Norman Baker
we’re putting an end to that.’ Warming to his theme on NR, Baker continued: ‘We’re also putting great pressure on NR to be more efficient in its maintenance and to get costs down in the interests of the passenger, but also to get the occupation time down on the railway. There should be more offsite fabrication and more single line working and we don’t want Sundays taken out. Last time I checked at my station, Lewes, 26 weeks out of 52 there had been engineering works going on – what are they doing? Should I be happy that they’re so occupied on my patch? No I’m not. I want them to be dealing with things differently so the trains are running. Sunday is no longer a dead day, it is a big day for the railways – it’s a day when people want to travel, and a day of potential growth for the industry. I don’t want people to think ‘Oh is the railway running or isn’t it?’ I want them to think it is running and so if there is engineering work to do, why aren’t we doing it on a Monday and Tuesday evening at 10pm at night and taking out last trains for example? We are making progress, the evidence from NR is that possessions are coming down and my efforts on reducing replacement buses will help, but I want to see them go further and I want it to be the case that rail possessions are the exception rather than the rule.’
Baker recalled a story told to him by Andrew Adonis when
he was Transport Secretary. ‘He went to visit Japan to see the high speed bullet train and asked them ‘When did you last shut this line for engineering works for repairs?’ And the Japanese had a huddle and they came back and said ‘1976’. I think we have to do rather better than we are doing in this country on that.’
A vision for the future
As a general wish list for five years’ time, Baker would like to see either the completion of or substantial progress with the investment programme. ‘We are electrifying 880 miles of track… that’s one in nine miles electrified compared to nine miles electrified under Labour in 13 years. I’d like the railway to be as accessible as possible so we get more people out of choice using rail. I’d like to see carbon emissions reduced and that means electric trains but it also means better practices on the railways themselves so we don’t have diesel trains sitting in sidings all night with lights on. And I’d like us to have successfully introduced our Fares and Ticketing review, which will improve the offer for passengers.’
Station manager Baker
On his website, I was intrigued to read that Baker had been a station manager after university. ‘I was employed by BR and trained up on the white collar staff programme and they gave me Hornsey station. I was the only person dealing with all the bookings and selling tickets, apart from a couple of guys on
the platforms. Saying I ran it is a slightly grand way of putting it but I was in charge of that station I suppose, answering to Finsbury Park which was the main base. I didn’t stay very long – but if I’d stayed longer I could have got free first class travel for life from BR so I made a mistake there didn’t I.’ I wondered, when he was running his small station, did Baker ever imagine that he would end up in his current position. ‘No, but then if you stand as a Liberal you don’t really expect to end up either a) elected or b) a minister. But the good news is that people have historically stood for my party because they believe in it rather than as a career move, because it certainly wasn’t a career move 20 years ago to stand for the Liberals.’
Another thing that stands out is his enormously diverse range of interests, from David Kelly to meeting the Dali Lama. ‘Well there are other MP’s who have interests of course, sometimes eclectic ones – Simon Burns next door has a big interest in American politics and his room is full of American paraphernalia. But I think we need outside interests. The worst kind of MP is a person who has left university, gone straight into their party HQ, become a kind of 12 year-old spotty nerd in Downing Street somewhere, and never having had a proper job, then becomes an MP at 27 and knows nothing about life. They’re not good MP’s and I happen to think my background, and it wasn’t worked out this way, I didn’t work it out like Michael Heseltine on the back of an envelope – but it so happens that running a station, being an environmental researcher, a teacher, a regional director for a record company, running a wine shop – all those different things I’ve done, actually its quite a nice mix of private and public and I think it’s quite a good preparation for being an MP.’
Asked if he would like to add anything else, Baker defers ‘I don’t know but these guys will probably tell me things I shouldn’t have said,’ he laughed. And then when I’d switched the tape off he showed that he has a deep affection for the industry so many know and love. ‘Working at Finsbury Park station years ago when it was under BR, I was told to read out all the stations to Cambridge. And I turned to this guy in the office who’d been there for some time, a rather wizened guy, and said to him, ‘Cor that took a long time to read out all these stations’. He said ‘You don’t want to bother with that. What we do is you see that platform over there for the fast trains coming through to the north? You wait ‘till there’s a train getting near that. You then start saying, ‘The train now approaching platform 3 is for…you then say nothing while the train goes through making a hell of a noise, then after it’s gone through you say ‘and Cambridge’. •
September 2013 Page 49
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