Introducing Phil Taylor, Conservative Councillor For Ealing Northfield, CiF Contributor, Blogger And Muppet

I've had enough Holocaust denying ranting lunatics, thanks, so I'm going to bring things closer to home (well, my home at least, not to mention Andy Rambling's workplace) and play that well-loved Old English parlour game, Fisk The Tory.  First, some background.

When I first moved to London in 1997 I lived for ten months or so in the Northfields area of Ealing, near the Tube station, and had a thoroughly marvellous time that ended when I moved to Hammersmith and met my life partner.  Actually, that sounds rather harsh on the old lady, but there you go, it's not like she reads the blog anyway - the important thing is that I've called London and specifically West London (Ealing/Brentford/Hammersmith/Chiswick) my home for a third of my life and as far as I'm concerned it's where I'm going to stay.

As such, being a generally well off area we can afford to have Conservatives representing us on the local councils (and Brownite loyalists representing us in Parliament).  Moreover, with the advent of blogging and online forums, we now have the opportunity to engage with some of these people and in the course of the current Mayoral campaign, boy have we been engaged, in the sense that a machine-gun platoon might use the word.  It's tempting to hit the dirt until they run out of bullets, but for the sake of sanity and Old England I'm going to charge head on and devil take the hindmost, and my target for tonight is Conservative councillor for my old W5 stamping ground, Phil Taylor.

Firstly, the man has a website.  Nothing wrong with that, most of us will have one, although ours isn't so obviously an Iain Dale wannabe - we occasionally do depth as well as smug self-promotion. Phil Taylor's website has a blogroll, and the first thing that strikes one about this blogroll is the rather short list of sites in the 'Political Thought And Comment' section:

• Adam Smith Institute
• Burning Our Money
• Conservative Home
• Ian [sic] Dale's Diary
• James Bartholomew
• TaxPayer's Alliance

 A fine, balanced selection there, a Thatcherite think tank, a low tax pressure site, a Thatcherite Tory, another Thatcherite Tory (whose name Phil can't be bothered to spell correctly), a man who wrote a book about how terrible it was to spend money on public services and finally another low tax pressure site.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  I'm getting the impression Mr. Taylor might be a Thatcherite who doesn't like paying tax to fund public services.  He also doesn't seem to like being exposed to much in the way of a range of ideas, to put in mildly.

However, I didn't come across this fellow via his website, I discovered him through a lengthy blog comment, left on Dave Hill's London: Mayor & More website, which I read with mounting horror even before twigging that he was actually an elected councillor (I thought originally he was just the usual mouthy know-nothing Boris supporter found contaminating online fora the length of London).  Having digested the contents, I found myself pacing round the house, a habit of mine when deeply disturbed that nearly caused a domestic with the missus.  So, in order to preserve domestic harmony, on with the fisking:

Dave's post is the fine one that should put the whole Routemaster/bendy bus idiocy to bed, by pointing out that Boris can't count and has now admitted as such.  Open and shut case, black mark Boris, Ken was right, as anyone with half a brain can see.  Not our Phil though - he thinks Boris is steering clear of actually costing his Routemaster policy because

"they don't want to use up too much airtime on this issue."

You what?  Their most high profile transport policy, talked over endlessly everywhere for months, the 'first act as Mayor' given highly favourable treatment in the Standard, Times and by Boris himself in the Telegraph (seriously, just go and read the Telegraph one and tell me you want this clown running the city) and now they don't actually want to talk about it?  Could have fooled me, Phil.  Possibly they don't want to talk about it now it's been completely busted?

 He then goes on to repeat the allegation (also from the Standard) that Ken somehow leant on TfL to produce Ken-friendly figures for the cost of Boris' plan, an allegation demolished in Dave's piece which points out that Ken and TfL came up with similar costs by different routes.  In fact, TfL's are somewhat higher and more accurate, since they twigged you'd need more drivers (which to be Phil Taylorishly smug I worked out on the 5th March, two days before Dave Hill's original piece).  The subsequent admission by Boris that the £8m figure is rubbish and he was really thinking of a figure around £100m is completely ignored in favour of a classic bit of Conservative projection:

"A lot of what the Mayor says about London's buses is rubbish."

