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Thursday 4 December 2008

Can London be turned around like a troubled company?

Judi Bevan meets Tim Parker, the controversial private-equity player who slashed jobs and boosted value at Kwik-Fit and the AA, and is about to apply his skills at City Hall

He suggests a coffee in City Hall’s café rather than ‘some bleak office’ and when he pays for my latte and his cappuccino he claims the 10 per cent staff discount — slightly surprising for a man reported to be worth £75 million, but a good sign in someone whose mission is to spend Londoner’s taxes more effectively. By all accounts Parker is good at getting things done; he speaks his mind and has no fear of friction. He detests the top-down, centralist approach of the Livingstone era. ‘I’m a great decentraliser. We have to give more power to local people. In business, success is created when you devolve responsibility, set the rules and push the responsibility out to the people.’

I point out that businessmen who go into politics often sink without trace. He agrees, but hopes he will be the exception. ‘Often the problem is that they don’t have enough personal money to stick with it,’ he says. That clearly does not apply to him.

Parker’s assessment of Ken Livingstone is of someone in a parallel universe. ‘Ken may have improved some things but it was largely eight years of missed opportunity,’ he says scathingly. ‘Central government handed him huge amounts of money yet there was never a sufficiently serious debate about how to get value out of it for the hard-pressed tax- payers of London.’ He grudgingly acknowledges that Livingstone’s contracts with the bus companies improved the bus service, albeit with many running almost empty much of the time.

‘But the subsidy to the buses is about £860 million a year.’ He peers pointedly over his rimless glasses. ‘So it is not a costless exercise. And four or five billion was spent on the Tube with little perceptible improvement.’ Parker believes there is a less ruinous way to have a good bus service and he has other plans to get the traffic moving, such as changing the alignments of traffic lights. He regards the Congestion Charge as ‘a blunt instrument’.

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