London bus and underground services comments by Mayor Ken Livingstone

There is an alternative to the government's policy of forcing the private sector into public services

Ken Livingstone
Thursday February 7, 2002
The Guardian

Downing Street has calculated that a row with the unions this week is worth the long-term benefit of having a good sound-bite to define your opponents. The attack on those who oppose the government's plans for the public services as wreckers has backfired with Labour supporters. But the stage has been set.

The future of public services is the central domestic debate in this parliament. It was the main issue at the general election, when voters rejected the Tories' threats to cut public spending. It is the major factor in the decline in voter turnouts. That Labour has not delivered the expectations of its own voters keeps them at home.

The Tory party is waging a campaign not in support of public services, but against them. Iain Duncan Smith's strategy is to expose bad practice in the NHS, and simultaneously oppose any extra resources for it. The objective is to disillusion voters into accepting some form of privatisation.

Labour, having stuck to Tory spending limits during its first term, is now expanding public expenditure. But the government appears not to have woken up to the fact that the public is no longer convinced that the private sector holds all the answers. The Mori poll conducted for the GMB union found that only one in 10 Labour supporters believes in greater involvement of the private sector in the public services.

Despite this, the government has not slapped down the Post Office regulator, who is proposing to liberalise the postal service. It has done nothing to convince the public that it is putting a brake on the contracting out of services in health and education. And it is pursuing the private finance initiative with vigour.

There is an alternative, the cornerstone of which is the maximum democratic control and openness in setting policy goals, coupled with strong management in the delivery of those priorities. In London, the key mechanism for establishing democratic accountability was the creation of the mayoralty. The management philosophy was expressed through the recruitment of Bob Kiley from New York as transport commissioner.

I have taken this combination of democratic accountability and high quality management and applied it to public services. Bus fares have been cut; extra bus conductors have been added; bus lane enforcement has been stepped up; bus drivers have received a bonus; over 1,100 new vehicles have been added to the fleet. In one year, bus usage has increased by 6% and passenger miles by 9%. Night bus usage has risen by 16%. Bus miles lost because of staff sickness have been halved. More people are using the buses than at any time in the last 26 years.

London has allowed the government to meet its own national bus targets. Such a reforming agenda can be equally applied to health, education and other services. Given the inherent higher costs of the private sector (because of the need to pay dividends to shareholders), it should only be used where it can be demonstrated that it can provide a better quality or additional service. Such decisions should be totally pragmatic and unideological. Instead, PFIs and "public private partnerships" now appear to have become the accepted route for financing essential public services in preference to the public sector alternative.

Hence the government's intransigence over the tube, the biggest public private partnership. Unless all the indications are wrong, the government will today proceed to consult me formally on the contracts to break up and partially privatise the London Underground. Yet the tube PPP runs contrary to good public service.

Running a railway requires precise lines of accountability. You have to be able to direct staff to fix a signal or mend track when you need it done. By separating the running of the trains from the maintenance of the track, this PPP will muchreduce the lines of accountability. It will replace railway operators with lawyers and accountants arguing over which company is responsible.

It will make efficient integrated planning decisions more difficult, because the network will be in four pieces. It will not deliver the improvements which the public demand. It will put station improvements ahead of train and track upgrades, and will not provide the 15% extra capacity that the sys tem needs within 20 years, as we were promised.

The first time the wreckers and reformers rhetoric was used was in a Commons debate on the tube last week, when Stephen Byers said: "People will have a choice. Those who block the modernisation proposals will be the wreckers, while the reformers will want to go ahead with modernisation and change."

This is to stand reality on its head. The wreckers are those who propose to break up the most frequently used railway in the country and turn it over to the lawyers and accountants. The reformers are those who want to let world-class management get on with the job of expanding public services, as they are doing now on London's buses.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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