That memo...

The article can't be for real..... Where is the standard BBC picture of a 67ts?

Well I think it's worth my ten penn'orth! First I would ask where Bob Crow was (I know where he was, it's a rhetorical question) in 1992/3 and again in 2001/2, it's a little late for him to be making noises about union bashing. Where was he when we didn't want to see Engineering dissolved and diluted by unskilled contractors and where was he when we were being readied for privatisation. I have never forgotten how we were shafted by Ken Livingstone aided and abetted by Bob Crow as he happily watched many of his members (engineering) lose out in the pay round to secure a wage rise for the rest (operating). Subsequently Bob bleeted on about Tube Lines following the Camden Town derailment, castigating former LUL staff even though many were still in his union and doing the same work they had been doing before being sold to the highest bidder.
The Company Plan was cobbled together in the 1980s and but for the tragic events at King's Cross engineering would have been completely privatised at least 10 years before it was. Some may remember 'Action Stations', the Company Plan by another name which did not achieve the desired results but which did sow the seeds for line devolution and lead to a management recruiting drive on the operating side of the business on the one hand while changing the roles of grass routes operating staff on the other.
The majority of what I knew as LT when I joined the Underground in 1977 was long gone by 1996 and by 1997 the company was in a mess having thrown out the baby with the bathwater so to speak simply throwing thousands of collective man years of knowledge and experience out and paying for the privilege in early retirement and severance packages from the late 1980s onward. The exercise left LU top heavy with inexperienced management at so many levels and outsourcing engineering projects prior to privatisation created a freefall spiral in which a great number made fortunes in the vacuum created which was very good to them for several years.
The government of the day used LU as a political football and made lots of noises about investment but the simple truth is that the taxpayer has been paying through the nose for a worsening service ever since. The PPP has cost the taxpayer a lot more than keeping the system publicly funded, the bottom line being that it is still publicly funded to a large extent but most of the funding is hidden.
The recession has perhaps highlighted that LU has indeed been overstaffed ever since the management was multiplied in readiness to run a devolved railway while operating staff have probably been reduced in real terms through various changes and reorganisations, ticket office closures, multiskilling etc etc. There is plenty of dead wood at LU which could be pruned, those who run the trains and the stations have been cut far enough but there are layers and layers of unnecessary management and associated administration.
Basically LU has been living on the never never, the PPP was a license to print money for contractors and an ever incresing drain on taxpayers and fare payers. Most of the system is in the hands of private companies under various PFI schemes and LU is paying through the nose for that. The PPP may never complete, as we know Metronet failed and Tube LInes could perhaps go the same way but John Prescott's vision of 30 years of PPP was a pipedream in so many ways and when the sums are done in 20 years or so I think it will be evident that the monies spent could have been better used! By then many of the nice new trains will probably be falling to pieces, the refurbished stations will all be looking shabby once more and the system will be looking for investment!

Whether the article is relevant now or not is questionable but it doesn't really matter because sooner or later it will be. We can argue over the details and the reasons but LU is not as efficient as it was 30 years ago and it never will be, the heyday of the 'Tube' is long past and never to be repeated the way it is operated nowadays.

Colin,

I agree that it is subjective but at the end of the day when I think of efficiency I am thinking of the customer experience. I think it's wrong to out SAMF and CSA grades but trimming all those other grades is long overdue. there have been too many cooks for far too long!