PPP adds up (if you have a PhD)

How do you know if the Tube is running on time under the Government's proposed part-privatisation of the network?

That's simple - just apply the mathematical formula: ERT=dx3.78x.

What about the stations and carriages. Are they clean enough? Slightly more complex; you need to understand "abatement service points" and the "facilities threshold" with the answer, as everyone will realise, expressed "as a number of 20-hour service days calculated to two decimal places".

Confused? You should be, but probably not as much as Bob Kiley, London's transport commissioner and his team who are trying to make sense of the 135 volumes, 2,800 pages and two million words which make-up the contracts, or at least part of them, for the proposed Public Private Partnership (PPP).

In more ways than one, Mr Kiley and his team describe the formulae as "staggering in their complexity". They say the mind-boggling lists of formulae are pure Lewis Carroll, a combination of the author's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and his books on mathematics.

In despair, Ken Livingstone's transport chief in charge of Transport for London (TfL) has written today to London Transport chairman Sir Malcolm Bates, the man in charge of the PPP, pleading with him, in effect, to return to earth and make the process easier to understand.

Under PPP the Tube will be split into four divisions with only the operation of trains and signals remaining under public control. Transport Secretary Stephen Byers says he expects to make a final decision on whether the controversial project will go ahead in January.

The trouble is nobody, well, except if your name happens to be Einstein or Carroll, can understand the calculations on which the contracts are based.

The equations are all to do with setting out the performance regime for the private sector. How much they are paid depends on how well they do. A senior aide to Mr Kiley said: "There are pages and pages of calculations on what defines litter and how big litter needs to be before it is classified as litter but nothing, for instance, about replacing a train's brakes.

"It is bureaucracy gone stark, raving mad. If it were not so serious - and we are talking here about the future of London's principal transport system for the next 30 years - you could dismiss it as pure Whitehall farce."

Mr Kiley tells Sir Malcolm in his letter the way the PPP is being worked-out it turns tried and tested formula on its head. He says: "I am sure every PPP advocate would agree that if the performance regime proves unworkable in practice then the PPP will fail.

Mr Kiley goes on to say that the PPP contracts are not reliant on private companies supplying "concrete deliverables" such as new trains or routine maintenance. Other ageing metro systems elsewhere in the world, including Boston and New York, have been improved by the simple process of identifying what work needs to be done. "The contractors would be paid as they delivered desired products and would be responsible if the products didn't work as promised," says Mr Kiley.

Mr Kiley tells Sir Malcolm that it may be better if he replaces Underground posters explaining the PPP and boasting of a "Publicly Run - Privately Built" system with examples of the mathematical formulae so the Tube's three million users can see what is going on.

He also wonders whether "anyone at the controls of PPP implementation has even the most elementary understanding of the implications of this regime", in reference to the "hundreds of formulae' and "massive amounts of data that must be gathered" to form London Underground's PPP safety net.

? The PPP suffered a new blow today when Land Securities, one of the two bidders shortlisted to manage and develop LU's non-operational property estate, warned it was on the edge of pulling out of the deal.

LU was planning on a property deal worth around £2billion to raise funds for making improvements to the network. An LU spokesman said only that an announcement regarding the deal had been "deferred."

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