Rail Services (West Kent)

Debate between Gareth Johnson and John Stanley

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Stanley]

I wholeheartedly endorse everything that my hon. Friend said. I come now to my final point, which is on penalties.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

This is about the issues that Southeastern had to contend with during the recent bad weather. Part of the problem was with communication. Many of my constituents in Dartford were informed by the website that Southeastern advertises that services were running and embarked on treacherous journeys only to find that the services were not, in fact, running. That is part and parcel of the problems that Southeastern needs to overcome.

[Sir John Stanley]

I wholly agree with my hon. Friend. The communication failures by both Southeastern and Southern during that period were abysmal.

My final point is that the penalties regime is wholly unsatisfactory, because it impacts solely on lateness. One important question for the Minister on a specific issue: is she satisfied with the accuracy and independence of Southeastern’s calculation? By the most wafer-thin of wafer-thin margins—0.04%—it has managed to escape financial penalties for lateness in its latest figures.

I come to the wider issue of the gross failure of the penalties regime—this was a failure by the previous Government—which applies to lateness but fails to apply to cancellations. As I said in a letter to the Secretary of State, that produces a perverse financial incentive for train operating companies to cancel services willy-nilly to avoid lateness, but the reality on the ground is that our long-suffering constituents and rail travellers would much rather travel on a train that arrives late than stand at the station from which they want to depart, waiting for a train that has not come.