspended from 4.01 pm to 4.07 pm for a division in the House.
__________________________________________________________________
2 Ev 21