PROFILE: ROBERT KILEY >>>

-Profile: Robert Kiley-

On the right track: The American recruited to revive London's Tube
has had an illustrious career improving New York City

Robert Kiley has long experience of bringing organisations back from the brink of disaster. He first came to fame as the man who rescued the New York subway from rack and ruin in the 1980s. In the years since then, as president of the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce, he promoted business-led efforts to tackle the economic and social problems which once threatened to undermine the city's position as one of the world's leading business centres. It was his track record in New York that prompted Ken Livingstone to recruit him as the man to sort out London Underground.

The NYC Partnership, which Mr Kiley left to take up his new post as London's transport commissioner, had big ambitions. Its objective was "to catalyse, support and supplement initiatives that will create an urban environment in which an educated and skilled workforce can live in affordable housing, located within reach of a fast, highly-efficient public transport system". If that sounds like a tall order, it must have seemed impossible when the partnership was founded in 1979, with New York facing an uncertain future following one of the worst decades in its history. Many of the old manufacturing sectors had moved out, and the combination of a declining tax base and ever-expanding welfare bill had brought the city close to bankruptcy in 1975. Emergency measures to tighten budget spending and borrowing stopped the rot, but left the problem of turning things around. On the eve of the technology-based new economy, the city was still hanging over the abyss.

"The situation had been stitched together," says Mr Kiley. "Humpty Dumpty was back on the wall, but with a lot of cracks still showing." One of the most serious cracks was the subway system. Notoriously inefficient, graffiti-covered, dirty and crime-ridden, it appeared to symbolise the run-down condition of the public services and the social problems that were prompting investors to take their business elsewhere. Prominent bankers and business leaders realised the full extent of the problem, and it was this that led to the foundation of the NYC Partnership. "They had the feeling that the business community should be more involved with helping the city to head off some of these social problems, so that it wasn't just the city authorities that ended up being saddled with them," says Mr Kiley. The proposal that the private sector and larger civil community should band together to find solutions was a "novel idea at the time". He says it was in the business community's own interest to do something about the problems created by poor education, unemployment and immigration.

It was novel for the private sector and civil community to band together

Mr Kiley came on the scene when he was appointed head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1983. In the following years he put his stamp on the subway, restoring it to order and safety with a mixture of heavy spending funded by bond issues and vigorous policing. His approach to subway crime was used as the precedent for the 'zero-tolerance' policy adopted by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. During his years at the Partnership, Mr Kiley and his colleagues focused on a host of problems. Not least of these was the New York education system, which was failing to meet the needs of the new economy. "By the time we got to the 1990s there was an awareness that technology was the future of the New York City economy, but the education system had lagged behind," says Mr Kiley.

The Partnership brought in a greater degree of transparency and accountability, and introduced a privately-funded policy of rewards and sanctions at schools. He says the process is by no means complete and there is "still much to be done". In addition, the Partnership is involved in housing projects. It builds and restores homes through a subsidiary corporation, the New York City Housing Partnership. More recently it has become involved in renovating rented accommodation in cooperation with local firms under the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs programme. "Close to a billion dollars of revenue a year is generated from home-building and renovation, and for many years it has been the single most-important catalytic factor in these districts," says Mr Kiley. "We've been active in about 55 neighbourhoods in New York City and this has made a substantial impact." The policy of forging closer links between the public and private sectors has also been applied to the problem of unemployment.

A scheme called Nexus aims to get people off welfare and back to work. "You do your best to get these people back into the workforce rather than to assume the appropriate step is to pay them a cheque to help them in the short term," says Mr Kiley. "The short term turned out to be the long term for too many people." Nexus was made possible by a grant from the US Department of Labor, and the authorities in New York gave the project access to neighbourhood employment programmes. The Partnership offers training to help people look for a job, and seeks to educate employers as well. "We work with the companies because they had stereotypes about people on welfare, which turned out to be wrong." Mr Kiley cautions that it is too early to say if the scheme is successful. He hopes, however, that Nexus may provide a model for private-public cooperation in similar programmes across the country.

He sees a number of similarities between London and New York. Both cities are truly international capital markets, where technology has a major role. Their populations are roughly the same size at about 7.5 million within the city boundaries, and 21-22 million if the surrounding conurbation is included. Mr Kiley is too diplomatic to point out one big difference between the two: they both used to have dismal underground transport systems - now only one does.