Wednesday 21 April 2010

£64 million price tag for abandoned Tube plan

Today's Standard carries this story which contains the results of a Freedom of Information request put in by journalists wanting to know how much of our money Transport for London spent on an ultimately abandoned plan to install disabled access on tube stations.

Regular readers will recall that £39 million had been wasted on the new Shepherd's Bush station alone, after Assembly Member Caroline Pidgeon first had her questions ignored by Boris, and then when he was shamed by the negative publicity eventually answered.

So this means that well over half of London's missing transport millions, earmarked rightly for making life equal for disabled people, was wasted on the Shepherd's Bush project alone. I know I've gone on about this before but I cannot think of a more disgusting state of affairs than that which is now forever associated with our new tube for those of us unable to use the stairs. (And no, by the way, I'm not disabled). As some of you commented at the time, an awful lot of that money went to contractors to carry out various "studies" which eventually informed us that it would cost £100 million to install a lift because of the wrong sort of earth.

I'll be interested to watch how many people eventually leave TfL and go and work for those same companies. Just a thought.

1 comment:

  1. If we saw this in another less developed country, it would be obvious that this is corruption. Sadly, in this country, we're so full of pride about our system - "it doesn't happen here" - that we're only just waking up to the reality of it in the wake of MPs expenses. £16k here, £64m there... who's counting?
    Not that anything will be done, but without a free independent media we wouldn't even know about it. Thanks for posting this.

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