Cutting shapes: the three infrastructure projects that made modern Wellington

“God made New Zealand,” said Sir John-Pearce Luke (Mayor of Wellington from 1913-1921). “But engineers made Wellington”.

Wellington's steep terrain, regular earthquakes and ferocious weather have been constant challenges, and Sir John knew good infrastructure was critical to making our city a success. Modern sewers helped rid the city of typhoid in the 1890s, trams and tunnels opened up new suburbs after the 1900s, and the urban motorway catered for the boom in car ownership in the 1960s. But three infrastructure projects – above all others – stand out as pivotal in shaping our city.

Queens Wharf (1860s)
The wharf enables the government to move to the city after two devastating earthquakes

As SS Airedale steamed into Lambton Harbour late in the summer of 1863 the noise of is engines subsided, and sailors high in the rigging furled the canvas. Passengers eagerly lined the handrails for their first glimpse of Wellington, and the brand new Government Wharf – its reddish brown timber yet to be bleached by the sun.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Eight years earlier the Wairarapa earthquake had created a three-metre tsunami, which smashed ships onto the harbour floor and washed out low-lying properties along Lambton Quay. When the waves subsided, the seabed had risen two metres, ruining access to the quays. Tectonic uplift and the destruction of wharves meant goods had to be ferried ashore by lighters – very time consuming, and the rapidly increasing size of ships visiting Wellington meant they had to anchor further and further out.

So Queens Wharf was driven by a desire to play down Wellington’s shaky start. The devastating earthquakes of 1848 and 1855 could have been fatal for the young city’s reputation, particularly given Britannia, the New Zealand Company’s original settlement at Petone had been abandoned 14 years previously because of the Hutt River’s tendency to flood. The Chamber of Commerce (then as now an advocate for infrastructure spending) campaigned for a new deepwater wharf – considered ‘a universally recognised want’, with the surviving private jetties hopelessly too small.

The new 122m-long ‘double T’ Government Wharf was a mixture of ironwork imported from Britain and totara from Foxton. Storms delayed the supply of timber and the wharf opened three months late. Stretching out from the city’s first major land reclamation around what is now Post Office Square, it quickly became known as ‘Queens Wharf’ – not in celebration of Queen Victoria’s 25 years as monarch (the first silver jubilee celebrated Kaiser Wilhelm I and was in 1886), but more likely because of its location adjacent to Queens Bond Store.

Queens Wharf was a huge vote of confidence in the 6,000-strong settlement, and a shot in the arm for business, as commercial developments rapidly filled the reclamation. It was seen as ‘a symbol that Wellington was becoming a port rather than merely a harbour,’ said Wellington Maritime Trust D Johnson, and proved so popular the ‘T’s were immediately extended to cope with the explosion of traffic.

The new wharf impressed the Australian Commissioners who visited Wellington in 1864 searching for Parliament’s new home. MPs travelled to their electorates by steamship, and our central location and modern infrastructure proved compelling: the capital moved a year later.


Tawa Flat Deviation (1930s)
Modern electric trains opened up the northern suburbs to created metropolitan 'Greater Wellington’

In the 1920s Wellingtonians enjoyed a comprehensive electric tram network connecting the city’s inner suburbs, but access from the north was far more challenging. Settlements at Johnsonville and Tawa were served by the Wellington & Manawatu Railway Company’s steep single-track railway, with steam engines wheezing through numerous tunnels as they hauled passengers up the gradients on the mainline north.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

For a nation with more than 28 million railway journeys each year (according to Te Ara) the trip into Wellington must have been an embarrassment. There had been little progress since the line’s construction in 1885, and the railway was a chronic bottleneck in the capital’s growth. Rail travel was critical to New Zealanders wishing to travel around the country, and arriving in the capital via a steep single track mixed up with livestock movements did not send the right signals.

The Public Works Department formed a team in 1927 under railway surveyor Arnold Downer to build an express railway over 13km long, with 5.6km of double track tunnels. Downer later led the Mt Victoria tunnel project – his name lives on in the eponymous construction company.

The Tawa Flat Deviation was completed in 1935, and allowed a major overhaul of the Johnsonville line, where cutting-edge English Electric trains were launched with fanfare (and ten speeches from the dignitaries assembled) in July 1938. The ‘delightfully smooth’ journey was completed in 16 minutes – considerably faster than today’s scheduled services. Tawa got its electric trains a couple of years later.

Eyes were firmly on the Mother Country, and the electric railway bears strikingly similarities to the ‘Metroland’ developments that turned the countryside north-west of London into prime commuter belt. Tawa’s new station offered a heated waiting room, and male and female lavatories. It was a big improvement for the passengers, and was the catalyst for the suburb’s population growth from a few hundred in 1930 to just over 3,000 shortly after the war. Johnsonville was transformed from a sleepy agricultural centre nicknamed ‘Cowtown’ to a suburb with booming property prices and a population growing at double the city’s average. Meanwhile Wellington’s neo-Georgian station, opened in 1937, bustled with passengers obtaining news from press-the-button information machines, vying for pies at the highspeed cafeteria and taking nicely-framed pictures of themselves at a shilling a shot. News, pies and selfies – nothing changes.

