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Public misery on private line
• IN your last issue you reported how the Underground’s Northern Line is to reduce the hourly number of trains (More misery as Tube trains are cut, January 18).
Gospel Oak Tory councillor Chris Philp blames Tube Lines, the private company which is now, under a 30-year Public-Private Partnership contract, responsible for infrastructure maintenance on the Northern Line.
He describes them as “incompetent”.
He is not the first local politician to express such sentiments about this company. Last year, former Labour councillor, Lucy Anderson, requested that Terry Morgan, Tube Line’s chief executive, face a public meeting to explain the Northern Line’s “appalling record”. He refused and later wrote a misleading letter to the New Journal about this refusal.
Your columnist John Gulliver complained in 2006 about the weekend closures of parts of the network. This partial shutdown went on for about 10 weeks, causing further condemnation, this time from an Islington Labour councillor.
We now have more weekend closures, with the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line offering no Saturday and Sunday services south of Camden Town until March.
In 2005, train drivers refused to work on the Northern Line because of safety issues about a back-up braking system. Underground managers attempted to keep the reasons from passengers.
The general secretary of drivers’ union Aslef, though, wrote in this paper how Tube Lines and its subcontractors were clearly at fault. He described what he saw as the “mad” and “murky” world of privatisation.
Those of us who have to use the Tube at weekends to get to work, are entitled to ponder whether all this inconvenience is what we must suffer so that New Labour and the Tube’s Blairite management can plough on with their obsessional private sector dogma.
ERIC KRIEGER
Haverstock Road, NW5 |
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