Winning hearts and minds

Rail Delivery Group falls well short of a coherent plan

The PR campaign to promote the railway, initiated by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), has failed to address core concerns that have generated a belief among many passengers that they would be better served by a return to a nationalised structure.

That view will certainly lead to disappointment, and is illogical when the vast benefits of privatisation are considered. That impact is headed by investment, and has again been emphasised by the Government’s decision to make £ 47.9 billion available to Network Rail to keep the network in good condition during Control Period 6 (2019-24).

It cannot be overlooked that funding on this scale provides certainty that there will be no route closures. It is too easy to forget that in the final years of BR stewardship, there were as many as 40 services where a case was presented for replacement by buses.

To give a flavour of these proposals, 23 closure cases were sent to the then Department of Transport in 1989, including Barrow- Carlisle, Derby- Crewe, ExeterBarnstaple, Exeter-Exmouth, FalmouthTruro, Norwich- Sheringham, ParNewquay and York-Harrogate.

I don’t think many people realise that if you put the railway back into a competition for funds with the National Health Service, social care, policing, and all manner of other demands on Government spending, the subsidies that support local rail services will soon disappear. The example is there for all to see in counties such as Northamptonshire, where there is a proposal to withdraw all subsidised bus services.

Very few people outside a core of stakeholders and media watchers have any idea about the RDG structure. The report it has published, In Partnership for Britain’s

Prosperity, prompts the obvious question about who the partners are, given that the RDG is a rebrand of the Association of Train Operating Companies.

This was a body created when the TOCs were established, to ensure that networkwide benefits continued to be available - for example, ticketing systems and products such as Railcards. As the RDG, it gained wider responsibility as a vehicle to deliver the findings of the 2011 McNulty report.

One of the report findings was that the default position for train operations should be driver only operation, with the removal of guards from their safetycritical role. There was never a word of acknowledgement about how this change in working practice might be resisted by the people to be displaced, and therefore no strategy about winning hearts and minds to accept change.

Although the RDG report runs to more than 50 pages, there is nothing in the content about any process to engage the 110,000 directly employed railway staff (plus as many contractors) in the objectives to deliver higher standards of service delivery for passengers.

There is an obvious fai lure to communicate why it is beneficial to change working practices, which in most cases is combined with job guarantees for displaced staff as ballots continue to produce overwhelming results in favour of rejecting management proposals.

It’s great that 5,700 new vehicles will enter service by 2021, but unless there are successful negotiations to change the way traincrew work many of these will be parked at depots rather than passengers seeing any benefit.

If there is a strategy to bring agreement, the only one on show is the new Southern agreement to increase drivers’ pay by 28.5% between October 2016 and October 2020. It isn’t in return for Driver Only Operation, as a second member of staff with safetycritical responsibilities will be rostered and trains will only run without the additional staff member in the case of short-notice sickness or other disruption.

This is almost desperation, and has of course eliminated any of the possible savings envisaged by McNulty as there will be a minimal reduction in staff.

It would be good to have had commentary from RDG about this settlement, and whether it now represents the formula to resolve disputes at Merseyrail, Northern, Greater Anglia and South Western Railway. For the latter, it is no sort of achievement to operate only 60% of the train service during the most recent RMT strike on November 8/9.

Passengers also have less confidence in train operators because of the fares policy dictated by the unseen hand of Government.

There will be a deluge of criticism when the January 2018 fares increase for controlled products such as season tickets is set at 3.6%, in line with the increase in the retail prices index. The well-documented background issue is that average takehome pay has increased by only 1.7% in the same period. This might as well be a railway tax.

Come on RDG! You have the tools to fight back, which you need to do if passengers are to stop thinking they would get a better deal from a nationalised railway.

For a start, fewer commuters travel for five days a week, so the ticketing system could be designed on the basis of actual travel. And with the advent of much greater workplace flexibility, journeys may often be undertaken in the peak in one direction and off-peak in the other. If hearts and minds are to be won, these represent opportunities for ticket pricing reform that should be taken now and reflected in a fares package from January 2018.

The decision to create a Railway Ombudsman is a helpful development. Justice is not served by fare evasion and penalty fare cases being reviewed within the organisation that issues the original notice. And if we are talking about hearts and minds, isn’t it time to stop the criminal prosecution of alleged fare avoiders and make this a matter for civil courts like any other commercial debt recovery?

There is also unfairness in the penalty fare system. It is straightforward if a passenger has no ticket when there is an obvious opportunity to buy one. But it isn’t that easy to ensure you have bought a valid ticket, given varying peak hour restrictions and the use of ambiguous phrases such as validity to London Terminals or travel by Any Permitted Route.

Added to that is the practice of leaving ticket gates open rather than providing staff, which defeats the object of identifying invalid tickets before travel.

“If you put the railway back into a competition for funds, the subsidies that support local rail services will soon disappear.”