Enormous pride was taken in showing we could match the Empire’s best, and the Tawa Flat Deviation, track electrification, new rolling stock and the gigantic Gray Young terminus were ambitious undertakings that laid the foundation for today’s Greater Wellington conurbation.

Rongotai airport (1950s)
International connections direct to the heart of the city after removing a hill

Charles Kingsford Smith's first view of Wellington was from the cockpit of ‘Southern Cross’, his Fokker Trimotor aeroplane. The Australian circled above the city at dawn on September 11th 1928, having left Sydney 13 hours earlier, but ended his trailblazing journey in Christchurch: Wellington had nowhere suitable to land.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Kingsford Smith secured his place in history by making the first international flight to New Zealand. Aged 31, he told the crowds his ambition was simply to become the world’s oldest aviator. When he finally made it to Wellington (by ship) he advised Mayor Troup – another aviation enthusiast – that Lyall Bay would be perfect for Wellington’s main aerodrome. A basic airstrip opened in 1929, which often closed over winter when the grass runway became too boggy.

Rongotai was talked about as the ideal location for our city’s main airport for years after Kingsford Smith’s untimely death in 1935, but nearby facilities proved more popular: Trentham’s airstrip handled early mail flights, the Air Force operated seaplanes from its base at Shelly Bay, and by the late 1930s Imperial Airways’ Empire flying boats were a regular sight at Evans Bay. These were the height of luxury, and passengers were often warned not to rush to the lavatories at the rear to plunder the toiletries lest the plane slid backwards out of the sky.

Meanwhile Paraparaumu became New Zealand’s busiest airport in 1949: Rongotai airport had been forced to close two years earlier as the grass runway didn’t comply with safety standards. And Tasman Empire Airways Ltd flew flying boats a four days a week to Sydney from Evans Bay in the early 1950s. The airline’s terminal at Greta Point was decidedly ad-hoc, with garages under the Casa Del Mar apartments on Evans Bay Parade used by Customs to process passengers.

Wellington was missing out. Prime Minister Peter Fraser announced in 1948 that a modern airport would be built at Rongotai, but construction took 11 long years. Passengers onboard the flying boats attempting to land when Evans Bay was choppy must have looked at the building work with longing – waves under two metres high were acceptable landing conditions.

The new Rongotai Airport necessitated moving 3,000,000m3 of earth, and reclaiming 55 hectares of land to create Cobham Drive and the new runway (which was further extended in the 1970s to accommodate passenger jets). The earthworks were impressive, but the new facilities weren’t: the 1937 De Havilland factory was repurposed as a stopgap terminal, which was intended to be replaced by the 1960s. Inevitably the corrugated shed served Wellingtonians until 1999. But the building didn’t matter – we finally had a sealed runway capable of handling the latest aircraft like the Lockheed Electra that flew the Beatles in from Sydney.

Today the decision to build a modern airport 15 minutes from the heart of the city plays a big part in the compact urban form loved by locals and visitors alike – and is every bit as transformational as the Queens Wharf and railway upgrades in previous decades.

First published in the December 2019 issue of Capital magazine

#BalhamOrTooting – a consultation exercise

www.BalhamOrTooting.org.uk
(see bottom of this post for the full website)

Crossrail 2 is the next of London's infrastructure megaprojects – it's a new underground railway line that will run north/south across the city, and relieve the Northern line and railways running though Clapham Junction. It'll take nearly 20 years to deliver, with the first trains estimated to be running around 2030. But it will transform large parts of London – including my patch, Wandsworth, which despite being in Zones 2 & 3 has poor connections into Central London (and partly explains why we have such high levels of cyclists).

The new line has included a station at Tooting Broadway since the route was initially put out to consultation in 2013. A station in Tooting makes a lot of sense as it's at the bottom of the Northern Line, and the area is ripe for regeneration: improving transport connections will unlock new housing.

My friend Dan Watkins – the Conservative candidate in the 2015 General Election – has led a strong campaign to put Tooting on the Crossrail 2 map, so when we found out last month that Transport for London was considering moving the station to Balham we decided to launch a campaign to engage the local population and see if there was support for a campaign to keep the dream of Crossrail 2 at Tooting Broadway alive.

Normally the Wandsworth modus operandi would be to do a combination of door-to-door petitions and email out a link to a Survey Monkey site. This time I suggested we did something different, so my friend Ben Guerin (an ace web developer) got to work on building a website aimed at raising awareness that there was a choice between the Balham and Tooting routes. I designed the graphics and finessed the text. We haven't spent any money on social media advertising.

First social media graphic

Second social media graphic

TfL produced a great map for the consultation

I also designed a leaflet that was delivered to all homes within walking distance of the stations – and at early morning raids on our local tube stations. The effort to get tens of thousands of leaflets delivered in the space of a week was immense – so well done Dan and team on the ground.

