Govia Thameslink and Network Rail

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) for securing the debate and agree with him that this really is déjà vu all over again. For all of us here, the issue is one of the single biggest annoyances in our constituencies at the moment. I get daily emails with progress or lack-of-progress reports from constituents, tweets and other social media. I have taken to having a “Trainwatch” section on my website, where I post, three times a day, the performance or lack-of-performance charts from Govia Thameslink Railway, which are usually a mass of red and yellow showing lateness.

On Monday, I visited the Three Bridges operation centre, so that I could see at first hand how it was dealing with all the problems. It is a very impressive facility where Network Rail works alongside Southern rail. I was taken around by the chief executive, Charles Haughton, and I am grateful to him for the time he took to show me around. However, it is very clear that GTR is still nowhere like on top of the problems. We were shown charts that were not just red, but pink, which is when it is in complete meltdown. The very morning that I was there, the whole signalling structure was outed for some 10 minutes, causing absolute chaos.

I then travelled in the cab with the chief executive up to London Victoria. Again, it was good to see at first hand some of the challenges faced by GTR. Fortunately, the train arrived into Victoria only 10 minutes late. I recognise the problems and challenges of the infrastructure going back to the 1930s, and we heard all about that at the heated meeting with the management and the Minister back on 18 January. We recognise that the responsibility for the problems is something like a 60:40 split, with Network Rail responsible for 60%. However, on the day I visited, it was quite clear that there were problems that were Southern rail’s own making.

I got an email just that morning from a constituent saying that they had just been told that the 7.31 am from Shoreham had been cancelled. At 7.35 am, they saw it shoot through Shoreham station. Later in the day, I found out that, in fact, the train had not been cancelled. There was a problem with the train crew at source. Southern had then chosen to shoot through some stations to try to make up that time, so, effectively, it had lied to consumers. It is no wonder that our constituents are getting cynical about the reasons for some of the delays. I said to GTR that it needs to be honest with passengers. Passengers will understand when major structural problems cause delays, but they need to be told the truth. If trains are to shoot through stations, passengers need to be given good warning of that and told exactly the reason why.

Some of the charts that I have posted on my website are quite appalling. One day, only 51 of 114 Gatwick Express trains actually arrived on time, and 30 were more than 30 minutes late or cancelled. Only two thirds of trains on the Brighton main line arrived on time that day. For people coming into Gatwick and getting on to the Gatwick Express, this is the “Welcome to Britain” sign, and that sort of inconvenience and hassle does not give a good impression of the services in this country.

I praise the social media that GTR is using to try to communicate more, but it needs to be much more transparent about the problems. The issue is having an impact on students in my constituency, who are arriving late at lessons as trains are overshooting their stops. Commuters are saying that they are going to move back to London.

In such a backdrop, the ticket office closures add insult to injury, with closures of the majority of 84 station ticket offices across the south-east. In Shoreham and Lancing, the ticket offices will close. At Worthing, it will be there for peak time only. The closures are supposedly based on a survey of ticket office usage. Nobody knows when that survey happened or how many people were involved. In fact, in Shoreham, the ticket office has been closed on many occasions because of staff illness. That information is not available for the three-week-only consultation that is closing this week. There will then be a week for Transport Focus to decide what recommendation to make but, in any case, it has no veto over GTR’s intentions.

I have had lots of emails, and some 2,300 people have signed a petition in 10 days. Tomorrow evening, I will be holding a meeting with Southern rail. Southern rail managers are coming down to Shoreham where constituents can see them at first hand and get the answers to why we have a shoddy service and why they have this ridiculous idea, in the interests of enhanced passenger experience, to do away with those station ticket offices and replace them with station hosts. Station hosts are there to tell people why the ticket machine is not working, and to deal with the trains coming into the station, and with maintenance and security. If people are lucky, hosts will have some time to advise them on how to buy their ticket.

Finally, there is the issue of the continued closure of the underpass at Shoreham station where, just last week, a 20-year old man was fatally hit by a train. We need to do more to be much more responsive to public need.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. You are always a fount of rail-related humour. I join in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) on securing a very important debate, which we must not shy away from continuing. Members have been very kind about what my Department and I are doing, but we are simply reflecting the concerns of Members and the constituents they serve. It is imperative that we sort the issue out. As the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) said, with many more investment projects to happen, we have to learn lessons and ensure that this level of disruption does not happen again.

There was very little that I disagree with in what was said today. We know that performance on this part of the network in the franchise—it carries almost a quarter of all rail passengers every day—is simply not good enough, whether in punctuality, reliability, customer satisfaction or the way people feel they are being treated. A lot of points have been raised today, and I will try to address as many as possible in my closing remarks, but if I do not get to everyone’s, please be assured that I have instructed my officials to take notes and to write specifically in response. It is important, on Budget day no less, to have so many hon. and right hon. Members prepared to come to Westminster Hall to make passionate and compelling cases. We need to keep working collectively on this issue.

