Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in?
At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings.
George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Green Park tube station.
Transport for London has, you see, noticed that the tube, being underground and reached by steps and escalators, is not terribly accessible to wheelchairs. It is therefore proposing to spend extraordinary sums of money — £97 million at Green Park alone — to dig new lift shafts and passageways through the earth in order to deliver what it calls ‘step-free access’ for the disabled to some of its Edwardian stations.
Buried in the small print of the plans is the final, definitive lunacy which trumps all the other lunacies. It turns out that the £97 million to be spent at Green Park, and the roughly £300 million to be spent elsewhere on TfL’s tube access programme, will only deliver step-free access from the street to the station platform. Boarding almost any train will still involve... a step — insurmountable to wheelchairs.
It turns out, therefore, that Transport for London is to spend not far short of half a billion pounds on something which will not substantially benefit even a single wheelchair-bound tube traveller; something which amounts to little more than the largest subsidy for disabled trainspotters in the history of the world.
There are about 3,500 disabled people — as measured by the number of holders of the disabled person’s free travel pass — living in Westminster, the borough where Green Park station sits. It would quite literally be cheaper to give every single one of those people a free car for the rest of their lives. Of these 3,500, only about 600 actually live close enough to the station to reach it in a wheelchair. It would be cheaper to give each of those people a free car and chauffeur for the rest of their lives (assuming they don’t have one already — this is Mayfair, after all).
Or, for the price of the works at just that single station, you could give every one of the 121,000 Londoners who qualify for a disabled travel pass £800 worth of taxi or minicab vouchers — enough to go to the supermarket or see friends every few days for a year, with a bit left over for the odd trip to the theatre.
Any of these door-to-door options would also, of course, be a thousand times more useful to a disabled Londoner than having to struggle across kerbs and pavements to the closest accessible tube stop. For even TfL’s largesse has limits; it proposes to adapt no more than a quarter of its stations for wheelchairs, meaning that the vast majority of journeys disabled people might wish to make, even in those parts of London served by the tube, will still be impossible.
At the same time, the part of TfL which disabled Londoners actually can and do use — the door-to-door Dial-a-Ride service — gets far less money than it needs and is, as a result, often pitifully bad. At a recent meeting of the London Assembly’s transport committee, users told of being unable to book journeys over six miles, of being taken places but not brought back, of being refused permission to travel with their own wives, of being kept waiting on the pavement for three hours in a street filled with drunks and drug addicts. Val Shawcross, the committee’s deputy chair, said TfL was ‘in denial’ about the ‘very serious problem’ with the operation.
I asked Richard Parry, the acting head of the Underground, why he was wasting so much of his customers’ money. ‘Disabled Londoners want to use the tube like anybody else,’ he said. But do they? (And indeed, does anybody else?) The tube is merely a way of getting to other places, not a destination in itself. The disabled Londoners I know rightly mind if they cannot enter an art gallery, an office or a shop. They don’t care in the slightest how they get there.
Disabled Londoners are, said Parry, angry at being ‘excluded’ from the tube. But even if TfL’s millions made any difference to that situation, how could anyone sane feel anything but relief at being excluded from a service which, even for the able-bodied, is an exercise in low-level misery? If someone offered me a free parking permit, a nice subsidised taxi or a dial-a-ride service which worked properly, I would happily exclude myself from the tube forever tomorrow.
Green Park was an Olympic commitment, said Parry. It would be central London’s ‘gateway’ to Stratford. But the Olympics only lasts two weeks, I said. Why not just give every disabled Londoner who wanted to go to Stratford a free taxi from wherever they lived, rather than dragging them all the way into W1 to get on a train? In the end, after much prodding, Parry admitted that the main benefit of the project was ‘symbolic’.
Two clear threads thus run through this ridiculous story. The first is the perversion of the noble goal of equality. The purpose of TfL’s policy is not to make life easier for the disabled. It’s to make a political statement. It’s to satisfy lobbyists and bien-pensants. It is a gesture to a wholly abstract notion of equality, taken without practical consideration for the actual needs of the people it is supposed to help, which will neither increase the mobility, nor diminish the disadvantage, of a single disabled Londoner.
TfL’s elevation of a symbolic equality agenda over common sense was also clear in its recent decision to allow a paranoid schizophrenic and convicted wife-strangler to take the Knowledge exam to become a London taxi-driver. TfL’s response when my then newspaper broke the story was to launch an inquiry not just into its own decision, but into the ‘disappointing breach’ of the killer’s right to privacy. Those protesting at the taxi decision have been attacked by some mental health campaigners as evil reactionaries, determined to ‘stigmatise’ the mentally ill. Well, yes, if they’ve killed someone.
Most civilised people would accept that this man’s crime was different from that of, say, Fred West. They would support the rehabilitation of the mentally ill. They would not, provided the man is judged well and safe, object to his working in, say, an office. But schizophrenic killers should never be allowed to take stressful jobs which put them in daily, unsupervised, one-on-one contact with total strangers. It is depressing, but not surprising, that Transport for London cannot understand this.
The second thread running through TfL is how, for some parts of the public sector, the spending of money has become an end in itself, with no real attempt to connect that spending to outcomes. In the most difficult of circumstances, with falling passenger revenues, stingy banks and an unhelpful Chancellor, TfL will soon need to find many billions for a project of genuine importance, Crossrail. But with its step-free access programme and all its other accesses, sorry excesses, it may simply no longer be able to afford it. With its 163 staff paid over £100,000 a year (the Treasury, responsible for the entire British economy, manages with 15), TfL is the RBS of public transport, a bloated behemoth walking dangerously close to the third rail.
You may object that for all these quintessentially New Labour tendencies, TfL has for the last year and a half been in the han ds of a Tory Mayor. Boris Johnson was indeed elected to put a stop to this kind of thing, but has failed to do so. Transport is the alpha and omega of the London mayoralty; Boris has staked his credibility on Crossrail; and unless he can rein in ‘Transport for Livingstone’, it may come to cost him even more than a step-free escalator.