Rail Timetabling

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, the national railway is a public service for two reasons. First, most passengers have no choice and, secondly, a vast amount of its expenses are paid for by the taxpayer. One has to ask: who is responsible for this public service? It is very clear: it is just one person, the Secretary of State. He owns Network Rail, he hires and fires the directors, he determines their pay, he can give them directions, he decides what funding they get. He commissions the train operating companies and the various, appropriately complex, conditions on their contracts. He is personally responsible for the mess.

My colleague in the House of Commons said that the Secretary of State should resign. I would not be nearly so presumptuous, but an apology would be a step in the right direction. There is not a word of apology in the Statement. I share his sorrow, and I wish that he would take personal responsibility for the sorrow that he has caused. He failed fully to understand the operation; he did not assure himself that he had sufficient skilled resources to understand the risk. Furthermore, he carries on trying to make the present structure work. The present franchise system does not work. You need much more skill than the Secretary of State has so far displayed to get a profit-maximising organisation with virtually no real competition to maximise the concept of public service. His favoured solution for getting the railway right is a partnership, as he set out in his east coast Statement, but Northern was managed by a partnership and it failed; GTR had a partnership and it failed. Why did it fail? It failed because a publicly owned Network Rail and a profit-maximising train operator do not make natural partners.

The Secretary of State fails to understand the basic financial pressures on the train operating companies. They go on about increases in passenger numbers, but this is much more dependent on external forces such as the economy than anything that the train operating company can do. Revenue is largely outside their control; the road to shareholder value is by cutting costs.

Finally, the Secretary of State’s plan to get us out of this mess, a programme of incremental introduction, is likely to go as wrong as the current mess. I have run a railway in the public sector. It is a complex system, and any change to any part has an effect on the whole system. Change needs to be modelled and tested by high-quality research staff, which takes time and effort and long lead times to recruit and train staff, particularly drivers. Does the Secretary of State have access to such staff? If he has, are they recommending incremental introduction?

To summarise, does the Secretary of State accept personal responsibility for this mess? Will he apologise, and has he got sufficient skilled resources to manage the situation? Is he still convinced that a partnership really can work? Given the continuous failure of the present franchise structure, does he not agree that the train operating companies should be taken into public ownership?

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord I am horrified by the tone of this Statement. The passengers, who bear the brunt of all this, have absolutely had enough, and the lack of any shadow of an apology in that Statement from the Secretary of State is going to anger them even further. The Secretary of State lurches from catastrophe to chaos, and I believe that he thinks that he is Teflon man.

I differ from the noble Lord in that I do not believe that nationalisation is the answer. Indeed, when you look at the ability of the Department for Transport to manage things effectively, one shudders to think of what it would do if it was in charge of the whole lot. I do not subscribe to the kneejerk approach to politics that heaps all blame on Ministers; I realise that government is difficult and that Ministers cannot be expected to micromanage. But I have been a Minister in two Governments and I recognise the point where a Minister has to take direct responsibility when something goes wrong. The Secretary of State has reached that point, and he needs to take that responsibility for his part in this debacle. You cannot claim the credit for something if you are not prepared to shoulder the blame when things go wrong. The latter part of this Statement trumpets the wonderful things that are still going to happen in future; the Secretary of State has trumpeted all this in the past and therefore takes responsibility for it.

Why were basic precautions not taken to ensure that a big change like this ran smoothly? It is the coward’s way to blame the staff and managers involved. Transport Focus warned of potential problems with the new timetables last autumn. Why were its warnings not heeded? What meetings took place with Transport Focus, and between it and the train operating companies, to deal with the concerns which it voiced? For how long has this change been planned? Was there any element of speeding it up to get it done by a particular time, which might have been a factor in why it went wrong? Has Network Rail, or the train operating companies involved, ever raised any concerns about either the scale of change or the timescale for it? The Statement says that there were meetings recently and no concerns were raised then. Were they raising concerns some months back? Why were these changes introduced on such a grand scale, involving several train lines? Would a pilot project not have been a good idea? Given the delays to the Bolton electrification project, why go ahead at all with changes on Northern at this time?

The Statement refers to compensation, but it is not precise. Can we please have exact details about compensation to long-suffering passengers? Finally, the Statement referred to the ORR undertaking an inquiry. Will this be entirely independent? Will it analyse the roles and responsibility of Government, as well as of Network Rail and the train operating companies, so that Government can learn the lessons from this and ensure that it never happens again?