Southern Rail: Gibb Report

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Randerson]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the publication on 22 June of the Gibb report on Southern Rail, what steps they are taking to deliver improvements for passengers.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, Chris Gibb’s independent report into Southern Rail makes a number of recommendations for the network that we have already been working with industry to deliver. In early January we committed an extra £300 million to improve infrastructure resilience, and we have established a new board to tackle issues ahead of the huge upgrades Thameslink will bring in 2018. However, Chris Gibb found that the main cause of widespread disruption for passengers was trade union action and unusually high levels of sick leave.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, as the Minister says, the report is now six months old. That is six months of misery for Southern’s passengers. Can the Minister tell us why the Government did not publish this report before the election? He is right to say that there were criticisms of the trade unions. There was also criticism of the Government for accepting a bid with the fewest drivers and a driver shortage from the start. Is the Minister able to assure us that in future there will be sufficient numbers of staff and there will be no further attempts to run this on the cheap?

[Lord Callanan]

There have certainly been no attempts to run the service on the cheap and I do not agree with the noble Baroness that performance over the past six months has been poor. In fact, since strike action has been reduced, Southern Rail’s performance has significantly improved in the past six months. Its public performance measure, which measures performance across train operators, is up by 23 percentage points—from 62% in early December to 85% now. We want and expect that figure to improve further but, as Chris Gibb’s report makes clear, that can happen only if industrial action by the trade unions stops.