Govia Thameslink Franchise

Debate between Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Herbert of South Downs

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The professor has helped us, and that is very useful.

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

Some 2,400 trains have been cancelled at Hassocks, in my constituency, since the introduction of the new timetable. The interim timetable this week seems to have resulted in fewer cancellations, so it is an improvement, but trains are still being delayed. What it has not done is to restore the direct service from Hassocks to Clapham Junction, and Hassocks is unique among commuting stations in no longer having such a service. Will my hon. Friend undertake to look at the matter again and ask GTR to review that omission, with a view to putting it right in future timetable changes?

[Joseph Johnson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for recognising that there has been some improvement since the introduction of the interim timetable on Sunday. He has been a strong champion of his constituents and their rail services in Hassocks. He and I have discussed how we can restore the direct services that he has mentioned on several occasions, and we have had debates on them in the House. I assure him that I will continue to raise the matter with GTR.

Govia Thameslink/Rail Electrification

Debate between Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Herbert of South Downs

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

The Secretary of State has been clear that he is leaving all options on the table should GTR be found to have been negligent. He is clear that the operator of last resort will be ready to step in, should that turn out to be the case, but of course the Department wants to follow all the correct processes in this matter.

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

We are now into week seven of this Thameslink timetable shambles, and there is no sign of the service getting better. Never mind electrification—frankly, trains were more reliable 100 years ago in the age of steam. Will the Minister confirm that the compensation package that he is to announce will be generous and that specifically, it will be funded by GTR, because its shareholders, not the taxpayer, should bear the pain for this appalling performance?

[Joseph Johnson]

I sympathise with my right hon. Friend’s concerns. His constituents, including those who use Hassocks station, which we have discussed on a number of occasions, have endured an unacceptable level of service, and he has been a strong champion for them. They will receive compensation and we will be setting out details of that compensation plan in coming days. It will be comparable, as the Secretary of State has indicated, with the compensation that was given to passengers on Southern about a year and a half ago.

Rail Services: Hassocks

Debate between Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Herbert of South Downs

Tuesday 19th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Joseph Johnson)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who, as we have just seen, is an extraordinarily powerful champion for his constituents, on securing this important debate on rail services in Hassocks. At the outset, I assure him that it is the Department’s No. 1 priority to ensure that his constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) get the rail services to which they have every right to feel entitled as soon as possible.

He is under the impression that services have not been improving in recent days. I am disappointed to hear that. I will look into the statistics and the picture he painted of performance to and from Hassocks. Passengers travelling on those services already should have started to see improvement in their performance since GTR started cancelling services in advance, rather than on the day.

During the week beginning 28 May—some time ago now—there were several days with just three morning services from Hassocks to London Bridge. The other scheduled services were cancelled on the day, meaning that passengers could not plan ahead. Last week, by contrast, there were no on-the-day cancellations and five services ran in each morning peak period. I grant that performance is still far from being at the level that my right hon. Friend or we in the Department would find satisfactory, but I hope that passengers seeing that change feel that improvement is starting to happen. It must now accelerate and that is the priority for the Department.

On the Hassocks to Victoria route there are still too many delays. I should add that in the morning peak last week, 12 services ran each day, compared with the seven scheduled services before the timetable change. Even if there is much more room for improvement on the Victoria line, even there we are starting to see things move in the right direction.

Network Rail and GTR are urgently developing and delivering plans to do more to reduce the disruption, and to give passengers the greatest possible certainty of train services so that they can better plan ahead. As I have mentioned, GTR is removing services from its timetable in advance, rather than on the day, and reducing weekend services to pre-May timetable levels. It is now updating journey plans on Fridays with the information about which services are being cancelled for the following week being all loaded up there and then, so that passengers can get a sense of what the travel patterns will be like for the coming week. That should bring about a more stable service than we have seen in recent weeks and will be in place, to answer my right hon. Friend’s question, until a full replanning of driver resourcing can take place. GTR also aims to publish an amended timetable across the whole network. Once that is in place, the promised improvements of the May timetable will be introduced incrementally, rather than as a big bang, to reduce the risk of further disruption.

