Will transport in London feel the budget squeeze?

On the Politics Show on Sunday at 12.30pm on BBC One I'll be looking at the spending cuts and how they could affect the transport budget in London.

Transport for London (TfL) gets about £3 billion a year from the Department for Transport (DfT).

Crossrail will cost the Dft 5 billion by 2017. And roughly £8 billion is being spent on rail in the next five to six years. All of which will be presumably be looked at.

The Mayor is meeting the new Transport Secretary next week.

Hopefully we'll get more information then but there have been a series of pre-emptive strikes by City Hall about protecting investment in transport infrastructure.

Is the DfT listening? Is there anything it can do about it, if its budget is cut by 25% as some are suggesting may happen?

Noticeably no-one is now putting a deadline on completion of Crossrail - it wouldn't surprise me if the 2017 deadline is moved to cut costs.

And already insiders have told me it's extremely unlikely the Northern Line upgrade will be ready in time for the Olympics.

The message from most parties and commentators is if you cut transport budgets in London then you could derail the recovery.

The business group London First make a good point though - could some of the projects be done cheaper? And for that they want strong leadership...

And Professor Stephen Glaister of Imperial College suspects we won't see salami slicing of transport budgets. It will be the big ticket items where the cuts come and perhaps deadlines will be shifted...

There's no doubt this is a real test of the Mayor and his relationship with the new coalition government...

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