Heh.  How amusingly ironic. We move on to a classic exhibition of why Thatcherites don't get transport:

"They are overcrowded at peak times and empty at off peak"

which is akin to complaining that the sun doesn't come up at night when the light would be more useful.  They're crowded at peak times because they're peak times, fool.  This abject misunderstanding highlights a key reason why public transport requires public ownership and subsidy, because the amount of capacity you need to run the peak service efficiently inevitably results in capital-intensive assets sitting around empty for most of the day.  A conventional business would seek to use them for something else, but a commuter train or city bus can't be used for much other than shifting lots of people around, it's too specialised a vehicle, so if there aren't lots of people to shift, you have empty seats.  The best you can do is encourage off-peak travel (which actually happens on the Tube and previously happened on the buses until the recent fare cut), but the Thatcherite solution would presumably be not to run them off-peak if they won't make money, at which point bang goes your integrated transport system.  Phil's point seems to boil down to 'London's got too frequent a bus service for Thatcherites to be comfortable with'.  Bollocks to you if you're poor or elderly and want to get to the shops, then.

However, this is a 24-hour city, and we have our own solution to this as explained [PDF] by Commissioner Peter Hendy of TfL last week:

"You have got to be careful what you characterise as times with low passenger volumes. If you want to see high passenger volumes, go out in the middle of the night - you have never seen anything like it. We do not run the 29 every four minutes, up to Wood Green, for fun. They are all full. In fact, coming into London they are quite full as well. I think one of the characteristics of London’s public transport now is that it is full at a number of times when you would expect it not to be."

In other words, splash the cash, run high-capacity buses (the 29 is one of the more notorious bendy routes) more frequently and people use them more even at times you wouldn't predict.  Anathema to Thatcherites, ballsy but ultimately the right decision for Livingstone and TfL.

 Next, a new argument to me:

"Bus ridership in Manchester and other major urban centres is about the same as London's (DoT figures) so London isn't any kind of outrider in getting people on the buses."

Now, as I understand it, the entire apparent rise in bus ridership a few years back was due to London, with the rest of the country falling.  Before we check that out, however, Phil's argument already contains one admission - even if he's right he's implying that the Thatcher-inspired deregulated private entrepreneur led bus industry in the rest of Britain is no better at attracting custom than rubbish-spouting Red Ken's statist dead hand TfL operation.  Oops.  Actually, I'm leery of the entire argument, so let's see if we can locate these 'DoT' (or, as we've been writing in the real world for a number of years, DfT) figures.  Mr. Taylor hasn't provided a link, sadly.

Now, two years back the Public Accounts Committee, which looks into these things and is led by Edward Leigh MP, who is a fairly right-wing Conservative, came out with a report on just this matter.  Let's delve.  Ah, the summary has the antidote right there:

"Five years after a PSA target was first set overall growth in bus and light rail usage in England seems likely to reach the national target level by 2010, mainly because of the substantial increase in bus passenger numbers in London since 2000-01 (Figure 1). The increase in London can be attributed to the commitment of the Mayor and Transport for London, increased public subsidy, congestion charging and enhanced bus services. Usage in all other regions has declined, however, and it seems unlikely that the target for growth in every region will be achieved."

OK.  London, according to the cross-party Conservative-led committee charged with investigating these things, is in fact the clearest outrider you could want.  Figure 1 shows a nice, long positive line with London next to it and a series of short negative lines (including North West, which to be fair is next best) for the rest of England.  At the bottom we find:

"Source: Department for Transport"

Phil Taylor is therefore completely busted on this one.  Next:

"Financially London's buses are a disaster. On the current account TfL lost £617 million on the buses alone in 2006/7. In 2006/7 every bus journey cost TfL 87p but they only managed to collect 55p. Doh! Their bus fare dodging bill is £46.7 million of which £8 million is down to the bendy buses that Boris is seeking to replace. With headline cash fares of £2 and Oyster fares of £1.50 something is clearly awry."

 Firstly, Phil has his fares wrong - Oyster bus fares are 90p everywhere all the time - which seriously affects his credibility on this point; to be nearly 70% wrong on such a basic fact of London's bus system really isn't acceptable.  Something is, indeed, clearly awry, but it's not in London - another excerpt from the PAC report:

"The Department believed operators would act rationally to maximise profits and hence would not seek to drive passengers off their buses. Fares had, however, risen by substantially more outside London than they had in London (Figure 3). Buses were on average 8.3 years old outside London, whereas in London they were renewed on a five yearly cycle."

