Is the Southern Rail situation going from bad to worse?
Yesterday I joined a large group of Sussex Conservative MPs for an update with Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, on the latest developments regarding the railways. We have been meeting virtually weekly with the Transport Secretary and his junior minister, Paul Maynard, over recent weeks. Since we last met the previous Monday we have seen the announcement of a series of strikes before and after Christmas by train drivers union, ASLEF, on top of those already announced by RMT.
In addition last Friday the Government announced a compensation package for regular passengers – equivalent to a free month’s travel for annual season ticket holders. This was a welcome development which I have been calling for over many months but it was only a start and somewhat diluted by the news that despite the chaotic lack of service ticket prices are still to rise in January. The news that the compensation payments are to come from the Department for Transport, i.e. the taxpayer, and not the main culprits responsible for running the service directly GTR, added insult to injury.
On Monday I joined Brighton Pavilion MP, Caroline Lucas, and other local MPs in an Urgent Question to the Rail Minister in the House of Commons where we questioned what is being done about the latest imminent strikes and why the compensation package did not go further, as I called for previously. The following day, I again joined a large group of my colleagues in a briefing meeting with Chris Gibb, who was appointed in September to head a new project board to get to the bottom of why there are still so many infrastructure and train failure problems affecting the local network and in particular how better joint working between GTR and Network Rail can minimise them.
Chris Gibb is an impressive, down to earth character and is one of the few people in this whole shambles who appears to know what he is doing. He has been given £20m mostly from the Network Rail budget to find solutions as quickly as possible. Contrary to press reports, this public money has not been allocated to GTR, thank goodness. He has so far spent just over £3.7m of that money and much of that work is on technical issues around streamlining arrival and despatch times at stations and better train signalling routing. Much of this work is plain common sense and should have been done ages ago by Network Rail or GTR.
So far 150 miles of trackside vegetation clearance has taken place and a new proactive predict system is being put in place to focus maintenance interventions on known problem hotspots. In Reggie Perrin’s day it was usually down to the signal box fire at Penge virtually every week, so this is nothing new. He is also trying to change working practices whereby essential overnight engineering works which over-run and then wreck the morning rush hour train schedule should not happen. Rather than over-run they should have to finish at a set time and if need be the contractors come back the following night to complete the work without disrupting services.
Today we await the ruling of the High Court where GTR, backed by the Government, are seeking to block the ASLEF strike action, which really will wreak even more havoc to the system if it goes ahead next week. Even at this late stage it is not too late to suspend strike action and the Transport Secretary has said he will clear his diary for talks with unions if they suspend their industrial action. Today also I will be dealing with the daily flood of emails and tweets from irate constituents whose daily scheduled have been wrecked, often including photos of display boards showing train upon train cancelled or severely delayed. We are only too well aware of the complete chaos which has been going on for so many months now. Whilst I usually only to travel from London to Sussex once a week each way I experience the chaos at first hand too. We have all been faced with accounts of how constituents have lost their jobs, missed important exams or are just not getting to spend any time with their families.
All this is completely unacceptable and it needs to stop. It is undoubtedly the top issue for my constituents and takes up most of my time, as it does with other Sussex MPs; we are in no doubt about the seriousness of the current situation. So it really does not help when certain people on social media or in emails to us seem to think that we do not care, have not been doing anything about it or are just pushing the GTR line on this and ‘union bashing.’
As anyone who follows my website, media columns or newsletter knows, I have been very engaged and vociferous on this issue since last year. I have a special section on my website where I have tried to put as much information in the public domain as possible. I regularly pass on examples of the worst breakdown in service to the Rail Minister, which are very useful to have from constituents as ammunition. I have been even-handed in my criticism of the shambolic way the GTR management have handled these long running problems, the way the unions have escalated this into a highly political campaign with no regard for the well-being of passengers and for the failure of the Department for Transport to achieve solutions and be more proactive.
On the latter point, undoubtedly the new Transport Secretary and Rail Minister are much more proactive and engaged with the dispute though they could still do more. For example, at this week’s briefing with Chris Grayling I challenged him on why train fares had not been frozen on top of a more generous compensation package. I also asked him why on strike days more replacement bus services are not being brought in and tickets made interoperable with scheduled busses as happens between tubes, buses and trains in London. His initial reply was that there is a capacity issue and GTR have raised safety concerns. This sounds far too feeble. At this time of year there are lots of holiday coaches standing idle and if there are not enough in the south then lets ship them in from other parts of the UK or even abroad. And if there is a shortage of drivers then let’s use the army. I am sure many MPs would be willing to help out too!
So what are the solutions?
