The Chris Bolt adjudication (I flagged it up yesterday) came through this morning, as my colleague Robert Wright reports. It is particularly bad news for the Tube Lines PPP consortium.
The PPP arbiter has told Tube Lines it will have to do the upgrade work on its three Underground lines for £4.4bn. That suggests a gap of £1.35bn between the figure of £5.75bn which Tube Lines insisted it needed to carry out the 7.5-year programme.
Not that the judgment is great news for Boris Johnson and TfL: They insisted that they could not pay out more than £4bn or so – creating a £400m gap which needs to be filled by either downgrading some of the Tube work or making cuts elsewhere in the transport budget.
Robert Wright writes:
If Tube Lines ends up shouldering the full £1.35bn extra, it will have to seek to borrow the money. If it cannot do so, the end result could be that LU will take control of the company. However, Tube Lines has always maintained that this is an unlikely outcome.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