Let me turn to the questions about the future timetable, once we are over this difficult period of disruptions following the implementation of the timetable. When it is fully implemented, the new timetable will deliver improvements to as many passengers as possible while balancing the competing and often contradictory demands of different passenger groups.

As my right hon. Friend noted, peak-time services from Hassocks no longer stop at Clapham Junction. That is because all peak services between Hassocks and Victoria are Gatwick Express trains coming from Brighton, which cannot stop between Gatwick airport and Victoria. However, there can be a single change at Gatwick airport. We can examine his view that a four-minute positive interchange was an unrealistic ambition; I will certainly go back to Network Rail and GTR to see whether four minutes is a realistic interchange time. However, if we assume for a moment that it is possible to interchange in that time, Hassocks passengers can make the journey to Clapham Junction with an average journey time that is roughly the same as before the timetable change, with some journeys being faster and, I grant, with some being slower.

It may be helpful if I explain the reasons behind the change. Since the end of the industrial action to which my right hon. Friend referred in his remarks, the main cause of disruption on the Southern network has been trains and train staff travelling on different lines during the day. That has meant that when disruption has occurred, it has often spread rapidly across the network because if a driver or a train were caught up in disruption on one route that can impact very quickly on their availability for the route on which they are next meant to be working.

The new timetable keeps trains and train staff working on the same route throughout the day, containing any disruption on that specific route. In addition, work has been done so that the timing of services does not conflict with that of other services on the network. This work has included separating Gatwick Express services and Southern services on the Brighton main line.

The net result is that Hassocks now receives a consistent four Gatwick Express trains per hour on the route from Brighton to Victoria during the peak, and two Southern trains per hour from Littlehampton during the off-peak. Previously, as my right hon. Friend knows, Hassocks was served by a combination of Southern and Gatwick Express services coming from Brighton or Littlehampton at all times.

I appreciate my right hon. Friend’s point that a considerable number of passengers are still being affected, but I believe that they are now in a position where they are able to choose between Southern and Gatwick Express services. Passengers from Hassocks will benefit from the performance benefits that will come in time from the full separation of Gatwick Express and Southern services.

I also emphasise that the vast majority of passengers travelling to London from Hassocks are being well served by the timetable change. None the less, I recognise that 9.45%, or somewhere under 10%, of weekday journeys represents a significant number of my right hon. Friend’s constituents who use services from Hassocks. However, it is also worth remembering that more than 90% of passengers using Hassocks are going to Victoria or are on Thameslink services. Overall, connections from Hassocks into London are much improved.

Hassocks now receives 12 direct services to Victoria in the morning peak, compared with seven before the timetable change. This provides a significant capacity increase for those passengers going to Victoria. As this is a Gatwick Express route during the peaks, it is run with new trains that have air conditioning, wi-fi and power sockets. On average, the journey from Hassocks to Victoria in the morning used to take more than an hour. Now it takes, on average, 51 minutes, which is significantly better than the amount of time that services took in 1905, the timetable for which my right hon. Friend produced and referred to.

[Nick Herbert]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Before he experiences the fate of politicians and other public figures in Sussex who have particularly infuriated us and is burnt in effigy, may I ask him to reconsider his comment that services are “much improved”? I think what he meant was that they might be much improved when the new timetable is finally introduced and works properly, but he cannot say, and nobody can say, that the current level of service is much improved.

[Joseph Johnson]

Indeed. I prefaced all my comments by saying that this was about what would happen once we are over this hump—the current difficulties—and once the timetable is fully bedded in and working to the levels that it should. Of course my right hon. Friend is right and I repeat what I said earlier: there has been improvement, as I hope he acknowledges, but there is significant room for further improvement, so that services are of the standard that his constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham have a right to expect.

On average, the journey times for trains into Victoria from Hassocks will be reduced by 10 minutes in the morning, when the service is operating at the level it should be operating at.