The last word on Boris’s bus black hole?
Channel 4’s excellent online FactCheck service has had a look at Boris’s costing of his pointless plan to replace bendy buses with conductor-dependent Routemaster-style buses, aka Boris’s bus black hole.
FactCheck rates each claim it examines on a scale from 0 to 5, where (rather counter-intuitively) 0 means it’s completely true, and 5 means there’s not a shred of truth in it anywhere at all. So how does Boris’s claim stack up?
The verdict
Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.
Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson’s plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson’s estimate looks like pretty small change.
FactCheck rating: 4.5
I’m just trying to work out where the 0.5 points’ worth of truth is located. Perhaps it’s the fact that he said it would cost £8m, and in fact it will cost £8m; it will just cost a further £106m as well!
Worth a read, anyway: they’ve certainly done their homework, unlike a certain Mayoral candidate, who clearly can’t be trusted to do his, even when it comes to his most highly publicised policy.
It really doesn’t bode well for Boris’s ability to control an £11bn budget as Mayor if he can’t even get the small sums right.