Southern Railway (Performance)

Jeremy Quin Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Claire Perry)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and I am sorry that the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) did not adhere to the four-minute rule. I appreciate that she raised a lot of points, many of which I may not be able to answer, but I will write to everyone whose questions I do not cover today.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on securing the debate. Many people in the Chamber have either been, or have replaced, Members of Parliament who are absolutely assiduous and dogged in their pursuit of a better transport system. It really shows—I extend this point to the shadow Minister as well—the importance that we now place on our national, local and regional transport infrastructure not only as an absolute agent of economic growth, but as an agent of human happiness. I was struck by the point made by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and I entirely agree. The worst thing about the whole situation would be to be that mother or father trying to get home to pick up their children from childcare, and month after month, week after week, day after day, being unable to say what time you will get home. That is an unacceptable burden on working families.

Sorting out the route will deliver potentially the biggest productivity gain in the UK. The Southern route carries the second highest number of passengers. It is the biggest franchise: it will, as my hon. Friends pointed out, be merging into the GTR franchise at the end of the month. It has some of the oldest and most complicated track layout in the country—there is a reason why the upgrade works have not been done by successive Governments. Some of the track is 176 years old. Doing this work is like doing open-heart surgery on a marathon runner. It creates delay, and misery when that delay becomes too great. There are serious lessons for the railway industry to learn about how works are done. Is it right to keep stations open and running, or is it better to use a blockade and have all the pain at once? Those are very important questions and challenges for the industry.

The work on the route is one of the largest investment programmes in the UK, and it is contributing to the problem—it is not the sole cause. It is not just about London Bridge station. There is the new station at Blackfriars, which has a wonderful layout and has added new capacity into the system. There is the introduction of new trains, which has started to happen on the route that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs mentioned. I know that he has seen the 387s already introduced, but equally the class 700s that come in will double the number of people who can be brought into London during peak commuting hours. So much is going on, but it is true that performance is often unacceptable and sometimes inexcusable.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) made the point that the majority of the time—I have the latest right-time performance figures—the trains are on time. It is not all doom and gloom, but we have got to a situation in which passengers have lost their trust in the operator and front-line staff have been left to deal with some unacceptable delay incidents themselves. It is not fun to work at London Bridge and not have the tools and information; to want to help deliver better performance for customers but be unable to do so; and to be spat at and abused. We should recognise that behind all these problems are often good people trying to do their best but lacking the tools to do so. I wanted to say a bit about that.

I have heard consistent themes in the debate, which I will try to address today. I am referring to reliability of service, communication and compensation. The reason why it is so important to get this right is that the Government have an unprecedented investment plan for transport infrastructure over the next five years. It is not jam tomorrow; the new stations and new trains will be delivered. I say to the hon. Member for Nottingham South that it is churlish to suggest that Network Rail’s £38 billion investment programme is in jeopardy. The only part of the programme that has been paused is the electrification programme. All the rest of the works are proceeding as scheduled, and quite right too.

Demand has increased by more than 60% in this part of the country, and of course passengers have expectations of a better service now. People do not want to be shuffled around and not given information. I think that one of my hon. Friends said that the guard had less information than he did, because he was able to dial into social media applications.

There have already been some improvements on this line. I know that hon. Members mentioned this. We have started to see a slow uptick in the various performance measures, whether public performance measures or right-time performance measures. We have seen driver recruitment increase. One big challenge for Southern was that it did not take on enough drivers when it took on the franchise. Its driver recruitment plans are now running ahead of where it wanted to be. It is losing drivers as other parts of the network grow, but it is recruiting. It is 50% ahead of plan, and training is proceeding apace. That is incredibly important.

[Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Minister talks about the investment programme over the next five years. My commuters from Horsham and elsewhere are already focusing on the control period beginning in 2019 and the pinch points in Clapham and elsewhere. I hope that we will continue to have investment flowing in the next control period as well. I am not asking the Minister to commit herself completely right now on what will be going on in 2019—other events this afternoon will determine that—but I hope that that will remain a priority.

