Underground a vital service for Londoners

Published: 20 May, 2010

• YOU report how maintenance and upgrade work on London Underground is to be brought back in-house (Weekend Northern line closures to be cut, May 20).

Mayor Boris Johnson has decided to acquire the shares of private contractor Tube Lines. Some of us would say, not before time.
The part-privatisation of the Tube was opposed from the beginning.

When the 30-year contracts were signed the then mayor, Ken Livingstone, did not have responsibility for London Underground.
Private-is-best ideologues in New Labour, with Gordon Brown at the Treasury, forced these public-private partnerships on the Tube.

Transport for London and Mr Livingstone inherited these contracts when they took over the running of the Underground. TfL mounted an unsuccessful court challenge.
The two private companies Metronet and Tube Lines seemed to close lines at weekends for their own convenience.

Former Camden councillor Lucy Anderson requested that the chief executive of Tube Lines, Terry Morgan, attend a public meeting with angry passengers about Northern line closures. He refused.

In 2007 Metronet went bust at huge cost to the public wallet. At the time, Mr Morgan went on the airwaves stating how Tube Lines operated with a different “business” model. This presumably meant further line closures, overruns and asking the public for even more money.

Now Tube Lines is to go at a price of more hundreds of millions of pounds.
Mr Morgan was awarded the CBE in 2009 and went on to become chairman of the Crossrail project.

Let us hope that the managers at TfL realise that with London Underground they are running a vital public service and not a for-profit commercial business.
They should realign the balance of inconvenience connected with upgrade work in favour of passengers.

They might also now drop the irritating piffle of referring to travellers as “customers”.
ERIC KRIEGER
Haverstock Road, NW5