Tim O’Toole, Managing Director of London Underground for Transport for London and generally a good thing was required to present himself before my committee to answer for the tube.

A bit of a challenge – but he’s basically up to it. Lord knows what it must be like to be a smart American lawyer and manager, and then to find yourself running the tube in London – particularly with its industrial relations.

But as I said, Tim’s a smart cookie. He does a great version of pro-active breast beating. For example, last time I had him in to an emergency session of the Transport Committee to answer for the Hammersmith and Fulham and Camden Town derailments, he started by apologising for a ‘parade of failures’.

It is always disarming to an extent when someone comes in and admits their failures when you are used to the vast majority of people in charge defending their position even when totally indefensible.

So once again Tim started by basically admitting that the tube was not performing that well – and that there was a need to lower expectations because the PPP didn’t contract for it to perform that much better.

I thought I played a bit of a blinder myself, when I elicited the information that however well Tim and his boys (sexist but true) managed the tube and got the most you could get out of it through tip-top management techniques – the truth was that performance would still deteriorate because the best management in the world couldn’t keep pace with the deterioration rate of the asset base.

Things can only get worse!

Well we knew that when Labour lost the plot on the tube and stuffed us with the PPP. And thus it is proving to be. My only hope is that there will be a renegotiated PPP contract or an add-on to the PPP contract that will be paid for by the Government to ensure that the standard contracted for in the PPP is raised. The new stations that will come on-line in the first 7 year tract of the contract will make it look better – but to us daily users reliable trains would be a boon.

I suppose we had two ‘victories’ from the morning’s session. Firstly, Tim reported that they had at last found a way to give me what I had been asking for – an easy benchmark for overcrowding.

In Paris (and my own recommendation) the standard is 4 people per square metre. Sadly, Tim is not tempted down this route – but he stated that they have developed a way of adding seconds to the journey time based on levels of overcrowding. This slightly odd approach is based on the fact that penalties for the contractors come into play if journeys take too long – so turning overcrowding into extra journey times means contractors might get penalised. He hasn’t unveiled it properly yet – just giving me a peek at the promised land.

The second piece of good news – also arising from that emergency meeting – was that London Underground have moved to address concerns expressed after the derailments by the unions that when staff raised matters of concern – management took no notice.

Both the infracos (the private companies now in charge of the infrastructure) have developed web based complaints and tracking so both staff and management can see what the complaint was and when logged, what was done, what the progress is and what the outcome is.

So two gold stars for the Assembly! Hoorah!