Alistair Darling is shying at his first big fence. This Easter the Transport Secretary is contemplating, I believe, a shameful announcement he had not dared confront until public attention turned from the present bonfire of taxpayers’ money in the deserts of Iraq. The contrasts would have been too obvious. He is considering pulling the financial rug from under a project whose lack chokes our capital city, undercuts our European competitiveness and brings daily misery to millions of Londoners.
Mr Darling may not yet have decided to do the dreadful deed to Crossrail. He may tip the other way: there are optimists who think he will. But my hunch is that the decision is on a knife-edge. This is the moment for anyone with a voice to raise for public transport in London and the South East to raise it along with the eight business leaders who last week wrote to Tony Blair (The Times, April 7) begging the Government not to falter.
The idea is, essentially, a new east-west tunnel from Heathrow, through Paddington to Liverpool Street, for express rail services which could fan out at both ends, providing through services to (for instance) Reading, Aylesbury, and in the east to Stratford and Canary Wharf, with interchanges for Kent and Eurostar.
Proposals for the preferred core route were to have been completed last autumn and put to the Secretary of State, along with a “business case”. He was then to announce the Government’s own firm proposal. The formal public consultation process would have begun.
But Mr Darling’s announcement was deferred to February, then March. Now it has been deferred again. His officials have stopped saying when they hope it will be made.
The project’s two sponsors are the Strategic Rail Authority and Transport for London. The former is looking for huge spending cuts. The latter is desperately scratting around for ways of raising extra finance for the project. I fear the minister may be steeling himself for the big cop-out. Mr Darling would not, of course, say Crossrail has been cancelled. He would not even say it has been shelved. He would say it needs more thought. He would call it a postponement. For the team of 200 working for Cross London Links Ltd, and for the millions who rage daily against transport failure in the South East, “tragedy” would be a better word.
The project is integral to John Prescott’s plans for expansion to the east of London and if the Deputy Prime Minister cannot save it he will have proved himself incapable of protecting existing policies, let alone initiating new ones. But no future dream of urban development is needed to justify Crossrail. New underground capacity for our capital’s transport is urgently needed now.
And the reason for Mr Darling’s Easter jitters? Money. The Secretary of State has been having second thoughts about the project’s “business case”. Plainly, the accountants have been getting at him. Just possibly, the Chancellor has been getting at him too. And if money is short today, do not expect it to be more readily available tomorrow, next year, or in five years’ time; for as everybody knows, and everybody but the Chancellor says, the Government is running out of money.
Mr Darling should understand that this is a moment to display the only quality of which we still await evidence in this rather capable minister: the quality of leadership. Leadership in this case means sweeping the paperwork aside and looking out of his office window on to the streets, where any fool knows that the Tube is staggering beneath the weight of its passenger numbers. Any fool knows that Crossrail is a project whose time has come. Angry and despairing outside those Tube stations intermittently closed “due to overcrowding”, or squeezed into Central Line carriages that until recently had all been out of service due to an accident, any fool knows that London Underground and its staff live hand-to-mouth, praying daily that one small failure anywhere in the system does not trigger general paralysis.
And Mr Darling’s officials witter to me about needing “more time” to think harder about Crossrail’s “business case”. Business case, schmizness case. What wimps. Crossrail was already overdue when Margaret Thatcher’s Government was finally persuaded of the imperative. The new line could have been finished three years ago if her successor’s Cabinet had not bottled out at the eleventh hour.
The Major Government performed its U-turn at the very milepost to which poor old Crossrail had finally clawed its way back by the end of last month. Tony Blair’s team can have no excuse for displaying a similar lack of political nerve. The Treasury sluices have been opened for education, and funds are vanishing into the deserts of local government. Money is being tipped into the bottomless pit of the NHS, with only the cloudiest hope of any matching return.
Where was the business case for this massive increase in health spending? Where was the business case for the 9 per cent increase in education spending? The case for one-off construction projects has always been clearer than for open-ended state subsidy. Investment in the public furniture which everybody uses but which no private concern acting alone would build — and where administrative and private heads have to be knocked together — is one area where socialists and free-marketeers can unite on the need for state intervention. Even Adam Smith thought governments wellplaced to build bridges. What excuse can this Government offer for parsimony in this case — beyond, that is, Gordon Brown’s alleged hankering to redistribute wealth away from the South East? This is his chance to rebut that slur.
That this project should be in any doubt at so late a stage indicates, I think, a deeper problem about the philosophy of public investment. I am no Harvard Business School professor, but I have noticed how fashionable it has become to express horror at what, for want of a more expert term, I will call “slack”. No business wants to keep much in stock any more; “just in time” has become a buzz-phrase; and imprecision — over estimates and outcomes — is anathema.
Up to a point this is admirable: it is running a tight ship and being hard-nosed about sums. But in areas where precision is unachievable, its pursuit can become doctrinaire. Keen to proceed with ideas that are not susceptible to “business cases”, followers of the anti-slack tendency are pushed into dishonesty, setting precise-looking figures for time and quantity against entries which admit only of guesswork.
It is as plain as a pikestaff that fast and frequent trains running east-west across London will bring huge benefits to a huge number of people and enterprises. But precisely who these people are, how the benefits will be spread, or how fast they will be realised, cannot be estimated without making many big guesses.
And there is a special consideration in the case of transport policy. “Slack” happens to be what we need in British transport, and the Mayor of London’s congestion charge is an example. With the Tube working to capacity, and narrowing scope for the introduction of further bus-lanes, pulling motorists out of cars is pointless unless we have other conveyances into which to push them.
On a national scale, the same is true of our rail network, key sections of which cannot bear more traffic, however tightly we throttle the road network. Our policy should be to provide a little slack in each mode of transport — at which point, using price as a lever (and once we bring road pricing into more general use, as we must), government can at the margins ease small numbers of passengers into, out of, or back into, road, bus, rail or Underground, keeping all four flowing freely.
It follows that ministers do not need to burn the midnight oil staring at figures for transport demand in the South East; precision is unnecessary because the aim should not be to hit a target, but to hit upside of a target. Like the release valve on a pressure cooker, a margin of slack in transport policy should be seen as part of the design, not a failure of precision in the “business case”.
Mr Darling therefore faces a rather simpler question than some think, as he stares at his “business case” for Crossrail this Easter. The question is: how much public transport does London and the South East need? The answer is: “A lot more.” There are no further questions. Crossrail should proceed.
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