Tube firms will get £90m bonus even if services do not improve
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Your support makes all the difference.Up to £90m of taxpayers' money will be paid to private companies running London Underground even if they fail to improve services.
The Secretary of State for Transport, Stephen Byers, was accused yesterday of trying to enforce a "staggeringly complicated" regime of contracts for running Tube services which will reward failure and result in the employment of "many hundreds" of extra staff to cope with the Byzantine system.
Under the scheme, the three "infracos" – consortiums taking over different parts of the infrastructure – will stop receiving bonuses only if the service is deemed more than 5 per cent worse than it is now.
Even if the service dips below that level, managers will be able to "play the system" to avoid penalties, according to Transport for London (TfL). A complex 10-step procedure is proposed for resolving disputes between the infracos and London Underground, which will still be publicly owned under TfL, and will run the trains on the privately maintained network.
Lawyers at TfL revealed a series of up to 3,000 bizarre formulae for measuring the performance of the infracos. Anything less than the width of a Tube ticket is not considered to be litter, so confetti liberally spread over a platform would not count but a solitary ticket would. The amount of chewing gum on station walls would also have to be measured to find out if the infraco was liable for a fine. The amount of dirt on stations will also be calculated, and its importance will vary depending on location.
A senior lawyer at Transport for London, who has worked on transit systems throughout the world, said: "The proposed system of contracts is like nothing I've ever seen. It is unworkable, unmanageable and unenforceable."
Another senior manager said: "There still a chance to stop all this. It's not like Railtrack, where the Government is trying to dig itself out of a hole."
London's transport commissioner, Bob Kiley, a fierce critic of the public private partnership (PPP) planned for the Tube, has written to Sir Malcolm Bates, chairman of London Transport, urging him to make the calculations simpler.
His team is picking its way through 2,800 pages of information included in 135 volumes of PPP contracts which will determine how the network is run.
Sir Malcolm accused Mr Kiley of trying to score political points because he and TfL have "failed to grasp the contract". The PPP helps to formalise necessary ways of measuring train and station performance, Sir Malcolm said. "This is a good thing in that it ensures everyone involved understands what is expected of a customer-focused organisation."
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