On May 8, 6:31*pm, D7666 wrote:

On May 8, 1:31*pm, Mizter T wrote:

He quite reasonably asks where TfL will find the £310 million from to
buy Tube Lines, given that TfL said they were going to struggle
finding the £400 or so million for the Tube Lines funding gap (as
determined by the PPP arbiter).

Wouldn't be a massive surprise to hear that some of the Underground
network's upgrades will be put on ice, given the already stretched
state of TfL's finances - given the state of (central govt) public
finances (which TfL is heavily reliant on), things aren't about to get
any easier any time soon.

In round figures, as I understood things, when metronet went into TfL
there were direct savings of 0.5 million - 1.0 million depending who
you listed to just by eliminating the duplicated effort of 2 parties
checking each others contracts and works. Proportionately finding 310
million to take in tube lines seems about right. While the
circumstances are different - metronet was in admin and tube lines is
being brought in before (if) that happens, those costs were still
there, they were not a function of collapse but contracts admin on
both sides. At least thats how the gossip wet. The problem is one
never knows if what you get is rumour and speculation or is a leak by
someone who really doesknow the score.

OK, thanks for that. The PPP contracts sounds like they were truly
nightmarish in their complexity. What does interest me is to what
extent the PPP contractual arrangements remained in place, albeit
perhaps in a vestigial sense, w.r.t. the in-house (LU-owned) Metronet,
as I understand they did. Furthermore now that Tube Lines is coming in-
house too, I wonder how much of the old PPP arrangements will remain,
and to what extent it can be dismantled - bearing in mind the whole
setup was created by central govt, had a complex legal background (I
assume there must have been some sort of statutory basis to it all),
and had a regulator of sorts in the person of the PPP arbiter - my
guess is that TfL can't just unilaterally end it (and indeed there
might be a few elements of it that are actually beneficial, even if
it's all internal dealings now). Of course the expert on such matters
here rather has other things on his mind given the context of it all -
I imagine all on here who appreciate his many insightful contributions
will hope that things will work out for the best when the dust settles.