[Claire Perry]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s comment. I think that on the day of the Budget, it would be a foolish Minister who committed to longer-term spending, but my hon. Friend has my assurance that I will listen to him and his constituents on this important matter.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs for his kind comments about my involvement. I think the hon. Member for Nottingham South is possibly the only member of the shadow Transport team who is actually interested in transport. She shows up at every debate; her boss is too busy running various leadership campaigns. She knows the issues on the railways well, and I look forward to continuing to work productively with her, but this is not about the Department getting involved and Ministers trying to drive change. As has been said today, what we want is the industry to be able to do this itself, so what are the levers that we need to use?

It is reassuring, I am sure, for hon. Members to know that the chief executive of Network Rail, when he gave a presentation to the Department for Transport board, said that the recovery of the area of the country that we are debating was one of his top five priorities for this year. It is obvious to everyone that the system is creating millions of hours of misery for millions of people in one of the fastest-growing areas of the country. That is simply unacceptable, and it is not good enough to have one-off interventions, despite the fact that we have unprecedented levels of work going on. The industry has to learn how to do things differently. The challenge, in thinking about Euston, High Speed 2 and connectivity into London, is to learn the lessons now to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.

I think the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood may have made a point about the existence of current passengers not being valued enough in the overall process. I cannot remember whether it was her, but that point came from the Opposition Benches. I agree. Understanding what matters to people now is crucial, so let me outline some of the things that are happening and will happen. I invite my hon. Friends to be part of the process.

The merger is happening, and that will bring in a raft of new performance measures that will hold to account those responsible a fair amount. Hon. Members may know that the franchise is currently in breach of some of its performance measures, and there has been a conversation with the Department about the implications of that. Performance improvement plans were presented back in the spring—I know that hon. Members saw them—and are already starting to be implemented. That is driving the slow and steady improvement in performance.

Beyond that, there are three main problems. The first is that delivering the London Bridge improvement programme will not solve all the problems on the lines in question, particularly the Brighton main line. The second is that although the public performance measure is improving, recovery from delays and the volatility of the service remain real challenges. As was mentioned by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who is no longer in her place, some trains are always late, and that is simply not good enough. The third point is that rail customers—those who are paying for the goods and services—are consistently unhappy. They have lost trust. They do not see the improvements, and they do not think they will be sustained.

So what has happened? Network Rail brought in its chief engineer to do a deep dive on the real, underlying problems on the line, from both an operations and an infrastructure point of view. That has been turned into a short-term and long-term plan for real recovery. I know we talk a lot about plans, recoveries and summits. There is a war room at London Bridge station that all hon. Members are invited to visit with me on the 20th. I would be delighted if the hon. Member for Nottingham South would join us. It is a cross-party invitation, which I believe she has already received, to see the depth of planning and understanding that is going on on a joined-up basis between Network Rail and the operator.

I can confirm to my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs that I chair the weekly meeting. We have also invited in Transport Focus, because I am keen for improvements to be seen and felt by passengers. We are not just telling ourselves that things are getting better. We are tracking social media sentiment and how people feel about their journeys. We are tracking what matters to people and what is actually improving for people.

I want to mention some of the points that have been made about compensation. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) made a valuable point. Compensation should almost never be paid, because we should have a system that delivers people to their destination on time. Members are right that it is estimated that only 12% of people claim compensation. We have a manifesto commitment to deliver better compensation—and part-time season tickets—right across the industry. I continue to look at the problem of giving compensation to passengers from London Bridge. It is difficult, because it is hard to target those passengers in a fairly open network, but we continue to work on it.

Of course, there are already companies, such as c2c, that are delivering compensation automatically to people’s phones if they are more than a minute delayed. That is the sort of model that we want to see. I will also refer to DelayRepay.net, which is a way to take all the paperwork out of claiming compensation. There are already some important innovations in the industry.

Ultimately, we have to have an unswerving commitment to and focus on passengers—customers—in the industry. The industry does so much right, but when things go wrong, the fact that we have capped fares at RPI for the remainder of this Parliament almost does not matter, because people are frustrated about their journey. So I am determined, and the Department is determined, to hold the industry to account. I am agnostic on the structure—whether this is done through an alliance or in another way. Whatever the structure happens to be, I just want better services to be delivered. I believe that the best way to do that is through transparency, a continued focus on quality in the franchising process and all of us being involved in holding the companies to account.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the performance of Southern railway.