The Subterranean Railway (37 page)

The Conservative government created a new organization, named London Regional Transport, though still known to the public as London Transport, to run the Underground and the buses. It suffered, as ever, from interference from central government, and now that Thatcherism was in full flow the ethos had to change too. The era of ‘London Transport does everything’, from making its own pies at its factory in Croydon and designing special caps for its Rasta staff to the heavy engineering of its trains, was, at last, beginning to be challenged. The role of the Acton Works, where trains had undergone both minor and major servicing, was re-evaluated as a study found that most of the work was overpriced when compared with outside contractors. This led, eventually, to most maintenance being spread out to individual line depots. Engineering was divided into ‘client’ and ‘contractor’ functions so that contracts could be let out competitively to the private sector. For the first time, under the Act which created LRT, London Underground had to seek competitive tenders for all major work.

Again, the funding situation for London Underground looked bad, with little attention being paid to its investment needs. A pattern developed by which every year there would be a lengthy process of negotiation between the LT management and the Treasury, which
would be resolved late in the autumn when the chairman would be called in to be told how much money London Underground would have to invest in the following financial year. Some years there would be adequate amounts (even, very occasionally, more than expected), but most years there was not enough.

A brilliant description of this process was given to me in an interview for a previous book
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by Peter Ford, who was chairman of London Transport between 1994 and 1998. He recalled how every year he was called into the Department for Transport to see the Secretary of State: ‘It reminded me of my public school when you went to see the headmaster. The finance director and I would go in and the Secretary of State would produce an envelope and I would have to sit there and open it. The first time I did not know what to do and just sat there. After that I realised you have to open it and read the first line of the second paragraph – the first paragraph is just niceties – and that would give you the hard number, your budget for the year.’

That was no way to run an organization which needed a long-term planning framework in order to ensure that the system was in a reasonable state. The worst two disasters on the Underground system, at Moorgate and King’s Cross, occurred during this period when underinvestment and short-term political interference had almost brought the system to its knees.
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While that may have been a coincidence in the case of Moorgate, it certainly was not at King’s Cross. Apart from these two catastrophes there has been no Underground accident in peacetime in which more than a dozen people have been killed, a remarkable and proud record for the system during its 140 years.

Moorgate was a strange disaster in that the underlying cause has never been explained. The facts are simple. Moorgate was the terminal stop of that odd little stub of a line, the Great Northern & City, which at the time was a branch of the Northern line, although now it is no longer part of the Underground as it is served by National Rail trains. A train packed with commuters at quarter to nine on the morning of
28 February 1975 did not slow down as it approached the station and instead continued through and slammed into the wall twenty-two yards beyond the platform end at an estimated speed of forty mph. The results were horrific with the front carriages being concertinaed into each other. Some of the victims were found dead but still standing and clutching the straps or sitting and holding newspapers, killed by the impact or impaled by twisted metal and broken glass. Others survived thanks to the heavily upholstered seats which fell on them. Forty-three people were killed and seventy injured, the high proportion of deaths being a result of the fast speed of the crash. It took five days to get all the dead out, including the driver who was clearly the focus of the investigation. Had he been drunk? There was evidence of alcohol in his blood but this was probably an irrelevance because the production of alcohol is part of the natural decaying process. Or depressed as a result of his marital problems and therefore suicidal? Or in some kind of trance state induced, perhaps, by a medical condition? We will never know. The investigators found that previously he had had a good record and was known to be conscientious.