DL-sized leaflet

Dan's dodgy photography – something I can't do from the other side of the world!

And of course Dan followed up with local residents who signed the petition.



The results have shown strong support for the station at Tooting Broadway – which is unsurprising given that Balham is a lot more gentrified, and two stops closer to Central London on the Northern Line. Tooting will have to endure a more intrusive construction phase, but the benefits are much, much greater.

What I did find interesting is how support for Tooting Broadway extended in the areas close to Balham station – I used to live in the Heaver Estate area and would walk to Balham if I was catching the tube into town. A station at Tooting Broadway will see some people from Balham and Tooting Bec travel southwards, so perhaps these results are not that surprising after all.

Here's the infographic I produced which summarised the results. I also produced a version for social media (this required slightly different formatting). I love data – so laying this out was a real treat.



The campaign also helped raise the profile of Dan's work in the community, particularly around Tooting Broadway, where Labour has been historically strongest. I was surprised that local MP Sadiq Khan was so slow off the mark – after all, it's a crucial issue for the future of Tooting. Others noticed this too...

We're thrilled with the results, with a substantial majority of the 2500 people signing the survey living in Tooting. It's helped engage people with Crossrail 2's more detailed consultation – having filled out a number of these I know they're usually the domain of the more determined. And that's the point about politics, right? Yes we need politicians to champion causes, but change happens when whole communities are engaged and mobilised.

Tooting responses

Here's the full website:

The full website (background image stretched to render entire length of page)

East Coast showed us what a renationalised railways would be like

Two years ago, I was on my way back to London from my first Party conference in Manchester. The train carriage was rammed, with the heating inexplicably on full blast. This situation was made worse by the buffet being closed, so with no water for the two hours we were stuck in oven-like conditions.

Not fun – but not exactly life-endangering, and Virgin Trains offered me two first class tickets to any part of their network as compensation.

I mention this merely because it is a good example of how, under privatisation, our railways now ‘do’ customer service. Yes, there is still enormous room for improvement. And, yes, train travel can be utterly maddening – as anyone stuck at Finsbury Park after Christmas knows only too well. But the upshot of my trip back from conference was that I thought Virgin Trains were actually bothered about whether or not I’d want to travel with them again.

Why, then, is renationalising the railways so bizarrely popular – even with Conservative voters? People almost willingly ignore how much better our trains are than the squalid service that state-owned SNCF runs to some loose timetable on the other side of the Channel.

Yet you don’t have to go to France to see what a renationalised railways would be like for the travelling public: look no further than our own East Coast service, which was run by the Department for Transport for five years. The chaos at King’s Cross last Christmas was caused by state-owned Network Rail, but compounded by the customer service of then nationalised East Coast trains, whose operation propped up the bottom of the national railways performance tables before the company was returned to the private sector a month ago.

'Privatisation' gave Britain the world's fastest steam locomotive

(Telegraph)

Let me explain it another way.

Remember how privatised Virgin Trains made up for my poor travelling experience? Well, in early January my cousin was travelling from Aberdeen to Kings Cross on ‘nationalised’ East Coast. My cousin has muscular dystrophy and is stuck in a wheelchair. Alas, the train’s disabled lavatory was out of service for the entire seven hours of the journey – and his request for help via the disabled assistance button was ignored.

Not unreasonably, he wrote to East Coast. The state-owned company replied – two months later – by sending him a voucher for £10. A tenner! I can’t imagine Richard Branson would regard ten quid as anything other than a slap in the face of a disabled man ignored by the train staff, and unable to pee for the best part of a public sector working day.

Many people remember British Rail as a proxy for a halcyonic Britain that never existed. But it was free enterprise that gave us our railway glory days, with ‘privatised’ LNER’s Mallard breaking the speed record and Glasgow’s ‘privatised’ North British dominant as the world’s largest locomotive builder, selling to all corners of the globe.

Nationalisation in 1948 put a stop to all that: British Rail was an introspective operation that closed down railway lines, treated passengers badly and built locomotives that we couldn’t export. Its head office was nicknamed ‘The Kremlin’ – and with good reason.

Miliband’s lot would put the faceless apparatchiks at the Department for Transport back in charge of our trains; leaves on the line would be the least of our worries. The East Coast franchise was a timely reminder of what renationalised railways would be like – and my cousin has the £10 voucher to prove it.

First published by Conservative Home on April 2nd, 2015

(Only) three reasons to vote Conservative in May

The polls say the election’s outcome is up in the air, but one thing is clear – the Tories are close to passing the 36.1% share of the vote won in 2010. No mean feat given the perils and challenges of five years in office. Of course there have been a few facepalm moments (ask me after May and I’ll give you my list) but overall David Cameron’s government has been one of innovation and reform – not a bad record when the books left by Labour offered little room to breathe.

