That’s out of line!
Boss of most unreliable rail service gets 50% pay hike
THE boss of Britain’s most unreliable rail service has been handed a 50 per cent pay boost – including a bonus worth almost £600,000.
David Brown, chief executive of transport giant Go-Ahead, insisted yesterday he was ‘mortified’ by the recent timetable shambles which caused delays and cancellations for thousands of trains.
But his apology came as the company’s annual report revealed his pay package had soared above £1million.
The Newcastle-based train and bus operator also announced its annual profits had jumped 6.5 per cent to £146million.
The boom in profits and pay for top staff will fuel public anger over surging fares and the state of the railways.
Last night Conservative MP Grant Shapps branded Mr Brown’s bonus a ‘reward for failure’ and urged him to hand the money back.
Go-Ahead and French firm Keolis jointly control Britain’s biggest franchise Govia Thameslink Railway, which runs Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, as well as Gatwick Express. In January a damning National Audit Office found Govia was the ‘worst’ performing franchise.
A botched introduction of a new timetable in May led to misery for commuters on Thameslink and Great Northern.
A shortage of staff trained on the new routes led to huge numbers of delays and cancellations. Some Thameslink drivers had to stop the train and swap with another driver because they were not trained to drive through certain tunnels.
Govia’s boss Charles Horton was forced to quit in June. Over the longer term Southern has consistently been one of the worst services in the UK, with commuters plagued by disruption and more than two years of strike action.
Although the service has improved, it was still ranked by the Office of Rail and Road as the second most unreliable service in the UK out of 26 lines, with a fifth of trains running late in the year to March.
Despite all this, Mr Brown received £1,175,000 for the year to June 30, up from £782,000 the year before. This included a basic salary of £556,000 and £582,000 in performance related bonuses, half paid in cash and half in shares which can be cashed in after three years. The reason for the huge rise was Mr Brown had forfeited his bonus for the previous two years in recognition of the problems at Southern.
The 57- year- old executive decided he deserved a bonus this year but gave up a quarter of it – worth £193,666 – in light of the recent timetable chaos.
Go-Ahead’s finance chief Patrick Butcher also gave up a quarter of his bonus but still saw his pay jump by half to £630,000, after a £198,000 cash bonus. The payouts caused outrage last night.
Mr Shapps, Tory MP for Welwyn Hatfield in Hertfordshire, said: ‘These are rewards for failure, pure and simple. It almost beggars belief that the man ultimately responsible for the rail chaos suffered by hundreds of thousands of commuters gets a massive pay rise and bonus.
‘Rail bosses need to show they understand the sense of dismay from the travelling public – a good place to start would be to hand some of this money back to commuters who lost out financially.’ Theresa Villiers, Tory MP for Chipping Barnet, said: ‘My constituents had to put up with weeks of travel misery. This money should be spent on passenger compensation, not on executive pay.’
Mr Brown stressed the group is providing a ‘much improved train service’ since an interim timetable was introduced in July, and is confident of having the full changes in place by December. He stressed none of its profits came from the troubled Thameslink operation.
‘Weeks of travel misery’
ONE consolation of growing older and more forgetful (as I may have mentioned in the past!) is that I can re-read books with absolutely no memory of having read them before.
Every page is as fresh as the first time, every twist of the plot as unexpected — and I find I can work my way through to the end, baffled and eager to discover whodunit.
But on our summer holiday this year, I plumbed new depths of forgetfulness that have left me seriously worried about the state of my marbles.
Ever since my childhood I’d been wanting to visit Quimper, the historic capital of Cornouaille in the south-west corner of Brittany. This was because my late aunt, Deirdre, used to go there summer after summer, returning in raptures over its medieval delights.
I remember fondly how every year she would come back with gifts of the local pottery for her nephews and nieces — those colourful cups and bowls for which the region is famous, decorated with Breton characters and emblazoned with our names.
Familiar
Anyway, this summer my wife and I decided we should finally get around to paying a visit. So we booked a gite in nearby Fouesnant and the two of us set off on the car ferry from Portsmouth to Saint-Malo, with the wonderfully trafficfree roads of Brittany opening up before us for the three-hour drive.
The following morning, after we’d settled in, I drove the short distance to Quimper, full of curiosity as to whether it would live up to the high expectations raised by my aunt.
It was just after we’d found a space in the car park by the river that my wife said: ‘Are you sure we haven’t been here before?’
