London Underground

I am pleased to contribute to the debate because the performance of the District line and the tube generally constitutes a major part of my constituents' lives. If they have a bad time getting to work on the tube, they generally have a bad day. The debate is important for Londoners because it is about their day-to-day quality of life in this city. I welcome the report. When Metronet collapsed, a full inquiry was needed and the report makes some valid comments about and has some valid insights into what happened. I was especially struck by the comments of Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, which appear on page 14. He referred to the £5 billion to £7.5 billion spent on the tube network in the past five years, saying that it"““is a huge amount of money to have delivered—at the very best—a train service that's overall no different””" from"““when we began.””" My constituents, who have to use the tube every day, would agree with that. I shall spend a couple of minutes considering our experience locally. On our local District line, we need a more reliable service, more capacity and signalling. That was in the PPP contract for Metronet. The work was not going to happen overnight, but it was initially pencilled in for, not today or tomorrow but probably 2012, perhaps lasting until 2018. My constituents are now concerned about the major question mark over those promised performance improvements that the failure of the PPP contract has raised. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) pointed out, the backdrop to that is people doing what the Mayor wants them to do—using the tube to get to work every day. As I said in an intervention, in the past three years we have seen the equivalent of three trains-worth of extra people using the Wimbledon branch of the District line every day. That is one extra tube-worth of people every year. Our concern is not that the planned improvements will not happen, but that when they do happen, they will merely catch up with the extra capacity that we needed anyway, so we will not see much of an improvement. Our daily experience is one of being crushed on overcrowded tubes—certainly not pleasant at any time of the year, particularly not in the summer—delays, being stuck in tunnels, being unable to contact people when late for meetings at work and long waits at Earl's Court station coming home, with thousands of other people waiting for the occasional Wimbledon-bound train finally to arrive. My constituents find it particularly galling that they are never asked what they think about the service, but treated merely as people to be shunted around on it. The report does not cover this, but London Underground has never asked them their views following the Metronet collapse. I felt so frustrated by the lack of feedback from customers that I set up what I call my MP textline, so that people can rant to me on their mobiles. They sign up on my website, get a mobile number and can text me when services are poor.