Delays on the London Underground have risen by 20 per cent, according to a London Assembly report. The increase, which occurred between 2009/10 and 2010/11, represents “a drag on London's economy,” said Caroline Pidgeon, chairman of the assembly's transport committee.
The delays equated to passengers spending an extra 6.5 million hours on the Tube in the last year.
The Jubilee, Victoria, District and Metropolitan lines were the worst performing, said the report, which also cited strike action as the cause of more than half the increase in delays.
Mike Brown, managing director of London Underground, said that the replacement of signalling, trains and track had led to inevitable disruption, while Bob Crow, firebrand leader of the Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT), blamed the delays on Transport For London (TFL).
''The repeated breakdowns and infrastructure failures on the Tube can be blamed fairly and squarely on cuts to maintenance and the expensive failure of privatised upgrade works,” said Crow.
''Passengers are left waiting by years of mismanagement of the London transport budget and a recent wave of signal failures and breakdowns shows clearly that a dire situation is getting worse."
The report called for a thawing of relations between the TFL and the RMT.