Southern Rail

Debate between Andrew Jones and Helen Hayes

Friday 20th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Andrew Jones)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) on securing the debate. I know that this subject is close to her and her constituents’ hearts, and we have had much ministerial correspondence on the matter. She has, as ever, spoken up for her area with a strong voice, whether it has been about services for Lewes’s famous bonfire night celebrations or about replacement bus services.

I understand the frustration that my hon. Friend and her constituents have experienced with the service that they have had. I expect Govia Thameslink Railway to be able to run a reliable and predictable service for passengers—that is an entirely reasonable expectation—so I can only imagine what it must be like to be dependent on such an unpredictable service not just as a commuter, but as someone who needs to travel regularly. There are two elements to improving the service: the industrial relations issues; and the long-standing, underlying service problem areas. I will go through each in turn.

As hon. Members will be aware, trade unions and Southern rail have been in dispute since mid-April last year. The dispute has centred on driver-operated doors, and it has caused significant disruption to passengers. However, moving to a way of working in which the driver controls the train doors and the second person on the train focuses on customer service will be much more passenger-friendly and will allow a higher performing and more resilient rail service. The unjust industrial action arising from the dispute has held back GTR from delivering a modern, safe and passenger-focused railway. We want a railway that is fit for the future, but the dispute is getting in the way.

Although the dispute is a matter for the union and the train operator to resolve, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), have been doing everything they can to limit the impact of the strikes on passengers. On strike days and to cope with the overtime ban, additional measures have been put in place to help people to get to work.

A huge amount of work is taking place behind the scenes to try to get a resolution to the dispute. That is why I welcome ASLEF’s offer to suspend industrial action, allowing for a new round of intensive talks towards the end of this week. Indeed, those talks might be happening right now. I hope the talks end in success, which would allow us to get on with improving services and, most importantly, ending the misery that industrial action has inflicted on hundreds of thousands of passengers.

The travelling public are still subject to strikes by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, however. I assure hon. Members that the train operator has contingency plans in place. On RMT strike days—such as next Monday, on 23 January—tickets are accepted on alternative GTR routes and other operator’s services, while bus replacement services are in place where there is no alternative rail option. In the meantime, GTR has trained a large number of office staff as contingency conductors to provide cover on non-driver-only operation Southern routes, and additional GTR and agency staff have been deployed to stations to help passengers.

Let me turn to the issue on which the dispute centres: the driver-controlled operation of the doors. Essentially, DCO involves someone driving and also controlling the doors without the need for a guard. Drivers on Southern have been striking against what others in GTR have been doing for years. This way of working is perfectly safe. DCO services have been operating effectively at very busy stations on a third of the UK network for more than 30 years. In fact, more than half the trains running in Britain, including all trains on London Underground, operate with drivers in full control of the doors. Indeed, more than 60% of GTR’s current services operate without conductors.

We are investing about £2 billion of public money in providing longer modern trains across the GTR network, which is all about delivering extra capacity for the travelling public and coping with increased demand for services. These trains are fully equipped with the latest technology that allows the driver fully to operate the train from the cab, in line with modern practice. When Ian Prosser, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of railways, published his GTR DCO inspection report recently, he confirmed that driver-controlled operation on Southern is safe. The Office of Rail and Road has concluded that the proposal fully meets legal requirements for safe operation.

Given that such a significant voice has assessed the practice as safe, as well as the safe record of operating such services, I hope that the unions will now acknowledge that they have no credible argument for saying that DCO is an unsafe method of operation. GTR has publicly stated that there will be no compulsory job losses until the end of its franchise in 2021 as a result of this modernisation, and affected conductor staff will have their pay protected.

Our railways are a success. Passenger numbers are growing. In fact, they have more than doubled since privatisation—from 735 million journeys a year in 1994-95 to 1.7 billion in 2015-16. That is a fantastic record. We will obviously need more people, not fewer, to help passengers in the future. The changes are about freeing up staff time so that they can focus on providing customer service and helping the travelling public on board the trains. If the unions insist on retaining outdated ways of working, it will be impossible to deliver the benefits, including improved reliability, that the new technologies can bring.

GTR has always been clear that there will be more staff on board trains in the future than there are today. They will be there to help passengers, including by giving customer assistance to individuals at unstaffed stations. Some 99% of on-board supervisor contracts have now been signed, and more than 80% of the additional 100 on-board supervisors who have been recruited have started their role. We hope that the new talks will end the months of misery and hardship faced by the travelling public, and the problems that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes articulated so powerfully today.

