London Underground

I would take the hon. Gentleman through the miscalculations—[Hon. Members: ““Go on!””] If I am to allow the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) to get in, I cannot go down that route. We are considering the failure of the unbridled privatisation of the London underground. Tube Lines has a completely different internal structure, containing incentives and higher materialisation thresholds, which encourage it to incentivise, innovate and keep its costs down. Metronet was a cash cow, on which stakeholders and shareholders fed until there was nothing left. It was unable to impose any form of accountability or efficiency on the stakeholders and shareholders. Moneylenders to Metronet did not impose any restrictions and the whole edifice came tumbling down. We finished up with 50 delayed station upgrades and no risk transfer from the public to the private sector. In the short time available, I want to emphasise to the Government that there are lessons to be learned, as everybody has said. We must not repeat the mistakes that we made in the run-up to PPP 10 years ago. The London underground needs stability and time to plan ahead. We cannot enter into another enforced PPP, whereby a private sector partner is levered in to take over the contracts that London Underground currently runs. The administrators have attempted to introduce the private sector and they have failed. Indeed, they said that pursuing that would be a waste of public money. We need London Underground to retain the management of Metronet's contracts and a period of stability for the benefit of Londoners. Metronet has let Londoners down and we must not put another Metronet in place to repeat that exercise.