Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway
Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Jeremy Quin(7 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)
The point of agreement between me and the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) is that the service has caused heartache, distress and job losses for thousands. The report was commissioned to try to find ways to improve the resilience of the service, and I welcome it. I think everyone acknowledges the author, Chris Gibb, to be a serious, experienced individual, and he has produced a report that is thoughtful, helpful and comprehensive. The clear message that emerges from his report is that the primary cause of the appalling service that passengers received last year was the result of members of the workforce
“taking strike action…declining to work overtime and…undermining the system integrity”.
He concluded that
“if the train crew were to work in the normal manner…the output of the system, a safe and reliable rail service for passengers, would be delivered in an acceptable manner”.
The validity of Mr Gibb’s words has been reinforced by the 23 percentage point improvement in performance achieved by Southern over the past few months, when there have been no strikes. GTR has shown that with the support of its workforce it can deliver, as Mr Gibb says, an acceptable level of service for customers.
Like everyone in this House, I am horrified that we are again seeing a return to industrial action. The Opposition were keen to lambast the Government on public sector pay restraint last week, but I am acutely aware of how many public sector workers use these trains. ASLEF, on the behalf of train drivers, rejected a pay offer worth nearly 24% over four years. Passengers will draw their own conclusions. [Interruption.] Is the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) trying to intervene? If he would like to get in, I would love to hear whether he thinks that that is a bad thing that is being put to members. I have offered the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to come in and say that the 24% rise is adequate, but he has declined to do so. I understand, so I will return to my speech.
Passengers do not believe that the DCO trains that have operated on our network for the past 30 years are unsafe. They do not believe that passenger trains operated in Germany, Austria or Canada using DCO are unsafe. Passengers do not want much; they simply want the drivers and the on-board supervisors to do their job, so that they can get into work to do theirs. In the helpful statistics provided by the RMT in a meeting this morning, as referred to by my hon. Friends, it was confirmed that 97.25% of the 70% of Southern trains that used to operate with a second person on board continue to do so. Those trains have a second person who is not preoccupied with opening and closing doors; they are there to help passengers. That is a high proportion, reflecting the additional numbers of OBSs that have been recruited. It is not as high as I would like, nor is it as high as GTR intends it to be—GTR is aiming for 100%—but all train users would rather see the 2.75% of those trains continue to run for the benefit of passengers. If they did not run, the negative impact to the service as a whole would be far more than the 3% diminution in service. It would lead to many thousands of passengers being wholly unnecessarily delayed.
Jeremy Quin
I thank my hon. Friend. She really has to ask the unions why they are still on strike. My understanding is that it is because of the 2.75% of the 70% of trains that traditionally had a second person on board. I am convinced that her constituents and my constituents would rather that those trains continue to run. I look forward to 100% coverage, but the 97.25% figure and the recruitment shows that GTR is serious about ensuring that there is a second professional on board. Passengers have had enough. It is high time that the unions ended their action.
As the Secretary of State made clear, however, it would belittle the report to suggest that it focuses only on industrial action. It is far broader and more useful than that. What runs through the report is the difficulty of operating trains on a hugely well used and complex service. As the report states, Southern is
“simultaneously running at absolute capacity at peak times, and undergoing a period of dramatic… change”.
The introduction of class 700s, new depots at Three Bridges and Hornsey, a doubling of Thameslink peak-hour trains to 24 through central London, and major infrastructure enhancements at London Bridge are all good improvements for passengers. They are vital to maintain a railway that has seen a massive increase in passenger numbers. As the report makes clear, Southern has been under strain with
“unreliable infrastructure, a timetable that is very tight and with overcrowded peak services”.
In some ways, the railways are a victim of success. In the days of British Rail, which the Opposition still seem to recall so fondly, the network was declining and, as Gibb points out, was relatively lightly used. In the 20 years since privatisation, passenger numbers have grown such that, on Southern’s routes, more passengers are now travelling than at any time in the past 90 years. The emphasis that Gibb places on collaborative working is welcome, as are the practical steps that he recommends to ensure that that takes place, many of which have already been implemented. I am pleased that on receipt of the report back in January the Government immediately committed £300 million to meet the basic infrastructure requirements that were set out. It is good to hear the Department’s strong commitment to ensuring that the region secures the investment it requires.
The report also has lessons for the operator, and Gibb makes clear the complexity of the Southern operator’s task. There are few, and I am certainly not among them, who view the scale of the franchise as optimal. However, for those who believe that firing the operator would be a simple gain, Gibb argues persuasively that such an approach is naive. Twice operators have been replaced by Government emergency provision, as the shadow Minister said, and the report implies that this comes at greater cost. In both cases, the routes were running at steady state; Southern is going through a period of substantial change. The implication of the report is that firing the operator would be, at best, risky, and at worst could lead to chaotic failure.
However, it appears to me that the operator, in bidding for the franchise, was too optimistic about what it might be able to achieve by crewing via diagramming software. The system can be highly efficient when it works well, and in theory it should work brilliantly, but that requires perfect operating conditions, which are not what Network Rail delivers. I am therefore delighted by the Secretary of State’s commitment to the additional drivers who are being trained and coming online, and I am pleased that there are now more on-board staff than at the start of this process. They will increase resilience and reduce dependence on overtime. He is determined to ensure that we have a modern, resilient railway that delivers for its passengers. I congratulate him on commissioning this report, and I thank Mr Gibb for his work.