Secondly, the idea that public transport should break even is round the twist - as stated earlier, the aims of providing sufficient peak capacity lead to underutilised resources off peak and are incompatible with any idea of turning a profit, not to mention that the competition essential to the efficient operation of a deregulated system and the integrated transport network essential to driving ridership growth are mutually exclusive concepts.  To sum up: you put public money in, you get an integrated efficient bus network out - see Figure 4 in the PAC report.  In any case, buses outside London are subsidised as well, but they got negative ridership growth for the money plus higher fares and older vehicles, so who's got the better record?.  Next:

"One of the Mayor’s own capital expenditure plans for the buses, announced last November, is to spend £10 million on just 10 experimental hydrogen powered buses. The Mayor might think it is his job to give US bus manufacturers R&D money but some of the rest of us are not so sure."

Now we're into the realm of high chutzpah.  This is actually the second trial, the first of which concluded in 2005 and was part EU funded and came about in conjunction with 8 other cities, zero-emission buses being extremely interesting from the point of view of emissions, noise, particulates, David Cameron etc. to a wide variety of operators.  The cost of £9.65m is for the full five years including parts, maintenance etc. and for bleeding edge transport technology isn't all that much.  Now compare Boris's wholly unnecessary Routemaster plan.  We now know that hiring conductors would cost £8 million/year * 5 years * 3 shifts = £120m and will get you laughed at rather than seen as a world leader in environmental development.  In any case, £2.6m comes from central government.

If you really want to piss money up the wall, try commissioning a bespoke design of open platformed bus harking back to the 1950s but with worse maneouverability and capacity than existing off the shelf designs and zero export potential.  In other words, back Boris.

Talking of which, Phil is a businessman.  Let's see what he thinks Boris' Big Idea will cost:

"It does not take much wit to work out how you replace one capital asset, the bendy buses, which will have a finite life in any case, with another, newer one, the new Routemaster, and to fund this from the savings you will make by having bus conductors to clamp down on the fare dodging"

Hmm.  He reckons £8m a year in fraud on the bendy buses and indeed it is about three times higher than on conventional routes.  However, this means that if you get this down to the same fraud rate as on other buses you'll only save £5.3m a year.  At an estimated £200k for a new RM this will buy 26.5 buses a year so with 620 to buy (just to replace all the bendy buses) you'll be able to fund them from the savings in a surprisingly short 23 years (or 15.5 if you manage to completely eliminate fraud).  This isn't counting the cost of the extra drivers and conductors, of course - if you do that you find you start making a loss and would be better off leaving the freeloaders alone and keeping the bendies.

In other words, fraud on bendy buses is tiny compared to the waste of money involved in replacing bendy buses with twin crew open platform son of Routemasters and is therefore most efficiently tackled by targetting revenue protection officers at peak times and known hot spots.  Phil is therefore busted.  Again.  I do hope he doesn't run his business like this.

 "The trouble is this kind of argument is difficult to communicate against a background of Livingstone inspired hysteria and misinformation."

The trouble is this kind of argument is industrial-grade horseshit.  If I were the Livingstone camp I'd have this guy's self-righteous crap on billboards across the capital as a ghastly warning.

Nearly at the end:

"The buses still tend to be a Zone 1 issue and Boris is busily running the outer boroughs talking about their problems."

Now we're finally getting some sense.  As mentioned before, Boris' strategy is entirely suburban, playing on fear of inner city crime and opposition to car use restrictions to try and get elected.  This explains his entirely non-serious and unworkable bus policies - none of the people he's trying to reach seriously think it matters, they just want someone who'll readjust the city for their 4x4s and school runs.  Hence the leak today that Daniel Moylan might be in the running for chairman of TfL (a job that no one expects Boris to be able to do, so he's going to have to pay someone else to).  Moylan's actually written two CiF articles.  One's attacking the £25 Band G congestion charge rise, the other is about 'naked streets'.  Neither has much to say about buses, tubes, rail or indeed public transport at all. Obviously the Tories' ideal man for the job, then.