Morning:
8°c
As Baftas rain down on Slumdog Millionaire, the Evening Standard's news pages today suggest an even better route to riches than winning a TV quiz. You just join the senior management of Transport for London.
One hundred and twenty-three top TfL managers, we report, earned more than £100,000 last year. Their average pay was £140,000 — £2,500 higher than the Mayor's. Fifteen earn more than the Prime Minister. The top earner made £540,000 — almost double the prize, by the way, that the Slumdog hero won in the film.
TfL is no more than a local municipal transport operator, albeit a large and important one. But it has eight times as many six-figure managers as the Treasury — which is responsible for the entire UK economy.
It would never, of course, be a good time for a story like this to come out. But now, exactly a week after the transport system was halted by snow, is an especially bad time. Halted by snow? No, the transport network was halted by the bad management of a widely foreseen event.
They didn't leave trains running all through Sunday night to keep the tracks clear (though they did the next night); they pulled all the buses, even though many streets were passable.
The Standard did a freedom-of-information request on the six-figure managers. Not one of the 123 has a job description which mentions emergency planning, or snow. Only eight mention the words “customer service”; only 16 are anything to do with directly operating buses and trains. The rest are accountants, policymakers, lawyers and PRs.
TfL says that its extraordinary pay levels — even its head of insurance is on six figures — are merely a reflection of its size (28,000 staff today) and task (moving four million people a day). But in the early 1980s, the then London Transport was more than twice as big — and only one person, the chief executive, earned the then equivalent of £100k. I don't believe that TfL is 123 times better, or busier, than it was in the 1980s.
TfL argues that inflated pay rates are necessary to attract the best talent. If only that “talent” were in any way manifest in the service they provide! In fact, of course, there is no job market for the vast majority of these managers, except that created by their own generosity. Many are just bureaucratic lifers who got lucky.
True, Tim O'Toole, the Tube managing director, impresses most people he meets. Maybe he is worth his £425,000 salary — yet weighing up fares and reliability, the Underground is arguably the worst major metro in the world. On most things save executive pay, TfL is not the global leader it likes to think. Over the past decade, even Delhi has opened more metro lines than us — and converted all its city buses to cleaner fuel, while ours remain 99.9 per cent diesel.
Boris has taken some heat about his “sacrifice” of TfL revenue from the Venezuelan oil deal and the gas-guzzler charge, as if this were money that did not already rightfully belong to the peoples of Venezuela and
London, respectively. The more interesting question is how much he can liberate from the TfL waste-pit. There is almost certainly enough there to fund at least a year's frozen fares.
With the now state-owned bankers' bonuses due to be announced, this will be a big week for national resentment of public-sector fatcats. As the rest of us suffer, they must not go on prospering at our expense.
Your party needs you, Eddie
As London Labour leaders desperately search for someone, anyone, with enough star power to stuff Ken, and actually give them a chance of winning the next mayoral election, an exciting new name offers a flash of his knickers. “I'm going to stand for something in about 10 years' time,” the Labour-supporting comedian Eddie Izzard tells the Sunday Times, maybe “a Schwarzenegger place, where you actually hold power.” Funny, privately educated, sexually adventurous — sound familiar? Forget the 10 years, Eddie: your party needs you sooner than that.
Airstrikes are the real scandal
It's quite right that the activist Rachel Reid should be so angry at apparent government attempts to smear her in a tabloid newspaper for receiving information from a British Army officer, Lt-Col Owen McNally. But the row about that has obscured the important subject on which McNally is reportedly accused of leaking: US and British forces' extraordinary use of aerial bombardment in Afghanistan.
This practice is one of the great scandals of the Afghan war, grossly under-reported by hacks mainly confined to official embeds with Our Brave Boys. Targeting individuals, or even groups of individuals, with airstrikes — which is what we're doing — is disproportionate, inherently risky and almost guaranteed to cost innocent life. If we've been lying about the true cost, that's a far bigger deal than whatever some MoD PR whispered in the Sun's ear.
* Almost entirely unnoticed so far, I draw your attention to a disturbing item of domestic fallout from the Gaza crisis. In January 2008, the Muslim Council of Britain ended its much-criticised policy of boycotting the annual Holocaust Memorial Day. Last month, however, it reinstated the boycott and shunned the event. The first real sign, perhaps, that Gaza has, as feared, given British Muslim radicals the upper hand.
Reader views (2)
TfLhas fat cats and dirty rats...with so many highly paid managers who do littel to justify their existence, TfL also has a plethora or consultants and agency staff and spends over £100m a year on temps. Who regulates TfL and how public funds are spend, or rather dished out. So in the similar final words of Marilyn Monroe, "who do you have to know or what do you have to know?"
- Tax Payer, London, 16/02/2009 15:51
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Well how can London gain more metro and light rail lines when it has a part time mayor who cancels projects because fighting for funds would mean he would have to do something.
As for last week end removal of buses where was Boris Johnson? is the questiion this article should have been about.
Did he turn up on Sunday to see what the position was given the severe weather warnings that had been given or was he idleing his time earning more money writing newspaper articles?
I bet if Ken had still been Mayor this would have been the topic of this artice. Although Ken would have been there are by now heads would have been knocked together, afteralll what has Boris said about the failure of London's largely TORY councils failure--zilch!
Anyway Boris has been in power for nearly a year so what has he done about TFL? As they say Tempus Fugus (except if you are Boris who just drifts along with nearly 25% of his term used and only cancelled projects to show!)
Well he might have something to show by the end of this year when Red Arrow passengers loose the comfort of Artic Buses and go back to the largely STANDEE cattle trucks. A seat for every commuter you must be joking...
- Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex, 09/02/2009 15:02
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