SIMON EMMETT . net

A lot has been made this week in London about the Arbiter’s Report to a claim from TubeLines for extra money to pay for their upgrade works. The claim, under the PPP was, as we all know, for an extra £1.7billion. Thankfully, for Londoners, the Arbiter ruled that London Underground should only pay £400million.

Now, this leaves a double headache for Londoners. Firstly the extra £0.4billion that London Underground now has to find, on top of the massive financial black hole left behind from Ken Livingstone’s administration. Boris has quite rightly said that the government should find the funds for this, as they came up with the PPP. Or, to put a more finer point on it, it was Gordon Brown as Chancellor that created the contract.

Everyone in London, London Underground, or in the business world saw from the outset that this was the wrong thing to do. The Privatisation of British Rail had many faults, but at least it didn’t leave the taxpayers picking up horrendously large bills when things went wrong. With the PPP it is a double whammy for taxpayers, we pay the private companies to do the work, and pay more when it goes wrong, as in the reintegration of Metronet back into TfL.

The other issue is the shortfall in money from Tubelines’ perspective. The request for more money has come up £1.3billion short, so what next. Will we see upgrades cancelled, and refurbishment scaled back? or will we see an exact repeat of what happened to Metronet when the Arbiter ruled against their request for extra funding? Either way the future seems very uncertain.

This mess is Gordon Brown’s, he designed the PPP contract and it’s failure can only be attributed to him,and him alone. His economic record is now clear to be seen. He designs flawed contract that sees the taxpayer pick up the bill, and run the economy into the ground.

That is a common theme with Labour, when things go right the taxpayer pays, and when things go wrong the taxpayer pays.