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£2m to airbrush Metronet out of London commuter history
Jonathan Prynn15 Apr 2009
Plans to wipe out the final traces of Metronet, one of the most unloved names in London's transport history, are to cost passengers and taxpayers up to £2million.
Surviving vestiges of the consortium - including headed paper, pens and email addresses - will be removed this week by London Underground.
It ends a 12-year history that began when the Metronet group was formed to bid for contracts under the incoming Labour government's plans to part-privatise the Tube network. But Metronet, which ran two thirds of the system, collapsed into administration with debts of £2billion in July 2007 after becoming a by-word for incompetence and cost overruns.
A four-page memo to its 7,000 staff from managers at the current owner, London Underground, reveals how the phased death is to be handled.
In the first stage, which began before the Easter weekend, staff were told they could no longer admit to working for Metronet. The memo advises employees: "If you are asked who you work for you should already be saying London Underground." From this week all orders of branded marketing material "eg mouse mats, pens etc" and business cards must have London Underground rather than Metronet logos on them.
In the second phase, starting yesterday, all Metronet branding at its Templar House headquarters in High Holborn was to be ripped down and replaced by its LU equivalent. Computer screensavers and wallpapers will also change from Metronet to LU.
But the main changes happen from Monday when "the Metronet Rail name should not be used internally or in any external correspondence" including contact "with the media or stakeholders". Email signatures, letterheads, compliments slips, or Powerpoint presentation templates bearing the Metronet name will be banned and "all main switchboards will greet callers with 'London Underground'."
The final mopping-up of Metronet branding, including the scrapping of the website and replacement of uniforms, will take place "over time", says the memo from LU's internal communications executive Stephen Jones.
Rebranding experts said the bill for removing the Metronet name could be as much as £2million.
There was no response from LU.
The Metronet name is believed to have been conjured up round a boardroom table by its shareholders - engineering firms Balfour Beatty and WS Atkins, train maker Bombardier, energy group EDF and Thames Water - in 1997 simply to be used for their contract bid.
It took over the running and maintenance of eight Underground lines in April 2003 - Bakerloo, Central, Victoria, Waterloo & City, Circle, Hammersmith & City, District and Metropolitan.
But a succession of cost overruns, late running maintenance and derailments, quickly attracted public ridicule to the name.
In one of the most notorious incidents three lines were reduced to chaos during the morning rush hour in a May heatwave in 2006 when tracks buckled because they had not been prepared for warmer weather.
Rail expert Roger Ford said: "The Metronet name didn't have any value for passengers, so far as they were concerned it was just an annoying thing that kept closing stations."
Reader views (1)
If only we could do this with Brown and Labour, i.e. write them out of history. Brown was the big proponent of the PPP, which in the main was Metronet. Apart from the current banking fiasco, Brown has cost the U.K. billions and billions of pounds in other ways. Remember his sale of a large part of the U.K.'s gold holdings when gold was valued at US$250/ounce (now at US$900/ounce)?
- Phil Jones, London UK, 15/04/2009 10:38
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