I will step through the three root causes of problems on the lines, which I think Members know, and then I will talk a little about what is changing and where more needs to be done. The first root cause—my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) made the point compellingly—is that there is a very big improvement project going on with Thameslink and what that entails and the London Bridge reconstruction. It is not just London Bridge, though; Blackfriars is a beautiful station and a wonderful addition to our landscape, and it opened almost without fanfare. We will be unpicking the north-south lines through London and under the Thames so that the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham will be able to take a direct train straight through to Peterborough or points in between and access other train journeys. Moreover, they will be able to do so on a brand new fleet of trains, which will start to roll out in the next few months.

I was delighted to welcome the first of the new fleet of Gatwick Express trains. They are purpose-built for people travelling to and from the airport. The first is in operation, and the others will be up and running by the summer. That is tangible evidence of improvement. It is a big package of untangling lines that have not been touched properly in many years, putting in new stations, driving new train paths and providing customers with a much better travelling environment. That is a prize worth having. When London Bridge is open, all the platforms are returned to full capacity and we have many more trains with the ability to take many more passengers, some of the immediate issues will undoubtedly be solved.

[Tim Loughton]

The Minister mentioned Gatwick Express. I saw the brand new trains, which are fitted with wi-fi. I gather that she is in negotiations with Govia Thameslink Railway about upgrading existing rolling stock with wi-fi so that at least our commuting constituents stuck on trains going nowhere can get on with some work while they are delayed. Will she ensure that that happens as a matter of urgency?

[Claire Perry]

I am happy to confirm again that I have committed to roll out free wi-fi in all classes of train travel across England by 2018. Trains coming on to the franchises will be fitted with wi-fi as a matter of course, and trains that are already running will be retrofitted. I hope constituents who are not stuck on trains for longer than their train times will also be able to do some productive work. Wi-fi is an important addition to the landscape.

We always knew it would be tough with London Bridge and Thameslink. Despite what some might say is long-term disruption on the line and fare changes, we have seen incredible amounts of growth on the railway. In fact, travel from Horsham, for example, is up 40% in the past 10 years, so more and more people are getting on trains right across the country. Frankly, successive Governments have neglected to invest in infrastructure. We have all ducked our collective responsibility to invest in trains to get people moving effectively and efficiently around the country. It is vital that we keep the investment programmes growing, because we are now seeing some of the problems associated with passenger growth on lines that have not been invested in.

Underlying all that is a problem that is a little more sinister: even when Thameslink is running—when all the trains are rolling, the system looks great and the stations are open—we still have persistent, daily failures of the infrastructure the trains are running over. Our constituents do not care whose fault it is, and nor should they—that is my job, or at least my Department’s—but around 60% of delays are the result of infrastructure failures such as points failing, signals failing or other things going wrong. That is intolerable. Not only is it intolerable on a daily basis, but the Thameslink programme, which will deliver 24 trains an hour through the centre of London, north to south, will not be able to operate unless those infrastructure problems are sorted out.

The focus for my Department has been working together with Network Rail and the operators, including Southeastern, but I am afraid there is no magic bullet. There is no one thing we can all do. It is about a relentless focus on the day-to-day details of running a railway; and ensuring that, in the morning, trains come out of the depot on time to the second, and that, if there is a problem, it is fixed in the minimum amount of time. People may ask, “Surely that’s just railway 101—why hasn’t it happened?” Of course, it has happened, but the problem is that, under both public and private ownership, the customers have not mattered enough.

Members might be surprised to hear that no measure of lost customer time has ever existed on our railways, other than briefly on the London underground. That is inexcusable. My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham made the valid point that it is the human cost of failure that is so hard, as well as the productivity loss of making millions of people late, day in, day out. We have a record programme of investment in transport infrastructure—it was added to in the Budget today, which I welcome—and it is being done to drive up the productivity of the country, but nobody has ever captured the productivity loss from not running the trains on time. Members will be pleased to hear that I am devoting considerable time to that. I want the volume of people being carried on that part of the railway to really count, so that when infrastructure programmes need to be sorted out, there is even more emphasis on sorting them out. We are absolutely committed to doing that collectively.

Many Members raised driver shortages, which is a historical problem for the franchise. It has been run on a shoestring, with the number of drivers about 6% or 7% below what was required. That sounds like a small difference, but, on a very busy railway, if one driver is not there to run one train, there is an infection of delay right across the network. On its current recruitment plans, which are the biggest in the country, GTR will reach the minimum level—the operational level—in August this year. We have asked it to go further than that by recruiting more so that there is resilience in the system, and it is on track to do that. That is vital.

Several Members made important points about ticketing offices and smart ticketing. A consultation on ticket office changes is going on. Nothing can happen without the Department’s say-so. The future of travel in this country is not orange bits of paper but digital ticketing information being delivered to us through whatever device we choose. In some cases, that might be a bar code printed out on a piece of paper, although as the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) said, many customers like to buy a ticket from a person, or at least have some interaction.

We have already invested more than £30 million in the south-east flexible ticketing programme, and there are tens of millions of pounds of further commitment to come. That money has been invested to ensure that the franchises, of which GTR is the flagship, can implement the technology, have the back office and gate their stations so that the Key card—the smart card system—can work. If the Key card system were working, there might be an argument for getting people out from behind ticket office counters and on to the front lines, but I will commit today to having a deep-dive conversation with my officials and the franchise so that we can get to grips with where it is on the roll-out of the Key card and how that relates to ticket office closing hours. If we are going to do smart ticketing, let us do it right.