London Underground

The hon. Lady shakes her head, but I stood on a platform day in, day out with the Conservative mayoral candidate in many venues; I can say that the Conservative party was seeking total privatisation as an answer. Ken Livingstone had in this House voted twice for the PPP; only later was he converted to the idea that it was a flawed way to manage the future funding and structure of the tube. I am glad that he was converted. In the end, the struggle became one between London and the Treasury, and I was glad to be part of it. The ideology set a dangerous context. It created an environment in which flawed decision making took place. Ideology overrode common sense and clear, analytical thinking. First, there was no asset register. Teams were trying to negotiate the upgrade of a system when they had no idea of its underlying condition. That automatically meant that there was likely to be a disaster, no matter what the outcome. How does one get value for money in such circumstances? Then there was the negotiating team. I do not want to point fingers at very fine individuals, but put a fine individual in the wrong place and there is not a successful outcome. All the bidders—not just the successful bidders, Tube Lines and Metronet, but all the original ones—made sure that on their teams were world-class negotiators, whose skill and focus was to negotiate procurement contracts. The team that represented TfL—it was only nominally a TfL team; essentially, it was a Treasury-driven team—was largely made up of and driven by people with good academic and consulting backgrounds. Their skill set was wrong for taking on the kind of hard-nosed challenge involved in bids for which large amounts of money are at stake. The consultants have been mentioned; the Treasury and the Government will have to think through the selection of consultants far more. The contract depended on successful risk transfer. One cannot discuss such a thing with people from investment banks. Such people know how to do deals; they are not part of organisations that take, carry and hold risk. They therefore do not understand risk transfer, and the same applies to consultants who come out of the various accounting firms. Such people have the wrong skill set—the Government were told that over and again, but never listened.