That I’ll be voting for the Tories on May 7th is hardly a revelation given that I stood for council on the blue ticket last May, enjoyed (rather than endured) my first party conference a couple of years ago and have traipsed off to all sorts of by-elections around the country. But forget the slightly tame election promises and #LongTermEconomicPlan – here are three concrete reasons why I’ll be out pounding the pavements for the Tories in the run-up to May 7th – and why you should consider voting for Conservative too.


Apprenticeships

It is the Conservatives who are the party of opportunity – not Labour – and if you want proof of that just look at the how we’ve revitalised apprenticeships. I’m not sure whether it’s healthy to have a favourite graph, but here’s mine. Note how women have been doing better under the Conservatives then under Labour.

In 2010 the Conservatives committed to creating 400,000 apprenticeships. Here we are five years on and we’ve created 2,000,000 apprentices. In comparison Labour’s idea of opportunity was telling everyone to go to university: ‘why do an apprenticeship when you can have a degree?’ This was a betrayal of the idea that some people might actually be able to enter the workforce and secure skilled, well-paid employment by in-work training, paid for by the employer.

Apprenticeships were a massive part of Britain when we made things and exported to the world, but cruelly Blair and Brown saw them simply in the context of their inept class war. Besides, who needs skilled British workers when you’re one of three EU countries not to put in place freedom-of-labour controls when the EU expanded eastwards? Much easier to bring over the cream of the Accession States’ workforce.

And note how quickly Labour have forgotten their disgraceful record on apprenticeships:

Guaranteed with a Labour govt → 80,000 more high quality apprenticeships so every school leaver with the grades has the chance to get on.
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) February 17, 2015

Wow, 80,000 apprentices. That’s 80% fewer than the Tories promised in 2010, and 4% of the apprentices created during the five years of this Tory government. It is David Cameron’s government that has done the hard work of rebuilding apprenticeships, which are so important in the fight to upskill our workforce, improve productivity – and transform people’s lives.

RT to let friends know we've delivered 2 million apprenticeships since 2010 - helping young people get on in life. https://t.co/n6PdgpNsd5
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) December 22, 2014

Public Transport

Crossrail tunnels (John Zammit)

Like most people in the South East travelling on the railways and underground is a big part of my life, and the good news is that this government has poured enormous amounts of money into future-proofing the transport network.

Labour electrified 13 miles of railway under Blair and Brown. One poxy mile per year in government. In comparison we’ve just about finished electrifying the entire railway from London to Wales in five years. Work on Crossrail (London’s new East-West underground line) is on target for completion in 2018, by which point Crossrail 2 will be well underway – much to the relief of Northern Line commuters. George Osborne was under pressure to cancel these projects, but he recognised how vital it was to have transport that was worthy of London’s position as one of the world’s great cities. Likewise hundreds of railway platforms across the country have been lengthened to accommodate longer trains that are being brought into service – why we’re not shouting about this I have no idea.

And an enormous overhaul of railways in the North-West is being delivered – new electric trains through Manchester on the new Ordsall viaduct, with big service improvements – like Chester to Manchester in under 40 minutes (over an hour at present). Labour likes to think the North is its home turf, but what did they do for commuters in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Preston, and so on? The Conservatives have made the investment that is helping increase the reliability and capacity of the railways, and helping more people get a seat in the morning.


Leadership

Perhaps the most contentious of the three points, but I really do think David Cameron has shown genuine leadership as Prime Minister in the past five years. He has held together a government with the Liberal Democrats, our most despised opponents. I was on the officer team of a rock solid Tory Association outside the M25 for much of this parliament, and vividly recall our Chairman announcing his defection to UKIP as the first item on our AGM – so I have some insight into how difficult his position must have been.

Yet look at the alternatives. Wind up the government half way though? We’d have been slaughtered in the polls. Avoid addressing gay marriage? Labour would have introduced it from the opposition benches and caused all sorts of havoc. Cameron didn’t bow to UKIP’s agenda, the wisdom of which can be seen as the latter’s credibility disintegrates in the run-up to May 7th. It’s easy to bag Ed Miliband, but has he demonstrated the qualities needed to lead a government as Leader of the Opposition? I – and seemingly many others – think not. And Clegg’s lot has found coalition politics to be as comfortable as snuggling up to a boa constrictor, with single figure poll ratings since 2011. This May will see seats turning blue that have been yellow for decades.

There’s also the issue of the European Union referendum. I’ve always felt our EU membership is like an unhappy marriage: we need to try counselling before we divorce, and that’s what Cameron’s renegotiation is all about. Let’s see how serious Brussels is about changing. The EU is a political construction for wealth redistribution and regulation generation completely at odds with European project’s founding aim of building peace through economic activity, and I’d almost certainly vote to leave. But I want a proper national debate before any decision, and my gut instinct says that rushing a referendum makes a vote to stay in more likely – and then where will we be? Confirmed members of an EU that has little incentive to reform. So the Prime Minister is spot on: 2017 is the right date to hold the referendum.

