What is needed, he says, is simple government funding of the necessary investment in infrastructure, which he estimates at 500m- 700m a year. It is complicated by their being two camps - the Treasury which wants to push through PPP and the Prescott camp, which is more open minded about alternatives and has some of Mr Blair's sympathies. The cost of sorting the tube out could amount to 13bn over the next 15 years and the Treasury appears adamant that this should be kept out of public accounts, which an unmodified PPP plan does very neatly. They don't want the taxpayer being ultimately responsible for the risk as they would be under Mr Kiley's vision. The Treasury's argument is that although the work would inevitably cost much more if done by profit-making, private firms, this would be recouped be heightened efficiency of private managers.
Ministers are concerned that public sector management is irreparably inefficient.
They point to the Jubilee line extension which doubled in cost to 3.5bn and was completed 18 months late. The government are also concerned that if PPP were not adopted, it would also leave Aslef, the train driver's union, in a powerful position, as it showed earlier this month by just about closing the entire network for a day. Frustration is the dominant emotion from the four consortiums left in the running. There are noises of some degree of flexibility coming from the firms about tweaking PPP but not anywhere near the scale of change wanted by Mr Kiley. They definitely don't want to pour millions into a business if it is controlled by someone else.