Railways: Reliability

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 31st October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I hope I will not alarm the noble Baroness too much if I say that I agree very much with what she said. I also rise with some temerity to speak before the noble Lord, Lord Snape, who knows so much more about railways that I ever will. I well remember as a very green new Member meeting him on my first night in another place in the Strangers’ Bar, when he asked me what I did. I ‘fessed up to what I did, and asked him, “What do you do?”. He said, “I used to be with the NUR”. “What’s that?”, I asked. He said, “It stands for no use rushing”. I am sure that he remembers it as well as I do.

Before punctuality and reliability, connectivity comes to my mind, and the ease of finding stations and lines alike. This remains a great problem for many of our people, often still because of the closures for ever written against the name of Dr Beeching, whether fairly or unfairly, who in the late 1950s and early 1960s, helped by a supporting cast of experts, forecast the coming decline of our railways, which, of course, never happened.

Now, rather, there is pressure to reinvent passenger connectivity by reopening old lines, often by micromanagement. After some 50 years, for example, there has been the recent reopening in 2015 of links between two stations in Yeovil in Somerset, which are almost adjacent to each other, thus giving back local and welcome connectivity to Westbury and Weymouth. It is a little move but much welcomed locally.

On a larger scale we have the north-western powerhouse which may well soon be stimulated a bit by the north-south grand project of HS2, but in Lancashire, I am told there are groups pressing for more localised east-west reopenings or electrifications to bring back connectivity locally as well. That said, I am a very strong supporter of privately run railway operating companies. In saying that, I know that I may well be an endangered species. I think it is right, but I also recognise that they have a big responsibility to do better over reliability and timeliness, as do Her Majesty’s Government in writing new line contracts and renewal of contracts for franchises on our creaking railway infrastructure.

My weekly commute is on the Exeter-Waterloo so-called main line that is one of the mercifully few that still has substantial lengths of single track railway with attendant passing places—too often in my experience true loops of doom. Passengers, I know, long to have back the time in their lives that they have sat near Salisbury in the dreaded Tisbury loop—a kind of railway Bermuda Triangle in my experience. It is a black hole waiting for the delayed up or down train to pass, held up successively by maybe the wrong kind of leaves, the wrong kind of ice, or—once, late at night, it being dairy country—the wrong kind of heifers on the line.

There is no solution to this sort of thing from HMG. I am sorry to land these thoughts with my noble friend in her early outings on the Front Bench. The franchise was switched from the boringly named old South West Trains to the new, exciting and snappily named South Western Railway just last month. I went into it in some detail and it turns out to be a Sino-British outfit, promising in its franchise bid if successful, among much else,

“improved service frequencies and quicker journey times”.

I quote what it promised exactly.

Do Her Majesty’s Government have a well enough written contract with the means to claw back the franchise if these promises are not kept? I hope that they have, and I seek reassurances, not necessarily tonight, but in writing from my noble friend the Minister whom I am so pleased to see on the Front Bench.

The dualling of the whole of the Exeter-Waterloo railway is vital to the economic growth and social cohesion of the south-west, but in the meantime, it will be a Sino-British management failure if these promises are not kept. Above all else, it will be a central government failure if, together with the railway industry, and the new rail delivery group, we do not hammer out something that is more relevant to passengers than the currently imperfect public performance measure, rather concentrating much more, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said in her most interesting speech, on an “on time”, or as some would prefer a “right time” metric, measuring real performance.

I am sure that this will be a central issue for the new pan-industry Rail Delivery Group, set up so recently to represent private companies and the publicly owned Railtrack, to stress their public-private partnership. I hope that this will not be just a spokesperson-driven lobbying group, blaming the wrong kind of Brexit on the line, or whatever, but I particularly welcome the proposal to have a rail complaints ombudsman by the summer of 2018. I regard that as of fundamental importance. I hope that she or he will be truly independent and have teeth. I hope that the Rail Delivery Group will be circulating all noble Lords with details of where to raise issues, if they emerge. I shall certainly while away the time when stranded in the Tisbury loop by composing my thoughts.