Government must bail out the Tube

23 Oct 03
Whitehall must bail out Transport for London if the public-private partnership contracts cannot keep London Underground safe for travellers, the Greater London Assembly demanded this week.

24 October 2003

Whitehall must bail out Transport for London if the public-private partnership contracts cannot keep London Underground safe for travellers, the Greater London Assembly demanded this week.

GLA transport committee chair Lynne Featherstone expressed serious concern following derailments of two Tube trains in three days.

'If they find something was wrong and mend it that is one thing, but is this a pattern? Has there been a fall-off in maintenance since the PPP started? We need to know what the contract says,' she said.

'Given the government imposed the PPP on us, if the contracts do not ensure safety, then the government will have to bail us out of trouble.'

The first derailment was on a surface section of the Piccadilly line on October 17. It was followed on October 19 by a carriage jumping the track in a Northern Line tunnel, injuring seven people.

Both lines are maintained by private consortiums under the controversial PPP imposed by the government on TfL against protests from London Mayor Ken Livingstone. Metronet is responsible for the section of the Piccadilly Line where the first accident occurred, and Tube Lines maintains the Northern Line.

Senior officers from the two maintenance consortiums and from TfL were due to appear before the committee on October 23.

Livingstone said he would press the government for emergency legislation to suspend the maintenance contracts if necessary, though he admitted the incidents might simply result from '19 years of under-investment'.

But he said 'all my instincts' suggested that the partial privatisation was the root of the problem because it obscured responsibilities. He is to call all parties to a safety summit.

Meanwhile, he has asked the government to provide TfL with an extra £900m a year over the 2005/08 period, a rise of 19%. He said this would be essential to maintain London's position as Europe's fastest-growing city. 'The whole country's productivity is intimately bound up with London's success,' he said.

The extra cash would allow work to start on four tramways, extensions to the Docklands Light railway, and the Thames Gateway Bridge.

PFoct2003

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