West Coast Main Line Franchise

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his flurry of questions, and I shall address what he said. He asked for the release of the criteria of the contract awarded; that is a commercial matter and we are not going to discuss that, but I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Minister of State my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle has met very regularly with the entire industry and has been working on a weekly basis with officials and with Avanti, and therefore has had the matter very much in hand.

On the performance the hon. Gentleman describes, I am astounded that he is not agreeing with the Secretary of State and celebrating the improvement over the last nine months, and six months in particular: cancellations were as low as 1.1% in July; 90% of trains arrive within 15 minutes; over 100 additional drivers have been trained and brought on since April 2022. Each of those is a significant achievement.

It is all very well for the hon. Gentleman to talk about engagement, but the hon. Gentleman has not exactly been shy in writing to the Department, so I asked my officials to scan the letters we have received and I do not think there was a single one from him in the last year mentioning Avanti. If that is an indication of how content he is with the service, I am delighted to hear it.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Select Committee Chair.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

As a regular user of Avanti services, I agree that the performance has improved markedly and I pay tribute to the new managing director, Andy Mellors, and his team for turning around what was an abysmal service. I appreciate that the Minister will not be able to talk in detail about the contract, but will he say a bit about the extent to which this new contract moves away from the micromanaged national rail contracts that have been in place since covid? They were right at the time, but are now stifling innovation in the sector and I hope that this is just the first of the revisions of these national rail contracts.

[Jesse Norman]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question; he brings not just personal experience of this service as an MP for Milton Keynes but also his considerable expertise as Chairman of the Transport Committee. He is right to pick up on the point of micromanagement, and that is one reason why, having been in a period of relatively short contracts—a number of two-month and three-month contracts—in order to monitor progress, the Government have now seen fit to move to a much longer framework: a three-year contract but with the potential capacity to terminate thereafter if performance is not sustained. That strikes the right balance between giving the certainty Avanti needs to continue to invest in improving the service and the accountability that the Government rightly demand.

I would add that there is some awareness that in relation to services to Milton Keynes, west midlands and north Wales there is progress to be made, and I think I am right in saying that the new chief executive is very much focused on that issue as well.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Stephen Morgan (Portsmouth South) (Lab)]

For the second time in two days, the Government have been dragged to the House to explain the state of our crumbling rail network, and for the second time in two days, the rail Minister has failed to turn up. Surely things cannot get any worse for passengers in the north, we thought, but today, the Minister has proved us all wrong by confirming that passengers could have to suffer up to nine more years of Avanti West Coast and up to eight more years of CrossCountry.

The Minister claims that there has been enough improvement to justify up to a decade more of the utter chaos that is consuming our railways thanks to those two failing operators, yet the latest statistics show that Avanti was the second worst operator in the country for punctuality last month, with only 46% of its trains running on time. CrossCountry was the fourth worst, with only 49% of its trains on time. What is the Government’s response to that? More lucrative contracts and millions of pounds paid out in performance bonuses. These decisions have left glaring questions for the Minister to answer. What performance metrics were considered when the Government made these decisions? Have performance payments been restructured in the new contracts, or will they continue to reward failure? Did the Government consider the operator of last resort, which has driven improvements on other lines?

The country is tired of this cycle of failure, with cancellations and delays, and any prospect of reform kicked into the long grass. It is clear that this Government are determined to run our rail network into the ground. Is their plan really to allow for rail services to have another decade of failure under the Tories, with hundreds of millions handed over to shareholders in performance bonuses and fees? If so, it is clear that they are out of ideas and out of time. If they cannot put passengers first, is it not time for them to step aside and let us deliver the change our passengers so desperately need?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jesse Norman]

What I recall from that hearing is that Mr Mellors said 1% of the tickets at Glasgow were sold through the ticket office, that there would be a full staff in front of the ticket office, that those staff would work from the first train in the morning until the last train at the end of the day and that they would continue to accept cash. That sounds like quite a good service offer to me.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the Minister for responding to the urgent question.