London Underground

I start by saying how much I regret the fact that the Chair of our Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), is unable to be here. I wish her all the best, and I hope that she makes a swift recovery and returns to her duties in the House as soon as possible. It is inevitable in a debate on the failure of Metronet that everyone will repeat the arguments of 10 years ago, when people were raising questions about the public-private partnership, and they have jumped to the conclusion that the entire PPP has failed. I say to the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) that if he reads the conclusions of the report, he will find that paragraphs 21 to 24 all refer to severe failures of Metronet and its internal structures, but they do not condemn PPP. We take a strong position on the failures of the part of the PPP that Metronet was involved with, but the Committee is far from saying that PPP is a bad idea. Many of us in this House come from local government, where public-private partnerships are commonplace. It would be a foolish position to take to say that we were flatly opposed to PPP. The hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) is unfortunately no longer in his place. I used to share my office with the previous Member for that constituency when it was a Labour seat, and I have to say that he made a lot more sense. At the 1997 general election, the Conservatives' manifesto stated unequivocally that they would introduce proposals to privatise the London Underground. A little later, in 2000, their mayoral candidate, Steve Norris, was cited in The Times on 29 January:"““Steven Norris, the Tory candidate for London mayor, is to support Labour proposals for a public-private partnership for the London Underground.””" The article went on to say:"““Campaign aides yesterday made clear that the plans had been drawn up with the backing of William Hague””—" some echoes there of what happened to the Liberal party last week. Only a few months later, the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) reverted to Conservative old ways and said:"““We want fully to privatise the underground””.—[Official Report, 6 November 2000; Vol. 356, c.107.]" Londoners are clearly not protected by Conservative proposals. Conservatives would seek to use the private sector in the PPP in future. Their mayoral candidate already has a hole of £100 million in his budget, so Londoners know what to expect should they elect him.