Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The trouble is that this is all about politics rather than about the interests of the railways or of passengers getting on with their daily lives. It is a tragedy.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Will the Minister acknowledge that page 93 of the Gibb report shows a graph that demonstrates that Southern was the worst-performing company a very long time before there was any trade union industrial action? Will he also explain why he has not got round the table with the unions and GTR? This is an absolute nightmare for our constituents, but the Government cannot pretend that it has nothing to do with them, given that Gibb also says that the Secretary of State is

“already determining the strategic direction of this dispute”.

That is what Gibb says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

May I, Madam Deputy Speaker, add my congratulations to you following others that have been expressed? It is a pleasure to see you in your place.

I welcome this debate, as the Secretary of State has some major information gaps to fill and some serious questions to answer. It is a shame that he left the Chamber almost as soon as he could, because on top of the six-month delay between the Government receiving the report and its publication, we have had no serious formal Government response. The Minister’s 500-word statement barely stretches to a side of A4. That is indicative of the whole attitude that we are seeing from the Government—all hands-off and no leadership. After two years of the Brighton main line rail nightmare, my constituents expect more and deserve better. They have regularly been in tears of anger and frustration. We have heard the stories of jobs lost, relationships broken up, and businesses taking a very serious hit in Brighton and Hove. All the while, passengers continue to pay through the nose for Britain’s worst-performing rail service.

I have listened to the Secretary of State today. May I point out to him that it will not help passengers to heap all the blame for our long-running rail nightmare on to the unions? The people who work on our railways every day—people who are trained to a safety-critical standard and work on the frontline—are raising specific concerns about access and safety that have yet to be answered. Moreover, the Secretary of State simply cannot keep up the pretence that this two-year-long fiasco is nothing to do with him and the Government. The buck stops with him, whether he likes it or not, and chronic problems long predate the industrial action. That action started a little over a year ago, at the end of last April, whereas we have had enduring problems for well over two years. A glance at the graph on page 93 of the Gibb report makes that very clear. Southern was the worst-performing company a very long time before any industrial action took place.

As the Secretary of State well knows, Chris Gibb says that

“all the elements of the system have been under strain”.

He says that Southern rail was attempting to run too many trains on poor and unreliable infrastructure. He makes a lot of technical suggestions on issues such as signalling, timetabling and service patterns. He says, critically, that strategic leadership is missing. That is not news for long-suffering passengers. With regard to this dispute, the bottom line is that there has been a chronic lack of leadership from this Government and from Ministers. It is plain that we are not going to get anywhere unless we get people talking together.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that this is a case of “a plague on all their houses”—that Southern, Network Rail, the unions, and indeed, I am afraid, Ministers, have all failed passengers? Does she agree that it might be worth investigating the possibility of using binding arbitration to get them in the same room to agree a way forward?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I certainly agree that we need a situation where everybody is in the room at the same time, not a strategy where certain unions are picked off separately, and not one where the Government do not sit in the room either.

In his report, Gibb makes it clear:

“In GTR ‘do nothing’ is not an option, so negotiations must be entered into.”

The Transport Committee has called for all parties, including the Government, to sit down together and resolve the dispute, and that was months ago. The involvement of Ministers in the industrial dispute is often officially denied but in one phrase Gibb lays bare their central role, saying that the Secretary of State is

“already determining the strategic direction of this dispute”.

If the person in this position will not get around the table without preconditions, I really do not see how we are going to make any progress.

Can the Minister also tell us where the famous appendix 9 —entitled “Recommendations regarding the GTR franchise agreement”—is? That appendix, which might just shed a bit of light on the issue, is conspicuous by its absence. My constituents think that Southern has failed, as do I, and we want to see that section of the report. Does the mysteriously missing appendix 9 actually tell us whether GTR is in breach of its contractual obligations? Is the censoring of that appendix in its entirety the reason why the report was kept hidden for half a year? Perhaps Ministers want to avoid being pushed for answers about whether GTR was in breach of contractual obligations.

In October 2016, the Select Committee told the Government to “get a grip” on the monitoring and enforcement of the franchise, to speed up their assessment of the franchisee’s force majeure claim and to be prepared to restructure or terminate the agreement should GTR be shown to be in default. Until the court case brought by the Association of British Commuters, however, no action was taken at all.

ABC is also raising interesting and important questions about the safety of the concourse at Victoria station, which I want to touch on briefly. Gibb says:

“At major stations such as Victoria, pedestrian flows, gateline and concourse capacity are all significantly influenced by commercial strategy.”

He pointed to the dangers that arise when many commuters are concentrated in very small areas of the concourse. He points to the Department for Transport as the place from where we should be getting leadership, but are we getting that leadership? Is Victoria safe from overcrowding? Can the Minister give us a timetable and a funding commitment for the works that are needed?

Finally, Gibb says that bringing the franchise into public hands would create disruption and result in projects having to be put on hold, but that lays bare the fact that the Government have allowed the travelling public effectively to be held to ransom by a failing operator. The Government have dismantled Directly Operated Railways, so if they had to strip GTR of the franchise, they would have very limited options in terms of current project delivery. That is a serious dereliction of Government duty.

The state has to guarantee that if the private sector fails, the Government can and will take the franchise back into public control. Without that, there is no stick. The Department needs to rectify the situation and must immediately start preparing a publicly owned organisation to take over on a clear and agreed date. If the industry knew that, for example, in six months’ time the GTR franchise would switch to a directly operated railway, projects could be provided without disruption and my constituents in Brighton Pavilion would have a chance of getting a better deal on the railways.