I turn to some of the underlying service problems. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is acutely aware that performance has not been good enough in the past and has deteriorated again in recent weeks. We need to be clear about what is causing that, because some of it has been more about the failure of infrastructure operated by Network Rail than failures by GTR. The instruction to drivers not to work non-contractual overtime on rest days has also had a significant impact on services.

None the less, I assure the House that the Department is determined to resolve the issues that exist as quickly as possible. Some of them should be addressed by the work that Chris Gibb has done as head of a new project board, working with GTR, the Department for Transport and Network Rail to explore how to achieve a rapid improvement in services. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes asked specifically about the timing of improvements. I will check on that work and write to her with further information.

It is appropriate that GTR is held to account for the quality of its product, and the Government continue to do that. GTR must work with Network Rail to deliver better passenger services as soon as possible. We monitor closely the performance of all rail franchises, and the franchise agreement contains clear penalties and incentives so that operators are penalised for repeated poor performance in the areas for which they take direct responsibility.

[Helen Hayes]

It is straightforwardly the case that the measures in the franchise agreement covering Southern rail have not provided sufficiently significant incentives or deterrents to improve performance—they have not worked. Will the Minister comment further on that?

[Andrew Jones]

We know that there have been significant problems on the line, but the biggest single blockage to progress is the gun that is being held to everybody’s head by the industrial action. The huge investment in new rolling stock will deliver a vastly improved service, with improved capacity and comfort on the trains. All we need is for that £2 billion investment to reach customers as fast as possible.

[Helen Hayes]

I agree that the industrial dispute needs to be resolved, but the fact remains that Southern rail was failing long before that dispute even began.

[Andrew Jones]

I agree that there have been operational challenges which, as I said, have resulted in poor performance and predate the strike. That is clearly correct, but the strike has taken those challenges much further and compounded the underlying problems.

As I said, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has brought in a team to head a new project board, bringing together all the different parties to explore how we can make a rapid improvement in services. However, it is hard to do that when such huge day-to-day operational challenges are caused by the strike action. I am happy to agree with the hon. Lady’s point about the underlying problems that predate the strike—that is without any doubt. Under the regime of performance monitoring for the franchise, penalties have been levied against GTR for cancellations and short formations, and they will continue to be so levied.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes mentioned compensation, which is important, given the cost of rail travel and the level of disruption. Last month, the Government announced a multimillion pound compensation package for season ticket passengers in recognition of the hardship experienced by those who have suffered long delays, cancellations and disruption in recent months. She said that no one in her constituency had heard about the scheme, but they should have been hearing about it this week, so I am grateful for her feedback, which I will take back to the Department. I ask her to make sure that such practical, on-the-ground experience is continually fed back to me and my ministerial colleagues. The Delay Repay 15 scheme has been introduced to make it easier for Southern passengers to claim compensation.

It was appalling to hear my hon. Friend’s points about disabled services. We are dealing with Victorian infrastructure and trying retrospectively to install accessible and friendly services. This urgent work has been undertaken by successive Governments of all parties. Progress has been made, but there is a long way to go, and the experience she mentioned of someone having to be changed on a platform is obviously utterly unacceptable. The task of improving our public transport system for people with disabilities is important to the Department and one of my personal priorities. We will shortly be publishing an action plan for how to improve accessibility for people with disabilities on all our public transport, and for the first time we will include cognitive impairment and dementia in that.

This stretch of the network is one of the most intensively used in our country, having seen a dramatic increase in journey numbers over the past few years. I mentioned the dramatic passenger growth across the network as a whole, but the growth on this stretch is right at the top end of that spectrum. We need to increase capacity and update and modernise the service.

I fully recognise that strikes have caused disruption for passengers and that the current performance is far from satisfactory. It is utterly not good enough. ASLEF’s offer to suspend industrial action is a step in the right direction, and I hope that with these latest talks we can get on with improving services and, most importantly, ending the misery that this industrial action has inflicted on hundreds of thousands of passengers. We need to resolve this matter so that we can get back to the important task of improving the line and delivering the service that my hon. Friend and others across the House are rightly demanding for their constituents.

Rail is a critical and successful industry. It has been a success by all measures—growing passenger numbers, its safety record, and levels of investment from the public and private sectors—but when it fails, it highlights just how critical it is and how much people depend upon it. We need to work together to make the improvements that my hon. Friend is right to demand for her constituents.

Question put and agreed to.