Although there was no obvious technical fault, perhaps the automatic train stop system used throughout the network at other signals should have been introduced at a potentially disastrous dead end such as the tunnel at the station. Apart from that, Moorgate was just bad luck; but King’s Cross
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was a disaster that illustrated everything that had gone wrong with the system in the previous forty years since nationalization. Not only was it eminently preventable, there was a certain inevitability about the disaster. At 7.45 p.m. on 18 November 1987 a fire that had been smouldering for half an hour under the Piccadilly line escalator suddenly erupted into a fireball that killed thirty-one people. The accident and subsequent report by Desmond Fennell
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revealed a shocking state of affairs in the Underground, symptomatic of an organization in decline. There was a long catalogue of reasons why the fire, probably started by a lighted match from a smoker, spread so quickly: junk, much of it inflammable, had been
left under the escalator for years; station employees were allowed to ‘bunk off’ work, either simply not turning up or having extended meal breaks, leaving the concourse severely understaffed; fires were treated as an unavoidable routine hazard rather than as preventable; there had been no training in emergency procedures; and the management was sloppy and remote.

It was, perhaps, not surprising to find that London Underground was in such a mess after years of neglect; still, it was an amazing testimony to the legacy of Ashfield and Pick that it had taken so long for its decline to reach crisis point. King’s Cross forced London Underground into a complete reappraisal of the way it was run. Following the accident, the management system was reorganized and modernized. No longer was promotion based solely on longevity, and more managers were recruited from outside the organization.

The welcome rush of investment funds which became available to London Underground after the King’s Cross disaster was, within a couple of years, cut back as the recession of the early 1990s hit hard. Again, money for routine maintenance and refurbishment was in short supply because most of the capital spending went on the creation of a new line, the Jubilee Line Extension. The Jubilee line itself, running from Charing Cross to Stanmore, had been opened in 1979 after lengthy delays and a name change from Fleet line. The only new section was a tunnel between Baker Street and Charing Cross, since the rest had been hived off from the Bakerloo and the primary purpose had been to relieve congestion on the older line.

Terminating at Charing Cross was clearly an interim solution, and it was always intended to continue the line through central London and out the other side. But where? The original name suggested that it would run to Fleet Street, an area ill-served by the Underground, but the Tory government’s obsession with regenerating Docklands, supposedly a private sector enterprise but funded by considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money, determined that the route should go through south-east London and back across the Thames to Canary
Wharf and thence to Stratford. The developers of Canary Wharf, Olympia & York, had lobbied hard to ensure that their massive site – which included the highest building in Britain – should be linked into the Underground system, and had promised to pay part of the cost. In the event, the company went bust and the conditions under which they were supposed to pay over the money were never entirely fulfilled; therefore their contribution has been minute – less than 5 per cent – in relation to the eventual £3.5bn cost of the scheme. Yet, because of the concentration on Docklands, another long-mooted scheme, Chelsea to Hackney, which showed far greater community benefits, remains on the drawing board, with no possibility of being built, at best, until the 2020s. Fortunately, at the insistence of local politicians and the managing director of the Underground at the time, Denis Tunnicliffe – and despite the opposition of Olympia & York which wanted the trains to reach Canary Wharf from central London as quickly as possible – intermediate stations at Southwark, Bermondsey and Canada Water were built, contributing greatly to the regeneration of those areas. Eventually, the line was routed via Westminster to serve Parliament and which consequently meant the abandonment of the section between Charing Cross and Green Park after only twenty years in service and which is now used only for testing purposes and in emergencies. This decision was made after millions had been wasted on building an aborted extension from Charing Cross towards Aldwych, a testimony to the lack of a coherent policy on Underground extensions resulting from government interference and dithering. Nevertheless, the Jubilee Line Extension is unique in being an underground line designed primarily to satisfy the needs of a private developer rather than London and Londoners as a whole, although it did create several useful interchanges in East London.

In some ways, the Jubilee Line Extension was a return to the heyday of Pick and Ashfield in terms of the grandeur of the stations and the ‘no expense spared’ feel of the scheme. The stations, all designed by different architects, are one of the most innovative and exciting
modern developments in the capital – and there are platform doors, which add to safety by preventing people falling or jumping on the track. Yet, paradoxically, a late change to an older form of signalling, after a new method proved unreliable, means that insufficient numbers of trains could be run to cope at rush hours and the whole signalling system was replaced at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.