I told her not to be silly. True, there was something a little familiar about the place. But as I mansplained to her, many old French cities are laid out on the same pattern, with the cathedral and its surrounding half-timbered buildings close to the river and modern shops and offices spreading out from there.
As we walked towards the centre, however, I had to admit that Quimper did remind me quite strongly of somewhere we’d been before. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on where.
Maybe it was Dinan or Vannes — Brittany towns where we’d stayed in the early years after our wedding in 1980?
Or was it Ploudalmezeau, also in Finistère, near where we’d rented a gite not so long ago? No, they were all very different. So perhaps it was somewhere else, not even in France?
We found a nice-looking cafe by the cathedral — a bit of a tourist trap, to be sure, but that’s never really bothered me — and as we waited for our moules
marinieres, I scanned a mental map of Europe to try to identify the city of which Quimper reminded me.
No good. I could think of nowhere in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary or Greece — locations of past holidays — that came even close to fitting the bill.
Then, as I racked my brains for the answer, a mini-funfair sprang to life in the large paved area between the cafe and the church. Oh, Lord, that was familiar, too. Suddenly, everything came back to me. As so irritatingly often, Mrs U was right.
We had been here before! In that moment, I knew that if we walked down the alley a few yards to the right from where we were sitting, we would find the restaurant where we’d had a superb dinner during our previous visit.
It dawned on me, too, that if we entered the cathedral in front of us, we’d see the east end by the altar set at an angle to the nave, in a way unlike any other church I’d seen.
Furthermore, I knew exactly where I’d find the shop, down by the river, in which we had bought T-shirts for our boys, and the jeweller where I’d had a new battery fitted in my watch.
Horror
Worst of all, I remembered that the last time we were here, we had sat at this very same table, in this very same cafe, eating the very same dish for our lunch.
This was deja vu in the most literal meaning of the words.
On that last occasion, we decided that a single day and night were probably enough to see everything Quimper had to offer, and we headed off to the seaside in the north the following day.
To discover when we were last there, I looked at my iPhone’s photo album. To my horror, there I found a picture I’d taken of the cathedral, with the caption: ‘Quimper, July 2016.’ Only two years ago! How could I have forgotten so soon?
You will well understand, therefore, why I was more than a little interested in this week’s report by researchers at the University of Toronto, who believe they may have found the most promising way yet of detecting the early onset of Alzheimer’s, raising hopes of more effective treatment.
Based on a study of more than 3,000 elderly people in the U.S., France and Canada, the study finds that indications of this devastating condition tend to be more evident in the coldest winter months, while brains appear 4.8 years younger in the summer.
The best time to screen patients for dementia, therefore, is at the very end or beginning of the year.
All I can say is that if my memory was so unreliable in late August — and the weather in Brittany was deliciously warm while we were there — heaven knows what it will be like when the temperature starts to drop.
But though Mrs U earned the right to say ‘I told you so’ in Quimper, I have to report (at the risk of instant divorce) that she, too, is capable of moments of forgetfulness. Take last Friday evening, when we were back at home in London.
Weeks earlier, as part of her duties as a secretary, she had booked a table for her boss at a small fish restaurant, where he was to host a dinner for his fellow senior executives in honour of a long- serving staff member who was leaving.
She happened to mention to me that the menu looked jolly appetising — and I decided that, as end- of-holiday treat, I would take her there to try the place out for ourselves.
Hiding
Though it was fully booked for lunch, she made a reservation for the one remaining table available that evening.
When we walked into the restaurant, it was her turn to look horrified. For there at the back were her boss and his senior executives. She had clean forgotten that this was the very evening she had booked for the leaving party.
What would her employer think of us? My poor wife was all for bowling up to him and explaining everything.
But I had a terrible fear that he might think we were creepy stalkers, trying to gatecrash his party.
Worse, with his great kindness of heart, he might have felt obliged to ask us to join him.
In the end, we decided that cowardice was the best policy, and we spent the duration of our meal hiding our faces if ever it looked as though one of the party might spot us. I have seldom endured a more embarrassing hour and a half.
Back at work since Monday, she tells me she seems to have survived the ordeal unnoticed, with her secret intact.
Not now it isn’t, with her blabbermouth husband spilling the beans in the national Press.
So it is that Mrs U and I (assuming she doesn’t dump me the moment she opens this paper) seem destined to spend our declining years stumbling together from one senior moment to the next. Bring on that cure for senility!