UNDERGROUND IN LONDON.. .

The tube is traumatised by the King's Cross fire, but its troubles are deeper-seated.

Dominic Lawson finds out what is wrong

WHAT IS the point of London Under- ground Limited? More precisely, is it a public service? When I put this second question last week to Mr David Mitchell, the transport minister, and to Dr Tony Ridley, chief executive of London Under- ground, both seemed a bit flummoxed. Mr Mitchell, declared that it was a public service 'but that does not mean that it should not make a profit'. He added — and this flummoxed me — 'that a public subsidy is warranted when it provides a benefit to the non-user'. Does this mean that the London Underground should be a public ser- vice only to those who do not use it? No, said Mr Mitchell, that is not what he meant. Dr Rid- ley's view — after a long pause for thought seemed to be that it need not be a public service, but that it would continue to be one for the time being.

The confusion may appear general, but it has much to do with the specific trauma of the King's Cross fire. Up to that horrific event civil servants were looking closely at ways in which the London Underground could be priva- tised. But now the public view that the London Underground's drive for profit might in some way be connected with the lax safety standards associated with the King's Cross inferno has made privatisa- tion a political bridge too far.

(Mr Mitchell's stated reason for delaying privatisation was that it was not clear when the business would become entirely self- financing, and that no one would want to buy it until it was. But this is to ignore the lessons of the infinitely more risky Channel Tunnel project, which attracted hundreds of millions of pounds of investors' money even in the weeks following the stock market crash. Besides, my calculations are that it would have taken an extra fare increase of less than ten pence per passen- ger trip to have made London Under- ground entirely self-financing in the finan- cial year to end March 1988.) Whatever the reason, the delay is a pity, because, as the case of that other transport near monopolist, British Airways, showed, preparation for the commercial world can transform the attitudes of both manage- ment and workforce. Even by the stan- dards of nationalised industries the Lon- don Underground betrays a startling lack of self-knowledge. I had wanted to test Dr Ridley about cross-subsidisation between lines. So first I asked the preliminary question 'Do you know how much money each line makes or loses?' No,' replied Dr Ridley, with the directness and honesty which have characterised his evidence at the King's Cross enquiry.

By `no' Dr Ridley did not mean that he . had forgotten, or that others in the orga- nisation had this information, but had not told him. He meant that the information simply did not exist. In other words the London Underground does not know the extent to which certain routes are subsi- dised, and therefore has no way of know- ing which lines should perhaps be better marketed.

Sometimes crucial information exists but has simply failed to travel to the places where it can do most good (rather like some trains on the Northern Line). Earlier tube fires were followed by reports which advocated safety measures, which if car- ried out, might have prevented the King's Cross fire turning into an inferno. But Dr Ridley told me that these reports 'stopped circulating well below board level'.

To the extent that London Underground has gained a reputation for efficiency, it lies in its contribution to Lon- don Transport's achie- vement, trumpeted by its chairman Sir Keith Bright, of reaching the target of halving tax- and ratepayer's support to £95 million, two years ahead of the schedule set by the Government. Now Sir Keith's cost cut- ting achievements are being stigmatised as ex- cessive.

But the London Underground still em- ploys more staff per pas- senger than any metro in Europe, and the big re- ductions in unit costs are mainly a reflec- tion of an explosion in demand which the company never anticipated. Like the air- line business, tube transport is an industry with very high fixed costs and very low variable costs. In other words, when enough bottoms are on seats to cover fixed costs, any further increase in passenger volume goes straight into profits.

Since the average number of passengers per train went up by 65 per cent between 1982 and 1987, it is no surprise that the cost per passenger has tumbled. But, as a detailed breakdown at the back of London Transport's most recent set of reports and accounts shows, the average cost per train mile, including depreciation, but excluding voluntary redundancy costs, has actually risen in real terms over the same period. The conclusion could be either that the London Underground is not becoming so much more efficient or that one man's increased efficiency is another man's hang- ing on a strap all the way from Morden to High Barnet.

It would be most unjust, however, to accuse London Underground of deliber- ately encouraging congestion on the pre- sent insufferable scale, in order to boost profitability, or to create an illusion of efficiency. Dr Ridley now says that when he took over London Underground in 1980 it was his ambition to arrest the ten-year- old decline in passengers and hold volume at a level of about 500 million trips a year. It is now over 800 million and Dr Ridley told me that internal forecasts anticipate a further 20 per cent increase in passenger volumes before a peak is reached.

London Underground was not alone in being wildly pessimistic in its forecasts. The standard reference book, Transport Planning for Greater London, published in 1980, stated that 'The Underground will probably lose up to one fifth of its passen- ger miles.'

But if forecasts at the beginning of the decade—which resulted in the rejection of capacity increases which are now desper- ately needed — were simply bad luck, it is less easy to sympathise with Dr Ridley when he says that, 'a couple of years ago a review did not show that we would be banging up against capacity.' By 1986 the stock market deregulation at the heart of the City boom was a reality, as was the London house price explosion, a prime indicator of demographic change. London Underground also appears to have discounted the argument, common- place among road planners, that an infras- tructural improvement not entirely justi- fied by existing traffic flow becomes econo- mic because it generates new traffic. If it were not for this belief the Channel Tunnel project would never have attracted suffi- cient investors among the banks and the City.