Perhaps David Cameron will never be held in the same affection as our party’s great leaders, but I can’t imagine he’s particularly bothered. What I imagine he does worry about is getting Britain heading in the right direction after the precarious position that Labour left us in 2010 – and he’s done a pretty good job of that.

—

Which brings me back to my starting point. Back in the depths of 2013 I bet a particularly recalcitrant district councillor £20 that we’d be ahead in the polls in the run-up to the general election – and here we are, ahead in the polls and ready for the heat of the final weeks before polling day. Apprenticeships, transport and leadership are small fry in the bigger picture of rescuing the nation’s economy. But they’re indicative of a government that has taken tough decisions, improved people’s lives, and put us on the right course for the years ahead. That’s a record I’m proud to campaign on – and one that appeals to the heart as much as the head.

First published by Platform 10 on March 25th, 2015

Britain was built by private enterprise – so why is ‘privatisation’ so unpopular?

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘P’ word: privatisation. Ed Miliband’s team hasn’t done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like ‘no privatisation of our NHS’ and ‘reversing the privatisation of the railways’ is being wheeled out to fill the Left’s policy void.

This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government’s enthusiasm for market – rather than state – solutions. Some people know about Hinchingbrooke, the NHS hospital so ineptly run by the state that Andy Burnham ‘privatised’ it when he was Secretary of State. Fewer know that Circle – the private sector company that took control of Hinchingbrooke along with a 50 per cent staff mutual – has done a decent job of turning around something that was – if you’ll excuse the pun – a real hospital pass.*

Just why is privatisation seen as so politically toxic, when much of what we love in Britain has been shaped by private enterprise? Take tertiary education, where students attend the privately run institution of their choice. Our universities have always been ‘privatised’, with the model of academics and faculties competing for research funding well established. Yet the idea of such a system for our primary and secondary schools would currently be politically unacceptable, even though universities like Cambridge and UCL are world beaters – just look at the latest QS rankings, where four out of the world’s top six institutions are British.

And that’s the whole point of privatisation: creating a market where competition drives improvements in quality and efficiencies in price. Try telling that to the British public, who overwhelmingly want to see the railways renationalised – including a majority of Conservative voters. People dislike their trains being run by foreign state operators, but isn’t the point of the railways to move people around, rather than be some sort of national bauble?

Competition has been fantastic for train passengers in the post-British Rail era. This is hardly surprising given that the great triumphs of Britain’s railways were the product of healthy rivalries between private companies – from the Rainhill Trials through to the speed wars in the 1930s that resulted in Mallard, the world’s fastest locomotive. Our railway infrastructure was delivered by companies not wanting to miss out on market share, but today the government is desperately playing catchup after decades of neglect under state ownership – and building HS2 at a pace that would have appalled our Victorian ancestors.

The 2015 General Election campaign is already well underway, and perhaps you’ll hear someone talking about the evils of privatisation in a queue at the Post Office, only to realise that you’ve never had to endure a 40 minute wait at Sainsbury’s or Tesco. That’s because the supermarkets are in competition, and if they made their customers wait that long they know they’d be out of business. They’re also fairly good at keeping down costs for their users – something that we desperately need in our NHS if the principle of free healthcare for all is to survive the challenges of an ageing population and increasing treatment costs. So that’s the sort of privatisation we should be talking about: driving up quality of service, bringing down costs – and no lengthy waits before the automated voice directs you to ‘Till Number Three’.

First published by Coffee House on December 17th, 2014

* About two weeks after this was published Circle announced that it was handing back its operation of Hinchingbrooke to the state. Writing in the Guardian, former Labour MP Tom Levitt said that 'the failure of Circle at Hinchingbrooke hospital, in Huntingdon, where the company very nearly managed to remove an operating loss inherited from the public sector, was due to the failure of the NHS to deliver its side of the bargain, not least the over-demand on A&E which was well above what the company was told to expect.'

A gigantic shunting of workers

Last week the Office for National Statistics published research that found commuters who spend between 60 and 120 minutes travelling to work have lower life satisfaction, see their employment as less worthwhile, have lower happiness levels and greater anxiety. This in itself is hardly surprising, but it is useful to be reminded by hard data that ‘commuting is clearly and negatively associated with personal well-being’. Unsurprisingly the research suggested that people who work from home as the happiest: I’m self-employed, and the rare occasions I’m rammed into a rush-hour Northern Line train remind me just how lucky I am to avoid the daily grind on the underground.

Commuter at Waterloo

Our enthusiasm for commuting over long distances owes much to our historically excellent infrastructure, but also the failure to make modern city life accord with modern needs – not my words, but those of The Spectator back in 1964, which recognised that the ‘gigantic shunting of workers across the London conurbation’ was batty. This is particularly so when you recognise that drivers pay hefty fuel bills and require government to build costly roads, and that railway commuters need billions spent on capacity solutions like Crossrail (and Crossrail 2) while paying eye-watering amounts for season tickets. If your daily commute is an hour each way every day of the week, come Friday you’ll have lost a cumulative working day paying for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam with cyclists whizzing past you. Personally I’d rather spend my time with my family and friends, rather than listening to Southern tell me that yet again they ‘are’ sorry to announce that blah, blah, blah.

