Caroline Pidgeon

Local Liberal Democrat Councillors Lisa Rajan, David Hubber, Paul Noblet, Simon Hughes MP and myself have been inundated with emails from concerned passengers in Surrey Docks about the future of Greenland Pier. This also affects people who use the service and live just over in Lewisham.

We held a meeting on Monday morning with Gill Davies, Southwark Council's Director of Environment and Leisure. Our main aim for the meeting was to get Southwark Council to stop the temporary closure of the pier on 28th February, and instead keep it open for the Thames Clippers boats to use. We know how vital and valued the commuter boat service is and how many people rely on it. We also wanted to ask for a temporary pontoon to be installed if the existing one really does need to be removed for repairs.

We divided the pier issue into two parts - the immediate future, following the official Notice to Quit served on Thames Clippers, and the longer term future of the pier.

As far as the immediate situation is concerned, the Notice to Thames Clippers was, we were told, a legal requirement to enable the pier to be inspected and repaired as necessary. Thames Clippers should be granted a temporary licence to enable them to continue to use the pier until such time as it may be removed temporarily for any works. We have stressed that there should be no discontinuance of the service on 28 February, nor until it is essential for the pier to be closed, and we were led to believe that this would be the case. We also asked that users should be given one month's notice before the pontoon is actually removed.

As news emerges that TfL has had to pay £25m to the company that owns Canary Wharf in compensation for the major delays to the Jubilee line upgrade, Caroline Pidgeon commented:

"Users of the Jubilee line have faced years of misery as the upgrade programme over-ran. To learn now that millions of pounds has been shelled out to Canary Wharf Group, while passengers have not been compensated, adds insult to injury.

"It is time the Mayor and TfL were honest with Londoners over the real cost of this long-standing fiasco. We are entitled to know the details of every penny that has been spent."

You can read full coverage in the Evening Standard, the Docklands & East London Advertiser and the Wharf website.

The River Thames is a forgotten highway, a tube line effectively, across the centre of London and yet under-resourced in terms of transport.

In January, the London Assembly Transport Committee is looking into river transport services - so Caroline and other Committee members spent a chilly morning in early December out and about on the river with Thames Clippers from Putney to Erith, looking at the challenges and opportunities to really expand river transport services for Londoners.

After years of disruption on the Jubilee Line new evidence has come to light revealing some of the real costs of the years of dragged out weekend closures.

Following extensive freedom of information requests Caroline Pidgeon, Leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group, has now discovered that the costs of the weekend closures since April 2007 on the Jubilee Line include:

• 32 million passengers being affected by the weekend closures, leading to a loss in ticket revenue of a staggering £15.7 million
• Transport for London having to spend £13 million on replacement buses

Commenting on these immense figures Caroline Pidgeon said:

“A year ago the Mayor and Transport for London admitted that the upgrade programme on the Jubilee Line would slip once again. After years of disruption to passengers, communities and businesses they announced a further year of weekend closures which has only just finished.