The man in charge of London’s transport is out of town. Specifically, he’s in an engineering workshop on a Manchester industrial estate, eyeing a 200kg piece of cast iron destined to line the edge of a Crossrail tunnel. This, says Mike Brown, the new commissioner, is where investment in the capital goes – a point he is especially keen to make, with London’s funding up for review by a chancellor staking his bets on the northern powerhouse: “It’s not either/or. We’re in this together,” he says, borrowing an Osborne-ism. “I think there’s sometimes a sense that London’s had its turn, but the northern powerhouse comes from the investment in London.”
Transport for London spent £160m with suppliers from Greater Manchester last year, and the business Brown is visiting, Eaves, hopes its steel parts will also line the Northern Line extension, and possibly Crossrail 2. “The last thing we’d want is people like these guys and other suppliers to dry up.You need a continuous workstream – it’s so important, what it does for businesses and jobs.”
Brown, 51, has worked in London transport for more than quarter of a century, overseeing the upgrade of underground lines and helping the capital’s residents and visitors keep moving through the congestion of two Jubilees and the Olympics.
Now he has succeeded the the outspoken Sir Peter Hendy, new chairman of Network Rail, in the top job at a time when major projects like Crossrail are on the verge of completion, but day-to-day funding for transport is threatened.
“My style’s different... I don’t own my own bus,” says Brown of Hendy, who drives a vintage Routemaster for kicks. “What I’ve got to do is to make the same arguments Peter made, in different ways with different people, and continue to win the argument for funding for London.” Cuts have already seen TfL launch commercial ventures and hasten “modernisation” plans, in which Brown was the driving force, closing tube ticket offices and shedding hundreds of jobs. The ensuing dispute with unions fed into a standoff over the planned night tube, which Brown insists is now “close to getting sorted” and, he predicts, will lead to widespread 24-hour services across the capital.
Despite the wave of tube strikes in the last two years, Brown claims he can count on one hand the “challenging conversations” he has had with staff. He adds: “How many people would have said 15 years ago that you would have got a Tube driver to make public service announcements? Now sometimes we can’t get them to shut up. It’s fantastic.”
The commissioner’s job involves managing up as well as down, as transport is one of the few areas where the London mayor has absolute control. Under Boris Johnson, cash has been ploughed into a cable car across the Thames and a new Routemaster bus. How would Brown approach another such request?
“You always try to give advice as to where the priorities might be and where economic development would be best served. But the reality is that the mayor’s the boss, the elected politician with one of the biggest personal mandates of anyone in Europe.”
Brown claims to rarely vote and didn’t cast his ballot in the last election. “I’m very apolitical. I’m interested in the output.“ Yet at university in Belfast he was president of the student branch of the Alliance party: “I spent my whole life condemning one side or another. I was probably ahead of my time: a walking peace process.” On one election day at the height of the Troubles, he shook hands with both Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley.
After that, working for first Ken Livingstone and then Johnson might not have felt so polarising. Next up will almost certainly be either Zac Goldsmith or Sadiq Khan, and both have already mooted ideas that Brown would clearly, if diplomatically, reject: Goldsmith on negotiating with unions in public, and Khan on freezing fares. “They will all have their political aspirations, which is perfectly appropriate, and one of my jobs is to make sure we have a decent dialogue.”
He’s met the Conservative candidate several times, and “had a very good meeting with Sadiq Khan” at the Labour conference – despite Khan calling for his salary to be slashed (Brown is on a basic £356,000 and, with bonus, will pass £500,000). On Khan’s proposed fares freeze, Brown takes a diplomatic line: “It’s early days. Our view is that fares income is a significant contribution to ensuring continued investment in London. But I recognise that London has to be an affordable city for people to live and work in.”
But Brown says much of his in-tray won’t change, whoever is the next mayor: modernising the tube, managing scant roadspace between the priorities of buses, pedestrians and cycling, and improving London’s air quality.
The VW scandal has refocused attention on pollution, but a planned ultra-low emission zone won’t come into force until at least 2020. Brown says change can’t be forced through “at the stroke of the pen”. But all double-decker buses will be hybrid and all single-deckers electric by the end of the decade. The new double-decker hybrids, known as Boris buses, have been plagued by reports of problems, including a battery issue that left some of them running largely on diesel, but he said these have all been solved. The Routemasters, said Brown, had “a couple of teething problems” but are now “one of our cleanest vehicles out there”.
Despite having briefly been managing director at Heathrow – “I loved it; what’s not to like about planes?” – Brown shares mayoral scepticism over expanding the west London hub. He reckons the Davies commission has understated the new roads and railways needed if Heathrow (or indeed Gatwick) grows. There again, he says it is “self-evident” that the south-east needs new runways and a bigger hub for the long- term: “It’s not about London surviving or limping into the next phase – it’s about that next phase of evolution.”.
Brown cut short his stint at Heathrow to prepare the Tube for the 2012 Olympics and “to defy the media critics who had their headlines written about transport chaos”.
Post- Since that 2012 success, TfL has been on a high, but The early days of Brown’s career in London transport were very different than they are today: “We didn’t have much money, London had been in decline. We reduced maintenance by taking out some of the signals and points on the underground because we never thought they would be needed again. A third of Northern line trains were cancelled every morning. There were some gloomy days and tough years.”
Now the spectre of cuts looms again. While George Osborne has guaranteed £10bn for infrastructure in London this decade – and last week appointed former Labour transport secretary Lord Adonis to chair a national infrastructure commission that is likely to promote London’s next glamour project, Crossrail 2 – the so-called revenue grant to run the network is likely to be slashed. Brown says: “We already have a plan for TfL to be able to fund our own day-to-day operation in five years. But if we had to do that faster, it would be challenge.”
