---

London Underground

First, I draw attention to my interest as declared in the Register of Members' Interests. I rise to speak to try to bring a degree of balance back to a debate that, to me, has been disappointing, first, because of a tendency to go from the particular to the general and to assume that the PPP is universally unsatisfactory because of the failure of Metronet, and, secondly, because of a lack of realism in some respects about the context in which the PPP was developed. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) made an interesting series of observations on the negotiation of the PPP, many of which I would concur with, but she did not give us the background of the procurement of the Jubilee line, which was in many respects one of the most depressing and unsatisfactory procurement exercises that we have ever seen. The Jubilee line has a lot of things going for it. I take particular interest in it because it is my constituency's only contact with the London underground. The line was well designed and there are some very fine stations—we have one here at Westminster that many hon. Members use every day and can admire—but the procurement was fundamentally unsatisfactory. The scheme was seriously delayed and there were massive cost overruns—approximately £1.5 billion.