For many people the daily pilgrimage to work is an unwitting yet rational response to decades of poor urban planning. Escaping to the countryside to exercise what Nick Boles describes as ‘a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ is perfectly reasonable given some of the shocking housing built across the country in recent decades. After all, if your home is little more than a shoebox, having a garden for your children to play in is very sensible!

Yet ripping up the green belt to build garden cities simply compounds the cost and misery of commuting. Instead we need higher-quality housing in London and our other urban areas that entices people into living closer to where they work, and to challenge what the ONS describes as ‘inertia’ towards our rigid commuting patterns. Historically Britain’s inner city areas were much more densely populated than the leafy outer suburbs: today the reverse is true.

Fortunately there is hope. New homes are being built at sites like Battersea Power Station to higher design standards, and there is a renewed interest in promoting walking and cycling to work. And adopting new guidelines like ‘Building for Life 12′ means that for the first time in decades we are taking significant steps to avoid blighting lives at the planning stage with the expense and wasted hours of traffic updates and platform announcements – with which the inhabitants of our existing garden cities are only too familiar.

First published by Platform 10 on February 19th, 2014

Let’s celebrate 20 years of rail privatisation

Being a Guardian-reading Tory can be rather trying. I switched to the Grauniad a decade back for the paper's superlative arts coverage – I'm a photographer by trade – but also because as a Tory the political slant is like having a cold shower every morning. Reading it over toast and coffee means I'm fired up and know what the enemy is thinking. One of my friends (a government whip under Blair) does the exact thing in reverse, and wouldn't start the day until he'd worked his way through the Telegraph.

But every so often there are times when Toynbee et al become a bit much. This week marks the 20th anniversary of railway privatisation, which the the paper commemorated with a hatchet piece, the essence of which is summed up by the tirade that the 'supposed free-marketeers are gleefully happy about state ownership of British assets, as long as it's somebody else's state that's doing it'. This view – and wider yearning for British Rail – pervades our society, including many of those firmly in of the centre-right. I've even heard senior people in our party mumble that perhaps it was a privatisation too far.

And hankering after BR misses the essence of why we as Conservatives believe that the market, privatisation, competition – call it what you will – is the best way to serve the public need. The issue isn't about who owns the company delivering our rail services (or telephones, electricity, etc.) but ensuring that you and I get a better service as a result of companies in competition with each other.

In the case of our rail network this means franchise operators knowing that if they don't perform they will lose their business at the end of their contract. Yes, we know that the Department for Transport has issues with administering this process, but consider this: for the first time since 1948 the railways now return money to the taxpayer, rather than depending on massive subsidies that successive governments have tried to reduce. Profit isn't filthy, as faux revolutionary Russell Brand would have you believe, it's bloody great because Britain's railways are now running efficiently – and competition from operators across Europe has driven this. Besides, British firms like Go Ahead and Stagecoach have operations abroad. The foreign ownership thing goes both ways.

Perhaps the best example of how the markets work is the demise of Britain's locomotive manufacturing industry. We don't have many train builders left over here, and when our wonderful old InterCity125s were recently renovated the new engines were sourced from MTU, a company based in Friedrichshafen that built Zeppelin motors in World War One. Almost enough to make you think that Brunel would be turning in his grave, until you realise that German MTU was acquired by British Rolls-Royce two years ago. What the Guardian would make of that I don't know.

“Ahh, but train tickets are exorbitant!” comes the protest. I did some research into this, and found a piece* by Barry Doe – the leading commentator on UK ticket prices – which points out that despite all the recent coverage of ticket price increases most franchises have either frozen or reduced their season ticket prices in real terms since 1995. And in that time the cost of the single that I buy from Southern when I go down to visit Dad in Sussex has actually fallen – in real terms – by 7%.

Of course with wage stagnation and rising commodity prices travel is still expensive, and some of the franchises have yet to bring costs down (SouthEastern season tickets have seen a 25% price increase) but the situation isn't quite what the headlines would have you believe. Not bad going for a system that many of us are happy to criticise at will.

* Doe's 'Fare Dealer' article appeared in Rail 731 – not available online, sadly

First published by Platform 10 on November 8th, 2013

Ignore Labour's rage against the machines

Two months ago I walked into the railway station at Biarritz. Without thinking I headed to the ticket machine on the concourse, pressed the small Union Jack on the touchscreen, and thirty seconds later had my ticket in my hand. Very simple and stress free, which is unsurprising as modern ticket machines are beacons of sanity for the international traveller. I remember the palaver at the Polish Railways ticket counter at Wrocław in 2006, when I was saved by a local in the queue behind me who could translate ‘could I have a single to Poznan for the early morning train tomorrow, and do I have to buy a supplementary ticket for my bicycle?’ Give me a machine every time.

