London Underground

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am sure that her figures are absolutely right. I was going to talk about the overall passenger numbers on the tube and how they have developed in the past couple of years. Let us consider the population in our part of west London. Just last year, my local borough, Hammersmith and Fulham, had 7,300 foreign national applications for national insurance numbers. That is a huge number of people among an adult population of 120,000. My parliamentary constituency has the second largest population of any in Britain after the Isle of Wight. Most of those people are in employment and a lot of them go by tube, as my reference to the 2001 census showed. There is an enormous crush to get on that branch of the District line. The story is not necessarily much better for the Piccadilly line. In January, I met Piccadilly line managers, who had some very interesting things to say. I met them in the course of a campaign that we have been running to get the Piccadilly line to stop at Stamford Brook and/or Ravenscourt Park stations in my constituency. The District line stops there, but the Piccadilly line sails through. There seems to be no obvious reason why the Piccadilly line should not stop there and it has done so at various times, on a fairly impromptu basis. That is what the campaign is all about. The Piccadilly line managers made a strong case against the idea. They said that that the sheer number of passengers on the line meant that adding one or two stops would simply compound the overcrowding—the journey would be lengthened by two or three minutes and therefore the number of trains would be reduced. The managers told me that passenger numbers on the whole tube network have risen by 15 per cent. in the past two years. Numbers on the whole network are up by 7 per cent. year on year. The numbers on the Piccadilly line have increased the most in that time. In the past 18 months, the number of daily journeys on that line has gone up from 540,000 to 680,000. That is a 24 per cent. increase. Each Piccadilly line train, I was told, is running on average seven minutes late. Let me return to PPP. The amazing thing is that the upgrade of the Piccadilly line is not due to happen until 2014. The District line will be upgraded sometime after 2012, despite being a major route to the Olympic site. Those are some of the problems faced by my constituents. I shall talk briefly about some of the origins of the situation. We have already heard how PPP was set up. I did some research through some old press cuttings and found the most extraordinary row, which went on between 1991 and 2001 in particular but is still going on to this day, between the current Prime Minister and the Mayor of London over PPP. An article in The Independent, published on 7 June 1999, was entitled ““If your train is late, you should blame Gordon Brown””. It is an interesting article, especially when we see that it was written by Ken Livingstone. He went on to say:"““We all know that when John””—" the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott)—"““settled on 'Public Private Partnership'…as the means to raise the resources, it was because it was the only option the Treasury would sanction.””"