The union today said it was alarmed by today’s announcement that “hundreds” of jobs could be lost across TfL as part of a drive to find £2.4 billion in “efficiency savings.

“TfL has made vague statements about the need to reduce headcount across TfL and that can only cause alarm among our members,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

“Reducing the use of over-priced outside consultants is all well and good, but there can be no question of any job losses among the people who deliver the services that London depends on.

“There is no way that London’s transport workers should be made to pay for the failure of the bankers and privateers whose greed has created the crisis our economy is now in.

“The mayor was elected on the promise of bright new ideas, but there is nothing remotely bright or new about wielding the axe on jobs and services.

“If the mayor is looking for efficiencies he should find a way of bringing the Tube Lines PPP contracts back in house, because they are still draining huge sums of public money from London’s transport budget

“We thought the government was going to plough money into public projects to help us through the recession, but first we have had attacks on Network Rail’s essential budgets and now it seems London Underground is coming under attack.

“It goes without saying that RMT will resist any forced redundancies among our members,” Bob Crow said.

See also:

Mayor scraps 'impractical' transport plans

Financial Times: November 7 2008
By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent

London's mayor yesterday slashed several long-planned infrastructure schemes from the city's transport plans, portraying the move as honest recognition that they would never be built.

Boris Johnson saidthe money saved would be diverted to the remaining investment programme of Transport for London, his transport organisation, which he said would transform the city.

However, the mayor declined to say how he planned to achieve substantial parts of the upgrade of the capital's Underground system which were to have been delivered by Metronet Rail, the collapsed public-private partnership contractor.

The Underground upgrade is one of the two biggest projects due to be undertaken over the nine years between 2009-10 and 2017-18, alongside the £15.9bn Crossrail project to provide a new east-west rail tunnel under London. The projects are part of £76.3bn of spending laid out in TfL's business plan for the next nine years.

The abandoned schemes include the Thames Gateway Road Bridge; the Euston to Brixton cross-river tram scheme; the extension of Croydon Tramlink to Crystal Palace; the extension of the Docklands Light Railway to Dagenham Dock and plans to transform public spaces such as Parliament Square.

The nine-year plan is otherwise similar to that pursued by Ken Livingstone, Mr Johnson's predecessor. The significant additions are a greater emphasis on improving the flow of road traffic and funding for controversial plans to introduce a modern version of the city's famous Routemaster buses.

Of the abandoned schemes, Mr Johnson said: "I cannot and will not continue to waste our money and your money on consultants and planners who are currently spending millions and millions of pounds titivating the plans for schemes which are either impractical or for which we simply don't have the funding from government."

Planning for those schemes had already cost £61m, he added.

On the Underground, the Department for Transport wants a substantial future private-sector role for upgrades on the lines covered by Metronet, which collapsed in July last year and is now owned by London Underground. London Underground, which is part of TfL, wants to retain more direct control.

Mr Johnson said Londoners were uninterested in the mechanism for delivering the schemes and merely wanted to see the Underground improve.