Yesterday, Labour and the TSSA started making a huge song and dance about leaked plans that most of London’s tube station ticket offices are to be closed and replaced by 20 ‘travel centres’ in the major hub stations. Ominously, we’ve been told that – horror of horrors – ‘passengers would have to use automatic machines instead’. Labour’s London spokesman (and rumoured 2014 Mayoralty hopeful) Sadiq Khan told us that this will have a ‘devastating effect’ on commuters.

Old London Transport ticket machines (wemadethis.co.uk)

All of which is complete nonsense. London’s workers are already perfectly happy buying their weekly and monthly tickets from the Oyster machines, and I suspect that tourists to the UK would get better treatment at dedicated travel centres rather than the local ticket counter – if indeed it is open. Most of London’s visitors are already happily navigating their way through computerised menus in their own language, just as I did in Biarritz. I can’t actually remember the last time I used a ticket office, although I think when I did the upshot was being given some sort of ghastly form that I had to post to TfL HQ. Now you can probably fill in that paperwork online; meanwhile, the latest generation of touchscreen machines is guiding Joe Public through a bewildering array of ticket-based adventures.

Of course, this ticket office hoop-la is another example of Labour's inability to stand up to the transport unions. It is madness to be arguing for the value of a chap in a cubby-hole when in most instances a machine will do the same job better. Mick Carney’s predecessors at the TSSA must have felt the same way about automatic ticket barriers – ‘dreadful things that don’t offer the certainty of a ticket clipped by a friendly conductor’ – or something like that, I imagine. Certainly, the failure to embrace modern staffing practices across Britain’s railways in the 1960s did irreparable damage to the economics of operating trains and stations, for which Harold Wilson’s governments need to shoulder a lot of the blame.

These days budgets are leaner, and failing to take advantage of modern ticketing technology ties up funds that TFL would otherwise invest in new trains, signalling and step-free access to stations, all of which are essential to the bothersome business of moving people around. And wasting money on keeping the unions happy pushes up fares – hitting those on the breadline disproportionately hard, which makes Labour’s stance all the more puzzling.

First published by Coffee House on August 13th, 2013

Nimbyism? That’s not even the half of it.

Pity the poor Nimbys. Not only has the government’s horrible new planning regime come into force, but last week we heard the pro-HS2 lobbyists describing them as ‘posh people standing in the way of working-class people getting jobs’. Even Isabel blames them for wanting to preserve the idyllic views from their breakfast room window. Being a nimby is so last century.

Alas, calling the naysayers nimbys simply glosses over one of the biggest problems facing our society, namely how government deals with the built environment. This has little to do with preserving greenfields, areas of outstanding natural beauty, Jerusalem – or indeed nimbyism. It is simply that building houses in the countryside inherently designs significant expense into people’s lives. Little consideration is being given to how people are meant to travel to work, with developments usually far away from the local railway station, and money available for local infrastructure from Section 106 levies woefully inadequate.

So the lovely garden that the nice Nick Boles wants families to believe is their right has a nasty price tag attached ever so discreetly: the cost of a season ticket on our state subsidised railways and running two cars on our congested roads, with the cumulative loss of more than a working day a week in the commuting grind rubbing salt into the wound. We’re placing ridiculous and entirely avoidable stress on families, and commuting is penalising people for poorly designed cities.

The good news is that we already have lots of houses fit for families; the bad news is that they’ve mostly been subdivided into flats, a perfectly rational market response to the changing shape of British society. Of course we haven’t built enough houses, and yes, immigration has seen demand soar. But Britons are also leading different sorts of lives from a few decades ago: we marry later, and are more likely to divorce, meaning that fewer people are interested in the old concept of a ‘family home’. We’ve failed to build accommodation in line with the demands of 21st Century life, and the result is soaring rates of flatsharing in poorly converted apartments. Incidentally most young professionals must look at the protests over the bedroom tax with disbelief – in the private rented sector spare rooms get filled very quickly, and sharing your home is common if you’re young and saving for a mortgage deposit.

Frustratingly house building companies – almost uniquely – deliver products that the market doesn’t want. Unlike cars, cameras and computers where ‘new’ is aspirational, the building industry is churning out a product that only a quarter of home buyers would actively consider, a damning indictment that you’d think would merit a stiffer response than the Government merely ‘telling them to think a bit about it’. RIBA has already pointed out how bad regulations are for new homes, with people having to store food in their cars as kitchens haven’t been properly designed. Tragically the new planning regime will merely compound these failings, with swathes of new houses financed by state credit, built in the wrong place and for the wrong target market, and the opposition brushed off as heartless to the challenge of the ‘yet-to-haves’.

First published by Coffee House on April 11th, 2013

Mr. Brown goes off to town on the 08.21*

One of the reasons I was motivated to go out canvassing in the snow last weekend – not something I thought I’d be writing in late March – is the manner in which the Government has got stuck into overhauling the rail network. There’s been a lot of noise about the 50th anniversary of the Beeching Axe, which fell hardest under the Wilson Labour government. But what many of those nostalgic about the steam era haven’t realised is the extent of the work taking place on the railways today.

