Subject: Update on the London Underground and the public - private partnership agreements
Chairman: Have you concluded that the public private partnerships are wrong in principle?
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London: I am not an ideologue who wants to mount some kind of Trotskyish, you know, I don't want to take back the track, or re-nationalise every aspect of London Underground.
Nor do I defend every particular of the public private partnership because patently it has not worked, to the advantage of the tax payer and it hasn't worked to the advantage of the London travelling public. All I will really say is, what I think we really need, is a sensible system going forward, that the key thing that it has got to deliver, is taxpayer value, and it can only really deliver that in my view, if London Underground, is given the ability to see what is really going on.
And I think part of the problem that we had with Metronet, and certainly the problem that we have got at the moment, with the tubes lines has been the lack of transparency and that is a key difficulty for us in London Underground and obviously the consequences for the London travelling public are pretty dyer.
Committee Member: Mayor can we just get some of these timelines sorted out. Can you remind the committee when you were elected Mayor of London?
Boris Johnson: I can thank you. I was elected in May 2008
Committee Member: And when was Metronet taken into TFL ownership?
Boris Johnson: That was shortly after that.
Committee Member: Right so in your Mayoralty one of the first problems that you have in encountered is the legacy of this system.
Boris Johnson: Yes and you know, patently it was I think a poorly conceived system and I think if you were to get Shruti Bhandari  before your committee, to go through her thinking now on the PPP, I don't think that you would find her defending it very vigorously.
I don't think anybody now thinks in the Treasury that it was the right model. The right way to transfer risk to the private sector, which was what after all was intended by that PPP model, to try to liberate the energy and competitiveness of the private sector, without greatly exposing the public purse to unnecessary risk. That was, the idea, I don't think it did achieve that, and you know it has been a substantial drain on TFL finances to have to deal with the ensuing catastrophe.
Committee Member: So you have inherited the problems caused by Metronet, but under your mayoralty I suppose the big question is tube lines. And the big question: is tube lines going the same way as Metronet and surely on that question the signal is at least at amber if not at red?
Boris Johnson: Well I am not going to be tempted now into reading the last rights over tube lines or over the PPP. I don't think that would be right and Richard might want to amplify this, but my feeling is that the arbiter is going to produce his view on December the 17th about the equitable price for the second review period.
I think we should see what happens. I think what we want, what Londoners want, is a convincing account from tube lines about how they are going to deliver these upgrades.