Mayor: PPP is behind schedule

The Government's controversial proposal to part-privatise the Tube is falling even further behind schedule, Mayor Ken Livingstone claimed today.

The claim comes just 24 hours after Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary, told MPs that a final decision on the future of London Underground would be decided over the next two months. Ministers have pencilled in 20 March as "D" for decision day.

LU chiefs admitted today that while it had received the take-over bids from the private sector, some information and essential figures were missing.

Mr Livingstone said he did not believe the Government would be in a position to hand over the Tube to Transport for London - as it is required to do once contracts for all or part of the network are signed - until September at the earliest.

"Our estimate is the Tube will be transferred to us in the autumn," he said. The public-private partnership (PPP) is already running two years late and 1 April had been set for the latest handover.

Now the Department of Transport admits the new contracts will not be signed by then.

The changeover is further complicated by the safety audit which has to be carried out by the Health and Safety Executive, the national watchdog, before any actual handover can take place.

It is not known when exactly this audit will conclude or even when it will begin.

PPP critics were today highlighting the latest delays as giving further time to ministers in deciding the Tube's future. Mr Byers has already made clear that PPP will only go ahead providing it meets both financial and safety criteria.

There is speculation that one of the bids, covering the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, may fail the value-for-money test when it is compared with a taxpayer-funded alternative.

Under PPP, large sections of the Tube will be hived off to the private sector on 30-year leases.

Only the operation of the trains and signals - but not the maintenance - will be run by the public sector.

The deep-level lines will be split into two groups and the subsurface, including the Circle and District, into a third.

Mr Livingstone and Bob Kiley, the transport commissioner, say PPP is "fundamentally flawed" because it splits operation of the train service from the running and maintenance of the tracks and signals. They point to the disasters which have occurred on the mainline railways - both financial and physical - as evidence of their claims.