It was indeed a PPP, not a PFI—that alphabet soup is frequently jumbled in my mind. However, my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. If we had had proper scrutiny at the time, rather than the dragooning of Labour Members into supporting the Treasury position, it would have been exposed far earlier.
With the new clauses and amendments, and with the arguments made this evening, we have tried to expose folly on a potentially even larger scale. My hon. Friend’s speech was truncated rather ham-fistedly—if the promoter of the Bill will forgive my saying so—such that it did not achieve what the promoter wanted; it just made my hon. Friend, our expert on these matters, sit down, but we are still discussing what he was proposing. And this was after only one hour and 10 minutes. His argument was forensic. As I have often opined in here, Government Members do not like it up them—some of them do, that is true, but the promoter of the Bill did not, and it was because arrow after arrow of logic and forensic examination from my hon. Friend was hitting home that the attempt to close down the debate was mounted.
“Mind the gap” is the rubric to remember. This is all about the gap in funding from central Government to Transport for London and closing that gap through the disposal of public assets. I said earlier in an intervention that on these matters left-wing thinking has moved on—even such left-wing thinking as that personified by my hon. Friend. We are not against making non-performing public assets perform in one way or another, although, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North pointed out, we do not want them performing in such a way that they can never again be used to perform the purpose for which they were originally intended, which in this case, of course, is to provide transport for London—the clue being in the name. In other words, we do not want land disposed of in a way that Transport for London can no longer control, so that assets are lost forever. We are not against making public assets perform, if they are not necessary now—or perhaps even for many years and decades in the future—but we have certain conditions, and one of them has to be transparency.