Mr Edward Davey (Kingston & Surbiton, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move amendment No. 86, in

clause 33, page 15, line 3, at end insert—

''(6A) No grant may be paid under this section in relation to any agreement under the Public-Private Partnership for London Underground.''.

I doubt that we will be quite so fortunate on amendment No. 86. The Minister may even accuse me of being slightly mischievous in moving it. We tabled the amendment because, under clause 33, the GLA will be able to receive grants at the will of Ministers without any check by Parliament. We debated parliamentary scrutiny of expenditure, and the Minister undertook to read my paper on the issue.

I do not want to retread that ground, but it is vital that we scrutinise clause 33 to consider what moneys are to be paid to the GLA at the whim of Ministers. We are approaching the matter in a slightly different way because the obvious grants that could be paid to London Underground without scrutiny are grants to support the public-private partnership. That takes me and the Minister down a nostalgic route because I think it was in this Committee Room that we debated, for more than three months, the Greater London Authority Bill, which set up the framework for the public-private partnership for London Underground. I shall not rehearse the many and long arguments that were advanced in that Committee, except to say that we did not agree with the Government's approach. We said that the Government's financing models were wrong, that they would not manage to sign the contract for many years—we were proved right on that—and that they would end up having to put a lot of taxpayers' subsidy into the system because it was such an inefficient way of raising and allocating finance.

Hon. Members may think me cynical, but my fear is that clause 33 is the bail-out clause for the public-private partnership, which will enable the Government to lever in money to rescue their failed London Underground project. The Committee that debated the Greater London Authority Bill in huge detail over three or four months, during which my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) entertained us with the details of public-private partnership, did not see any legislation that would allow a bail-out of PPP. That was controlled in the mother legislation. This clause has been sneaked into a Bill that is completely unrelated to PPP and the powers of the Greater London Authority and would allow the bail-out that we predicted would take place. Therefore, before the Committee assents to this extremely large clause, we need some assurances. If the Minister can give us an assurance that the Government have absolutely no intention of using the powers in clause 33 to bail out the London Underground PPP, we may be able to achieve some consensus, but if the Minister is unable to give us that assurance, we may have to press the amendment to a vote.

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