RAIL union TSSA greeted today’s news that Transport Secretary Alistair Darling intends to hand over control of the Tube to London mayor Ken Livingstone by 15 July by saying that the mayor must make PPP work and stop blaming managers for all the Tube’s woes.

TSSA General Secretary Richard Rosser said: “Although TSSA has disagreed with PPP and campaigned against it from the outset, we hope that some real improvement can at last be made on the Tube now that the part-privatisation process has been completed.

“We will be watching PPP closely to see that the £17 billion that has been promised goes into the system and not on bureaucracy in the way that we have seen on the rail network as a whole.

“We also hope this will be an end to Ken Livingstone’s knocking of our members in London Underground management who are trying to run the network against a background of years of under investment and political sniping.

“Mr Livingstone has spent too long on the sidelines carping on about the inadequacies of Tube management. This must stop as it will be his job to make the Tube work and give Londoners what he has been promising them for so long a world class Underground system.”

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Notes to Editors

1. TSSA represents 32,000 members in administrative, clerical, managerial, professional and technical jobs in the railways, buses, the London Underground, the travel trade, canals, ports and ferries, and road haulage.