London deserves better than this Tube Lines farce

We were told it was going to be done by Christmas. We were told that the much-vaunted Public Private Partnership system was going to deliver the whip-cracking commercial efficiency to upgrade our creaking Tube network.

We were misled. It seems unbelievable and grossly irresponsible that we are now proposing to expose the Northern line, one of the most vital transport arteries in Britain, to the same chaotic procedures.

Not only is Tube Lines asking for 16 months of evening closures, Monday to Thursday. It wants 82 weekend part or full-line closures. What grounds can we have for thinking it would be able to keep even to that appalling timetable of despair?

Tube Lines told us it would need 50 weekends for the Jubilee line. It has had 125 and counting, and we still don't know when it will be complete.

It is as though the city was in the grip of a bunch of rogue builders who have been given a vast fee to spend three months doing up the bathroom.

For a whole month your family has been prevented from using the bath at critical times of the day, even though it sounds as if not much work is actually being done on the bath. And at the end of the month you not only find you are now being banned from the shower and the sink — before the bath is remotely ready — but that you will have to pay for the cost of the delay.

But it gets worse. How would you feel if the various senior plumbers were not being paid the normal rate for your bathoom? They were being "seconded" in exchange for "secondment fees" that were double the normal rate.

That, incredibly, is what is happening under PPP contracts. Colossal sums are being siphoned out of Tube Lines and taxpayers are picking up the bill. In the next seven and a half years it is estimated that these "secondment fees" will generate £400 million of pure profit for the Tube Lines shareholders, engineering firm Bechtel and Spanish Heathrow owners Ferrovial.

It is larceny. And yet under the terms of the contracts we are powerless to stop it. It is a savage irony that £400 million is the difference between the £4.4 billion bill the PPP arbiter has set for the next period of work, and what London Underground can afford to pay.

Which would Londoners want? To cut £400 million from core transport budgets, for example by cancelling the upgrade of the Piccadilly line? Or to cut the profits to Tube Lines' shareholders?

It is time to bring an end to this demented system. I don't have some Trotskyite ambition to take back the track. Whatever happens, the private sector will do the job — but we cannot allow them to do it on these terms.

It is time to contrast London Underground's successful management of the Victoria line upgrades with the Jubilee line debacle. We need a system that allows London Underground far more control of why and when closures are really necessary.

Above all, we need a system that delivers value for the taxpayer. Londoners deserve nothing less.