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Comment: Give us the full Metronet truth
Evening Standard comment6 Nov 2007
The truth behind the collapse of the Tube contractor Metronet is being buried. A report from the London Underground arbiter Chris Bolt on how the Public Private Partnership for the Tube ended in the consortium's humiliating demise is being kept secret, according to the arbiter himself, because Transport for London and Metronet do not want it published. It is bad enough that the bigger of the two consortia responsible for modernising the Tube should be in the hands of administrators after it failed to deliver the performance the £30 billion PPP was supposed to achieve - using a structure which cost £500 million in legal and consulting fees to create. That means many of the improvements promised have been delayed or may not happen at all, with grim consequences for a creaking system.
Yet the cloak of secrecy now being wrapped around the whole affair makes matters worse. This country urgently needs to invest in public transport. The PPP was Gordon Brown's vision for introducing private capital and transferring the risks of investment to the private sector. With Metronet, it went badly wrong. Policymakers and the public alike need to know as much as possible about why that happened. Publishing the arbiter's draft direction, revealing the financial and operational state of Metronet before it finally left the rails, would help.
At present, we do not even know how much the collapse has cost the taxpayer, and exactly how far Metronet's original improvement programme has been delayed. This shows a disgraceful lack of accountability at a time when vast sums are at stake, along with Tube users' hopes of a better future and London's ability to sustain its economic growth. Instead of burying the truth in a dark tunnel, TfL should let this report see the light of day. If it does not, the inevitable conclusion to draw is that the draft direction reveals more failings in TfL's own dealings with Metronet than we have suspected.