Of course, there are the high profile schemes – Crossrail and HS2 – both of which will address badly needed capacity shortages, as anyone travelling into Euston or on the Central Line during the rush hour will tell you. But there are other smaller projects that will bring dramatic improvements to local services, such as Manchester’s Ordsall Chord (which the Economist wrote up glowingly last week).

Manchester's Ordsall Chord project (Network Rail)

At the bottom end of the glamour spectrum, hundreds of platforms all around the country are being extended so that longer trains can be run – even the sleepy branch line down to my Dad’s place in the High Weald is having money spent on it. Stations are being reopened, while signalling is being modernised. And not a moment too soon: passenger use of the railways has doubled in the last two decades and continues to grow, despite the economic downturn.

More fundamentally, we’ve taken action to bring the railways into the 21st century. Despite howls of protest from Labour, the Department for Transport has pressed on with reducing the number of ticket offices, which add to the already high overheads of running trains. Besides, when did you last actually buy a ticket over the counter? Most people purchase their tickets online or at ticket machines. Labour has consistently argued the union’s line that this is a precursor to closing railway lines, when the exact opposite is true – by bringing down operating costs we are putting our railways on a sounder footing and ensuring their long term viability.

Around the country, Conservative councils and MPs are lobbying central government for better railway services, and earlier this month Brighton’s Conservative MPs and councillors came out strongly for the innovative Brighton Mainline 2 scheme that will drive economic growth and transform travel across Sussex and Kent.

The next general election will see commuters look at their wallets and purses and ask what we’ve done for them. We’ve got a great story to tell motorists on freezing fuel duty, but railway season ticket costs have increased, albeit at a lower rate than was planned by Labour. Our action to keep these down is a good thing, given that the average commuter spends a fifth of their pre-tax salary on train travel.

So it is essential that we make sure the hard pressed commuter knows about our track record: we are an unashamedly pro-railways government that has balanced protecting people’s pockets with investing in the service they rely on every day.

Or in other words, we need to talk less about the exciting headline projects, and concentrate on telling the people who pour through London Bridge each weekday about the hundreds of small improvements we’re getting done to make sure they can get a seat on a train that’ll run on time.

* Bonus points if you realise that this is a line from the Dad's Army theme tune, rather than an oblique reference to G. Brown, formerly of 10 Downing Street.

First published by Egremont on March 25th, 2013

Heathrow to Stansted by train: not as expensive as you’d think

In some ways Heathrow’s third runway is like giving your wife an incredibly expensive diamond necklace when you realise your marriage is on the rocks. It will buy you some short term goodwill, but ultimately you’re still in trouble. The £10 billion third runway project might well stimulate some work in the boom-and-bust construction industry, but it does little to address the fundamentals of growth, or indeed offer a long term solution to London’s need for airport capacity: it is lazy policy.

So instead of looking at expensive, shiny baubles, the government’s review should concentrate on getting the basics right: remembering to put the rubbish out, cooking more often, or in the case of London’s airports, making sure they are used more efficiently. Considering an expensive runway as a short term fix to Heathrow’s woes seems mad when you consider that Stansted is running at 50% capacity, with the space for more terminal buildings that would linked seamlessly into existing motorway and rail infrastructure.

The problem is that getting between London’s airports is utterly nightmarish – as anyone who has trekked across the capital to catch a connecting flight knows. Slow bus journeys around the M25 are the order of the day: not exactly reassuring if you have a tight schedule, and hardly an advertisement for modern Britain. The logical solution would be a Heathrow-Stansted rail link, yet this would obviously be a wickedly expensive option given the distance involved.

But curiously enough we already have all the infrastructure in place to operate such a service.

Re-laying the track on a disused rail chord south of Tottenham Hale is all that stands in the way of running trains between the two airports. The Gospel Oak – Barking line is a busy railway, but improved passing loops and signalling would allow passengers to transfer in about 70 minutes.

The disused rail chord

The work could be delivered as part of the already proposed capacity improvements to the Stansted Express, and for a tiny fraction of the £10 billion required for Heathrow’s short term third runway solution. The connection at West Hampstead would link to Thameslink’s Luton and Gatwick services, and Willesden Junction would give access to the new HS2 interchange. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap in imagination to see a ‘London Airport Connect’ service quickly becoming popular for both transfer journeys and passengers travelling to and from west London.

If looking at airport strategy is indeed a completely open-minded exercise, then there is the potential to shift the political consensus from a negative (a wasteful short term fix at Heathrow) to a positive (creating a long term solution – potentially building Boris Island in the Thames Estuary).

This process will be drawn out, with either solution decades away. The fine tuning of our existing facilities should start without delay – and with the imagination and flair that London desperately needs.

First published by Platform 10 on September 10th, 2012