The last vestige of the old Tube Lines PPP (Public-Private Partnership) is set to disappear as maintenance work on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines is taken back in-house by London Underground.
As result of London’s newly elected Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s drive to improve efficiency, the Transport for London (TfL) board announced that the current arrangement with Amey, that has run for 13 years, will finish at the end of next year – the earliest possible point the contract allows.
A review of TfL’s operations was ordered by Sadiq Khan shortly after he took office. It is looking at ways of working more efficiently, eliminating unnecessary duplication, obtaining greater value and significantly cutting reliance on agency staff.
Bringing the work in-house is expected to save at least £80 million over the next decade.
Managing director of London Underground Mark Wild commented: “We are carrying out a root-and-branch review of our business to cost less and make transport in London more affordable for our customers.
“As part of this, we are using our in-house maintenance expertise to save tens of millions of pounds. There will be no impact on our extremely high standards of maintenance and we will be working closely with Amey over the next 18 months to ensure a smooth transition.”
In a supplied statement, a spokesman for Amey said: “We’ve had an extremely successful partnership with London Underground over the past 13 years, looking after 50 stations, 90 miles of track, 45 miles of tunnel and over 600 Trains to support the two million plus passengers who use the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines daily.
“We’re extremely proud to have delivered more than £500 million in savings for TfL during this time, in addition to a number of significant improvements, such as reducing passenger delays by 70 per cent, improving signals reliability by 56 per cent, train reliability by 441 per cent and improving track quality to the highest levels seen on the Underground.
“We understand LU’s strategic business decision to bring all maintenance work in-house and we will be working closely with the team to ensure a smooth transition.”
How can they possibly improve train reliability by 441 percent? To do that, the trains would have had to have been less then 25% reliable (even assuming a near 100% reliability now), which even for TFL sounds rather low. How *is* reliability measured anyway?
Train reliability is measured by mean time between failures MTBF let’s say when amey took over it was 5000 hours MTBF and now it is 22050 that is 441% improvement