It is a pleasure to see you presiding over our business, Mr Hollobone. I am not sure where the three finest are, but my hon. Friends the Members for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), for Eltham (Clive Efford) and for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) are here, as am I, and I hope that we can make a contribution to the debate.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) on an excellent opening speech. He comprehensively covered issues such as funding, resourcing and staff cuts, which saves us having to raise them, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
It is good to see that the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), is here to represent Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is also good to see the Minister in the Chamber. I congratulate him on his recent promotion, which will hopefully make him more benevolent towards London. I intend to speak briefly—certainly for no more than 10 minutes—and to raise parochial issues, given that the opening speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West covered all the major funding issues.
I start by thanking Transport for London for its briefing, and its staff for all they do to keep this great city moving, ensuring that my constituents and I can get about. Their work is highly regarded and they do a fantastic job.
I was not going to mention the Silvertown crossing, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham raised it, it will be interesting to hear the Minister’s comments about what support the DFT will give TfL for east London river crossings. Half of London’s population now lives east of Tower bridge, yet we only have two crossings there, while there are 23 crossings west of Tower bridge. As tolling will be an issue, I would expect at least the same arrangements to apply to local residents in east London as those for residents around the Queen Elizabeth II bridge. Any tolling should be discounted, but I would be quite happy to put up with tolling to ensure that we get the crossing.
East London’s air quality is poor, and it is made poorer because of standing traffic and congestion from the Blackwall tunnel. We need to get that traffic moving. When the Blackwall tunnel has difficulties, as it regularly does because of collisions or oversized vehicles, there is gridlock in east London. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s comments about the Silvertown crossing.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West talked about VED and support from licensing revenue in London. My understanding—this may be entirely wrong, so the Minister might correct me—is that the vast majority of local authorities across the country get road support grants to deal with potholes, repairs and the like, but London does not receive such grant. That gives the impression that dealing with potholes in London is paid for by tube and bus passengers, who are subsidising the missing grant.
If one thinks about financial pressures, one can draw conclusions that may be entirely erroneous. We have a new franchisee running the docklands light railway: KeolisAmey. When I started in the Commons, the DLR was carrying some 20 million passengers a year. It now carries 100 million passengers a year, including many colleagues from the Scottish National party when they travel to London City airport to fly back to Scotland on a Thursday night or Friday morning. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West set out the massive increase in journeys on the DLR. That fantastic railway is, of course, a driverless operation, which makes it separate from most of TfL’s other rail operations.
The new DLR franchise is only six months old, but its staff have already gone on strike for the first time in 23 years. One has to ask whether the resourcing of the
DLR and pressure on the contract led the new franchisee to put pressure on staff’s conditions and wages. That is total speculation on my part, but the fact that we have had the first DLR strike in 23 years is not a good sign. It is certainly a concern for my constituents and a very worrying development indeed.
The final point I want to cover is another parochial one. I see that the Minister wearing his red ensign badge proudly as shipping Minister—there is nothing wrong with that at all, and I applaud him for it. Yesterday, I attended a Port of London authority presentation at Tower pier at which it outlined its vision for the River Thames for the next 20 to 50 years. The most striking thing about the presentation was that whereas most people think that the Thames’s heyday is behind it—we have the visuals of riggers in the past 200 years and merchant vessels in the 20th century being unloaded in the docks—and that it is now much quieter, with Thames Gateway and the port of Tilbury, as the Minister will know, London is now dealing with more tonnage than ever in its history.
With new commuter routes being opened up all the time, there is more commuter traffic than ever. Construction projects such as the Thames Tideway tunnel and, to a certain extent, Crossrail, which require the Thames to be used and that get HGVs off London’s roads and traffic on to the Thames, are welcome. The PLA’s vision is that the Thames’s best days are ahead of it, so it is really disappointing that the proposed cruise terminal at Enderby Wharf, which has been approved by the Royal Borough of Greenwich and the Mayor of London, does not have a ship-to-shore energy supply. That means that when cruise ships start arriving in London, they will have to run their diesel engines 24/7 to power them while they are berthed in the middle of the Thames, which is the equivalent of putting hundreds of lorries’ emissions back into London’s air. If we provided a ship-to-shore energy supply, which I believe would cost only up to a few million pounds, we could deal a big blow to London’s emissions.
Given that background, what funding does the Department for Transport provide for TfL to study air quality? Transport emissions play a big part in air quality, as they account for between 25% and 30% of all emissions. The shipping industry is growing, and we want to ensure as much as possible that its growth is environmentally sustainable and clean. Does the Minister have anything to add to the debate about the cruise terminal at Enderby Wharf? Can he say whether, even at this late stage, ship-to-shore energy supply could be introduced into the plan, given that the situation is a negative dark spot on what ought to be a positive clean bill of health for the Thames?
I again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West on securing this important debate. I have raised much more parochial points than him, and we will be interested to hear the speeches from the three Front-Bench spokesmen.
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