The cutback of funds during the early 1990s was precisely the kind of ‘stop-go’ policy that made it impossible for the London Underground management to plan ahead. For example, a scheme to upgrade the Northern Line had to be postponed when the money was cut back, even though it had been dubbed London’s ‘misery line’ by the
Evening Standard
.

The Treasury’s inability to understand the long-term investment needs of the system was the main driving force which led London Transport’s management to accept the Labour government’s proposal of a public private partnership (PPP)
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to bring investment into the Underground after its victory in the 1997 general election. While capital spending did, broadly, rise during the 1990s, there was still a substantial backlog but the incoming government had promised to stick to its predecessor’s spending plans. Private money was seen as the only solution by John Prescott, who was transport secretary and deputy prime minister, and the plan for the PPP was announced in March 1998. That involved the breaking up of London Underground into an operator, which remained in the public sector, and three infrastructure companies, responsible for three or four lines each, which were to be privatized. It was an incredibly complicated scheme that would ultimately fail but was nevertheless the catalyst for record levels of investment in the Tube.

The Public Private Partnership (PPP) for the Underground was a quite extraordinary and ultimately unworkable arrangement. It represented a part privatization of the Underground system, but in a manner so complicated that few people were ever able to understand it. Moreover, for the first time ever, the management of the infrastructure
– the track, signalling and trains – was to be separated from the day to day operations, a structure that had already been shown to be wanting on the national rail network after the privatization of the mid-1990s. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the PPP’s origins lay in the fact that Underground managers were worn down by the ridiculous annual budget process that meant intermittent periods of feast and famine, but never allowed them the luxury of being able to plan ahead. For the incoming Labour government in 1997, it seemed to offer a way of providing much needed investment in the Tube without breaking the strict, self-imposed rules of sticking to the Conservatives’ tight spending plans for the first two years of Labour rule.

The London Underground management had consistently lobbied for a steady investment programme to enable what Denis Tunnicliffe, who was managing director for ten years up to 1998 and later chairman, termed ‘a decently modern metro’. He argued it would have required an annual investment spend of around one billion pounds a year for a decade to refurbish the system completely. While some money was forthcoming from the Treasury, it was nowhere near enough and London Underground managers began to look at new ways that finance could be brought in, in the hope that private capital would be available. The management commissioned a report to look at all possible ways of financing Tube investment and it considered sixteen possible options, ranging from outright privatization to various ways of separating operations from infrastructure. Amazingly, when the report was presented to the board in September 1997, it revealed that the PPP, which had been largely devised by the management consultants Price Waterhouse Cooper, came fifteenth out of sixteen alternatives. And yet, within three months it was accepted as the only option.

This remarkable about-turn was the result of the Treasury’s insistence on adopting the PPP and the support of London Underground was obtained thanks to the promise that the scheme would guarantee the much needed investment for the system. There were essentially three
reasons why ministers pushed for the scheme so strongly. First, the government was anxious to prevent the Underground management from having control over the refurbishment programme. This was the result of the cost overruns, estimated at just under half a billion pounds – about twenty-five per cent – on the recently completed Jubilee Line Extension but that failed to take into account extenuating circumstances. There had been severe pressure from the politicians to complete the project by the time of the opening of the Millennium Dome at the beginning of 2000 and consequently costs rose as contractors and workers both realized that they had the Underground management over a barrel. This had come after a lengthy delay to the project as a result of fears that a tunnel collapse during construction on the Heathrow Express project, which was the same innovative tunnelling methods, might result in a similar incident on the Jubilee Line Extension. Nevertheless, the cost overruns were the basis of the second reason: the lack of confidence in the Underground management. This was very much in keeping with the neo-liberal ‘private is good, public is bad’ ethos that prevailed on both sides of the political divide, despite the fact that there was little objective evidence to support this notion. Finally, there was the desire, previously mentioned, to get away from the annual budget process for Tube maintenance, something that all sides of the debate agreed upon.