Nor is it the case that the Government has turned down any London Under- ground proposals to increase capacity. Indeed it has backed every proposal for capital expenditure put to it by London Underground since it wrested control of the business from the GLC in 1984. There cannot be many state-owned industries whose demands are so unambitious that they have never run foul of the Treasury's axe.

There are ways in which the London Underground has actually exacerbated the overcrowding by its own action (rather than inaction). The heavy marketing of the Travelcard and Capitalcard was initially a very good way of making life easier for the ticket collectors and passengers, but now it is a good way of encouraging people to take more journeys on a system which is already bursting at the seams. In no normal industry would a supplier continue to discount a product made in a factory suffering from severe bottlenecking.

Even more galling is the statement in the latest London Transport annual report that demand increased by 70 per cent in five years not just because of the introduc- tion of Travelcard and Capital card but also because of 'the improving environ- ment and the better quality of service provided'. It would be interesting to know what the popular reaction to this remark would be if Sir Keith Bright dared say it out loud. Dr Ridley confessed to me that 'we don't survey passenger attitudes in terms of additional travel,' so it is hard to see what evidence LT has for its claim. To put some statistical flesh on the bones of intuitive suspicion, it is merely necessary to cite the latest LRT service reliability fi- gures submitted to the London Regional Passengers Committee, which show that in the second quarter of this year the average wait for a peak time train was 40 per cent longer than scheduled, rising to an astounding 74 per cent over schedule for off-peak Circle Line trains.

(`There are operational reasons why it is difficult to run a reliable service on the Circle Line,' said Dr Ridley when I men- tioned this figure to him. True, it is circular. But don't the planners know this when they draw up the schedules? After all, the Circle Line has been running for over 100 years.) Life for passengers on London Under- ground will probably get worse long before it gets better. This is because the lead times in bringing on extensive new capacity, such as new lines, are so long. To build a new extension of any size would be the work of at least five years.

So improvisation is the only hope in the short term. On the dreadful Northern Line — where passengers distraught at inexplic- able delays and diversions have taken to hijacking trains — this has meant the bringing out of mothballs those grand maroon carriages of a generation ago. (The men who introduced the plain aluminium- covered trains clearly did not anticipate the graffiti age. The modern rolling stock are no more than high-speed blackboards).

But even in improvisation, London Underground seems to have restricted its options. The Northern Line is shunned by drivers because it is one of the few lines not now converted to single operator use, and the pay for drivers is 20 per cent lower. London Underground gave the railway- men's union the right to transfer between lines, but did not keep for itself any power to tell the men which lines to go to. And by another agreement it is unable to move any one individual from one line to another more frequently than once a year.

London Underground seems similarly to be at the mercy of its suppliers, a strange situation indeed for a monopolist. The appalling delays in repairing escalators which have broken down is partly attri- buted by the London Underground to the fact that it has for many years been reliant on only one contractor, Otis. (My sug- gested slogan: 'Otis lifts never let you down. Or up for that matter'). In the past two or three years, the London Under- ground has turned to CNIM of France as an alternative supplier, but at the moment that is little consolation to the old age pensioner in say, Archway, who would have free transport, if only he were able for months — to walk down the countless steps to train level.

Mr Rufus Barnes, secretary of the Lon- don Regional Passengers' Committee, which is an official body appointed and financed by the transport ministry, told me that he had been trying unsuccessfully for four years to get 'robust information about the reliability of lifts and escalators' from London Underground. He suspects he is not given the information because LU is worried about the bad publicity such statis- tics would generate if leaked. My guess is that the company simply does not possess the information.

It is only fair to point out that some of the most depressing aspects of the London Underground are not the fault of the company or its staff. There is no reason why London Underground should be held responsible for muggings on the trains, any more than London Buses Limited can be held responsible for those on the buses. And in any event, the incidence of crime per person on the Underground is no greater than on the streets. As for the graffiti, usually characterised by strange sub-Arabic script, it is quite beyond the control of any management. Reports of youths being arrested carrying 75 cans of spray paint each illustrate the problem. (Yet my visit to London Underground headquarters in offices above St James Park underground suggested that the fight against filth has not reached the highest levels. The sofa in the reception area was covered in dirt, and the free standing ashtray next to it was caked with rivulets of soggy ash. Oh, and the ticket office was closed.

Perhaps one could forgive London Underground everything if the staff showed concern for the passengers. Other monopoly providers of transport such as British Airways and British Rail have transformed the apparent attitude of its staff to what they now know as 'custom- ers'. Two months ago London Under- ground finally began to tackle this problem with a programme code-named 'Action Stations.' The artist's impression of the new Underground in the pamphlet given to employees is stranger than fiction. One female employee is ringing on a cordless telephone to help a passenger with his enquiry. Another employee is announcing something in person on the platform. And yet a third employee is helping a woman with a child off the train. It would be unfair to add that the only thing missing from this scene is a pig slowly flying over the train. Not for nothing does Dr Ridley's copy of Sir John Harvey-Jones's autobiography fall open on page seven, where underlined three times is the remark, 'Management is about maintaining the highest rate of change that the organisation and the peo- ple in it can stand.' The problem is that for too long London Underground has been maintaining the slowest rate of change that its customers can stand.