Rail cancellations and delays soar by 50% in just 8 years

THE number of trains cancelled or severely delayed has soared by half since 2010, a report revealed yesterday.

An analysis of official figures shows the 2.6 per cent of services cancelled or significantly late in 2009/10 jumped to 3.9 per cent in 2017/18.

Overcrowding has also risen by more than 25 per cent on the top ten most packed peak-time routes. These services are now carrying almost twice as many passengers as they are meant to.

The information about cancelled and delayed services was compiled by the Labour Party to illustrate how rail services have fared since the Tories came into power. A train is significantly late if it arrives at its destination more than half an hour after its scheduled time.

Labour criticised what it called ‘Tory rail mayhem’ as it renewed calls to nationalise the railways and gave a commitment to invest £10billion in building a ‘Crossrail for the North’.

It also highlighted a 36 per cent increase in fares since 2010, which has pushed up the cost of season tickets by hundreds of pounds. Commuters have been warned that their fares are to rise again by 3.2 per cent.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described the railways as a ‘national disgrace’, adding: ‘People’s lives are being badly affected by this chaos. The Government needs to recognise that rail privatisation has failed.

‘Labour will end this rip- off and bring our railways into public ownership so they are run in the interests of passengers, not private profit.’ But Tory MP Huw Merriman, who sits on the Commons transport committee, said: ‘It’s unjustified strikes, called by unions who bankroll Labour, causing mayhem.

‘Until Labour stand up to their union paymasters and call for these damaging strikes to end, rather than obsessing about nationalisation, they cannot speak credibly for passengers.’

A campaign of strikes kicked off by the RMT on Southern rail more than two years ago has spread across the country.

Services on some of the busiest routes were disrupted for the third consecutive day on Sunday because of a further 72hour strike on South Western.

But there was no mention of this in Labour’s report. Instead it focused on the disruption across the North following the botched introduction of a new timetable on the railways.

As well as wreaking havoc on Northern Rail, Thameslink and Great Northern in the South have also been badly affected.

Northern Rail slashed almost 170 services a day after it was forced to introduce a temporary timetable on June 4 to reduce last-minute cancellations.

Travelling on the proposed route of Labour’s ‘Crossrail for the North’ between Liverpool and Hull, Mr Corbyn said: ‘For decades, northern communities have received a fraction of the transport investment spent in London and the South East.’

A Department for Transport spokesman said: ‘We are spending over £13billion through to 2020 to transform transport across the North – the biggest investment any government has ever made. We’re investing £3billion upgrading the TransPennine route and providing an extra 500 carriages with space for 40,000 passengers and 2,000 additional services each week.’

JEREMY CORBYN has been on the move again. Two years ago, you may recall, the Labour leader became embroiled in a trivial, but revealing, fuss when he was accused of staging a political stunt on a Virgin East Coast train.

Claiming that the train was packed, Mr Corbyn staged a one-man sit-in in the vestibule, and tried to use the incident as ammunition for his crusade to renationalise the railways.

Virgin hit back, claiming that he had deliberately snubbed empty seats, and the whole thing degenerated into an unseemly mess.

Yesterday Mr Corbyn was back on the rails, though this time he managed to find a seat. Travelling from Liverpool to Hull on the route for the proposed ‘Crossrail of the North’, he used his journey to publicise the ‘national disgrace’ of ‘overcrowding, delays and cancellations on our railways’.

The answer, he says, is very simple: ‘Labour will end this rip-off and bring our railways into public ownership so they are run in the interests of passengers, not private profit.’

Infuriating

On the face of it, Mr Corbyn is pushing at an open door. Nothing is more infuriating than being stuck on a train that is running two hours late, if it is running at all.

As anybody who has travelled in France or Germany will know, our trains are too often an embarrassment. Few people would deny the Government has completely failed to properly regulate the rail companies, protect passengers’ rights and preside over a decently organised system.

Does the Transport Secretary Chris Grayling strike you as a man who is completely on top of his brief, dedicated to giving Britain an efficient rail network, and passionately committed to passengers’ interests? No, me neither.

The statistics tell the story. The proportion of trains that are cancelled or seriously late has risen by 50 per cent since 2010, while overcrowding has increased by some 25 per cent on Britain’s ten most popular peak-time routes. But as rail commuters will know (and if you are reading this in the corridor of a train that looks and smells like the Black Hole of Calcutta, I am heartily sorry for you), the bad news does not end there.

