West Coast Main Line Franchise

Debate between Preet Kaur Gill and Jesse Norman

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that there are knock-on effects and that some of those effects bear on east-west services. That is one of the reasons that the Department has separately announced and negotiated a national rail contract for CrossCountry as a rail operator, in order to provide a framework for stable further investment in those knock-on services.

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I declare an interest as a long-suffering user of the Avanti service on the west coast main line. In 2021-22, Avanti had the most customer complaints of any operator and it is consistently rated one of the worst-performing operators on the rail network. Despite that, Ministers spent an eye-watering £4 million of taxpayers’ money in bonuses to company executives for customer experience and acting as a good operator. Can the Minister explain when it became Government policy to reward failure?

[Jesse Norman]

The hon. Lady is deliberately drawing on statistics from before the recent improvements that the Government are recognising in this contract award. However, there is a further point: it is of course right to raise individual items, but we ought to get away from a situation in which politicians feel that they can micromanage and second-guess decisions made by people at the operating level. The key thing is to make sure that the quality of management is in place to drive continued, sustained improvement, as we expect it now is with the new chief executive, Mr Mellors.