Brown must stop wasting Londoners money on Tube chaos

5.00.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Mon 16th Jul 2007

Liberal Democrat MEP for London Sarah Ludford has demanded changes to the public-private partnerships (PPP) which have created chaos on London's tube network.

Commenting after the decision of the arbiter granting contractor Metronet only a small part of the money they claimed they needed to survive, Sarah Ludford said:

"Many Londoners, who are inevitably the losers in this shocking saga of incompetence, will say 'a plague on both your houses' to Gordon Brown who as Chancellor foisted the expensive and bureaucratic PPP scheme on London, and Ken Livingstone as Mayor who is keener on gimmicks than on good management of London Transport."

"Rather than wasting Londoners' money on yet more failure and bailing out collapsed PPP contractors, the Government should use the much better funding structure adopted for the new North London railway."