After years of increases, fares rose by an average 3.4 per cent this year, infuriating travellers who cannot find a seat. And peak- time tickets are crazily expensive. A standard return fare from London to Manchester costs £338, more than a cheap flight across the Atlantic.

When you throw in the neverending epidemic of strikes and walkouts, which badly disrupted services across southern England last week, it is no wonder so many passengers applaud Mr Corbyn’s calls for a return to the days of public ownership. Indeed, polls consistently find that almost two-thirds of voters support nationalisation.

So should we really turn back the clock to the days of British Rail? Well, the short answer is no. But before that, it is worth adding a bit of nuance to Mr Corbyn’s picture.

Contrary to what the Labour leader suggests, some private operators do a perfectly good job. My local service, Chiltern Railways, is almost always on time, runs clean and efficient trains and has spent a fortune on new car parks at Banbury and Oxford Parkway.

I am old enough, alas, to remember British Rail before privatisation in the Nineties. Was it better than Chiltern? No, it definitely was not.

It is, of course, perfectly true that some private operators have performed with lamentable incompetence, for which the Government has pathetically failed to punish them.

I think, for instance, of Southern, which has inflicted on commuters a seemingly unending saga of strikes, cancellations and delays. Indeed, if you want a symbol of everything wrong with our rail network, it is surely Southern’s infamous 7.29am train from Brighton to London, which ran on 240 occasions in 2014 and never once arrived on time.

No wonder, then, that people want to see the end of rail bosses like Southern’s Charles Horton, who was paid a colossal £495,000 even as his firm became synonymous with overcrowding and cancellations.

But would public ownership, under Mr Corbyn and his Marxist Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, really be the equivalent of a silver bullet?

Would fares fall overnight? Would trains magically become less crowded? Would delays become a distant memory?

Of course not. Nationalisation would do nothing to cure the basic problem with our railway system.

The truth is that we have the oldest network in the world, designed during the Victorian era, struggling to cope with greater demand than ever, with the population having soared from about 27 million in 1851 to almost 67 million today. If the railways were run from a Whitehall office, that fact would not change by one iota.

Mr Corbyn claims nationalisation would allow the Government to pour money into the railways. But who does he think he is kidding?

Billions

He has already pledged tens of billions to university students, the NHS, foreign aid and increased benefits. So where on earth would this money come from?

The history of British Rail after 1948, when the railways were nationalised, shows that public ownership was very bad for the railways’ finances. Whenever there was money in the kitty, schools and hospitals always got priority. But whenever the government needed budget cuts, the railways were first in line.

As a result, trains in British Rail’s heyday were an international laughing stock. Does anybody believe that if, say, Diane Abbott were in charge of the timetable, punctuality would dramatically improve?

There is no reason why the current system shouldn’t work well. The most popular operators, firms such as Chiltern and Merseyrail, are widely acknowledged to perform just as well as their European rivals.

But the Government has completely failed to enforce any kind of uniform standards. There is nothing wrong with the principle of regulating private services, rather than organising services from Whitehall; indeed, the results are usually far more efficient.

But if you are regulating, you have to do it properly, with fines and sanctions for underperforming companies, something Mr Grayling, like his predecessors, has conspicuously failed to do.

Weak

The Government has been far too slow to strip failing firms like Southern of their franchises. And it has been far too weak when faced with obstruction from the militant RMT union, which jealously protects its train drivers’ pay – — often more than £63,000 for a four-day week — while stubbornly refusing to accept that, in an era of technological change, there is no need to have guards on every train.

As a result, is it surprising that so many passengers — hot, weary, exhausted and infuriated — have lost patience with the current model? Is it any wonder that they listen to a politician like Mr Corbyn?

Faced with a rash of delays, as well as the prospect of more strikes running into the winter, the Government badly needs to get a grip, cracking down on rail bosses and rail unions alike. If Mr Grayling cannot do it, then the Prime Minister should find someone who will.

Unless they sort it out, the momentum behind Mr Corbyn’s nationalisation campaign may prove unstoppable. And then we really would be in a mess. For although the Labour leader pretends public ownership would turn every railway into a modern- day Orient Express, the reality is that it would probably turn every service into a version of Southern at its worst.

Nothing would be more likely to send millions of commuters reaching for their car keys. And then, given the state of Britain’s roads, we would be in a serious jam. But that, of course, is another story.