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The Times: Tube firm’s contract threatened after safety system fails

LONDON UNDERGROUND has issued the first emergency direction to a contractor since the Tube’s part-privatisation two years ago, prompting fears that Ken Livingstone is trying to undermine the £30 billion Public Private Partnership.

London Underground (LU), which is controlled by the London Mayor’s Transport for London, has sent its own inspectors into two train depots after poor maintenance caused an emergency braking sytem to fail four times in the past month.

It’s the way this story was written that interested me more than anything else – that private companies weigh human life against profit in no longer news as far as I’m concerned.

The fault on the Northern Line was first reported on December 9, when a driver was ordered to run through a signal that had jammed on red. The train should have stopped automatically as it passed the light, but this did not happen. The emergency braking device, known as a “trip cock”, failed in tests on three more occasions. The fourth failure, last Wednesday, prompted LU to order Tube Lines to inspect all trains.

Which sounds pretty alarming. But the Times and Tube Lines, which manages the Northern, Piccadilly and Jubilee lines, chose not to focus on the risk to public safety but to deflect attention onto an uppity mayor and the unions:

Terry Morgan, chief executive of Tube Lines, admitted that [sub-contractor] Alstom’s maintenance had been inadequate. The Northern Line has been the worst-performing Tube line this year and the only one that has failed to meet PPP reliability targets.

Mr Morgan said that bad delays on the Northern Line at the weekend and yesterday were a result of union demands that each train have two drivers until trip cocks were repaired.

He suggested that LU had let itself be bullied by the RMT transport union into overreacting to the problem and leaving itself without enough drivers for a full service.

I wonder if the old trick of bashing Red Ken and the hated unions washes with commuters as they rattle down the Northern Line. The delays on the Northern Line weren’t down to safety failings but 70s throwbacks with outdated notions, they’re told. But even if Livingstone and the RMT were trying to make political hay, the side-effect is still a raised awareness of safety concerns brought about by failings in the private sector.

The maintenance was “inadequate”, safety systems had failed but it was the RMT who had “bullied” and was “overreacting”. Morgan can demonised with impunity safe in the knowledge that, if a Northern Line train skips a red light today and carnage ensues, he’ll be – unlike some of his trains – as safe as houses.