There are three main problems. Initially these were largely connected to the huge rebuilding work at London Bridge which had a much bigger knock on effect to London services than had been anticipated. That work comes to an end next year and is being managed better but the underlying problem is that the whole of the railway system in the South East was built in the 1930s and has not been changed much since. Bridges, tunnels, junctions, track base etc. are all creaking and still need huge investment to bring them into the 21st century where the numbers of people using the system have risen dramatically.
Physically it is impossible to squeeze more trains on the current line network and that is why we have such problems at rush hour especially with level crossings in local towns down for so long.
The second issue is that GTR (Southern) has bitten off more than it can chew. GTR was effectively a merger of 5 separate companies and accounts for 23% of all the train travelling public in the UK, which is concentrated on the most over-worked lines in the South East. I think it is too large to cope. The management was not up to running such a large enterprise and they have been playing catch up the whole time. Whilst there have been some improvements to rolling stock on the Gatwick Express there are still too many short trains leading to overcrowding and completely inappropriate antique trains, on the Coastway in particular, which are well past their sell by date. It should be no surprise therefore that there are constant problems with defects on trains.
GTR is also bad at responding quickly and effectively when things go wrong and the domino effect across the whole network and the whole commuting day can be considerable. They need to work much more cooperatively and efficiently with Network Rail, as Chris Gibb has discovered. The GTR management is probably not the worst running trains in the UK but it is certainly not up amongst the best who seem able to run a reliable train service elsewhere. The trouble is that those other operators are not queuing up to take over the GTR franchise which runs until 2021.
For those who criticise the Government and the Department for Transport for these problems and then call for GTR to be stripped of its franchise and taken back into public hands think about what you are saying. It would be those very same ministers and civil servants you attack who then find themselves responsible for running the UK’s largest rail franchise. A case of out of the frying pan into the fire?
The third and largest problem undoubtedly is the industrial action by the unions. Notwithstanding the official strikes now enacted by RMT and soon ASLEF, it is clear that unofficial restrictive working practices have been undermining operation for some months. For example, when thousands of fans were left stranded at Falmer after a Friday match at the Amex last month I gather that 5 train crews rang in sick at short notice resulting in mass cancellation of trains and chaos ensued. Coincidence or what?
The basis of the strikes is the unions’ objections to the new Driver Only Operated (DOO) trains coming online in the New Year. This does not mean that there will only be one crew member of board but that the driver will now be responsible for operating the doors as is the norm for most modern trains. In fact this has been in operation on UK railways since the 1980’s and already on 60% of the routes operated by GTR. There will still be second guard/conductor/customer assistant (whatever you want to call them) on board able to spend more time with passenger snot least helping disabled passengers on and off the train. There will be no redundancies. All guards have had their jobs guaranteed until the end of the franchise, with generous pay increases and a bonus for signing the new contract which all but 2 of 222 have to date.
The unions are claiming this compromises safety. Yet there is no evidence to show that. Numerous independent reports have said this way of working is safe, indeed Ian Prosser, the independent director of Railway Safety at the Office of Road and Rail, has sent a letter to that effect which I have published on my website. If there were serious doubts over passenger safety then I obviously would not be supporting the changes but that is not the case and it is being used as a red herring by militant unions who have a political agenda to stop modernisation of our railways and force them back into public ownership.
This strike action is therefore not only highly regrettable but highly irresponsible and illogical. They are striking about a new contract which virtually all the guards have already signed up to. They have refused talks unless DOO are ruled out which is obviously not going to happen.
So the current chaos is the result of three main elements but the most damaging, immediate and most easily resolvable is the strike action. As Chris Gibb has said, the transformation programme is deliverable despite all the challenges but not when faced with such intransigent opposition by the unions. However I also think that GTR should be doing much more to improve the system. Clearly there is too much reliance on overtime working by staff and they should have done more to recruit more drivers and guards sooner to spread the workload and not rely on a small group of people.
I also do not think they have been feeling the pain financially to make them more alert to the urgency of finding a resolution. The new 15 minute Delay Repay scheme is helpful but still nowhere near enough. GTR may be losing money on its rail franchise but it only has itself to blame and the parent company Go Ahead recently announced £100m profits and should be underwriting more of the pain felt by passengers. To that end I am introducing a Private Members’ Bill later this month which will seek to overhaul the compensation system so that it does not rely on passengers going through lots of bureaucratic hoops to obtain inadequate refunds. It would also seek to ensure that penalties are levied automatically and paid into a public benefit pot. I will be publishing more about that soon to coincide with my Bill on December 20th.
I am sorry for the length of this blog but from it I hope you will realise that your MP has not been idle or indifferent, but very concerned, engaged and at times outraged. I will continue to post as much information as I have on this website and on Facebook. In the meantime if you have any other queries I have not covered then please do let me know and I will do my best to answer them. I hope you agree that we are doing as much as we possibly can to try to resolve this dispute but if you think I am still missing a trick then please do tell me what I have been missing and what you practically think I could be doing in addition.