Nigel Harris

Rail’s front line is now disconnected from those at the top

“Ultimately, the railway is about people. People at the top, who must be both in charge AND accountable ...and the people actually doing the job on the front line. And those two groups must talk to each other.”

“As is usually the case, where we need leadership and statesmanship, we simply get more self-serving politics.”

I was chatting to RAIL’s Fare Dealer Barry Doe about his latest timetable review (pages 44-51) when he made a truly startling comment.

“I’ve been doing the timetable review for many years and it normally takes me a busy, but not frantic, week to complete. This time it took three works of extremely hard work.”

If you wanted an indication of the considerable complexity and major changes of the May 2018 timetable change, there it is. If it took timetable guru Barry three times as long to get his highly experienced head around it, then what chance do the rest of us stand?! This was a monster change, that’s for sure.

In this issue, RAIL’s specialists have all been delving into the mess to unravel what went wrong.

Insider: “For the current control period (2014-19) the ORR insisted on a reduction in overall NR costs that was not achievable and this included timetable planning resources which have been shown to be below that required.”

Wolmar: “Pretty much everyone involved is to blame, but some are more to blame than others.”

Philip Haigh, speaking specifically of problems in northern England: “Most of the disorder flows from Governments changing their minds.”

There is a remarkable degree of consensus among some very individual minds. Last issue, I looked at Thameslink first; so let’s tackle Northern up front this time. It is true that Network Rail is reponsible for tipping Northern over the edge, by its failure to deliver the Bolton electrification scheme on schedule. The inability to launch the 25kV service prevented an internal cascade of diesel trains to other routes, with this train shortage made much worse by the delayed cascade from Scotland caused by late delivery of new Hitachi electric trains and refurbished HSTs to Scotland. Richard Clinnick lays bare all these details on page 15. No way can that be NR’s fault.

Dig beneath the surface, however, and the picture that emerges - of historic Government meddling, vacillation, politicking and mismanagement over the last 20 years - is as damning as it has been damaging.

On pages 60-61, Philip Haigh’s devastating forensic analysis shames governments of all political hues - Conservative, coalition and Labour alike - of the 21st century. The constant changes of policy on the one hand and starva- tion of investment on the other is a stain on all five of the last Governments - two Labour, two Conservative and one coalition.

None of this crucial context is being properly reported in the North where, as in southern England, mainstream journalists have generally failed to properly reflect the full story. What we have seen instead is endless reports of entirely justified increasing passenger anger, with little attempt to establish or explain the real root causes of the North’s deep-seated rail problems.

This, of course, plays into the hands of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, and his self-serving political grandstanding. In a personal Twitter exchange with me, Burnham insisted he is merely “representing passengers in the North”. This is transparently nonsense. Burnham’s rabble-rousing demands for Secretary of State Chris Grayling to “step in and take control” and for Northern to be (wait for it) “stripped of its franchise” were the worst kind of political playing to the crowd. He actually used the expression “last chance saloon” - straight from the book of tub-thumping political rent-a-quotes.

If Burnham really wanted to represent the North’s passengers he could have more constructively (and maturely) followed Philip’s forensic approach highlighting Westminster’s role in constantly moving the goalposts, in order to drive home the case for deeper and more effective devolution of rail powers and finance to the North. That would be tricky, of course, given that as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Gordon Brown’s pre-2010 Labour Government, he was deeply complicit in creating or worsening the long-standing problems that now blight the North’s railways. The Labour Government’s appalling so-called steady state ‘invest nothing, do nothing’ Northern franchise of 2004 is in large part responsible for the problems he failed to do anything about when he could have done so, and which he now complains so loudly about. This kind of political hypocrisy lies at the heart of so many of rail’s problems. It saddens me to say all this - I had previously thought highly of Burnham. As is usually the case, where we need leadership and statesmanship, we simply get more self-serving politics.

Northern’s timetable collapse is a direct result of the compromised train cascade triggered by NR’s failure to compete the Bolton electrification on the one hand and crew shortages on the other, seemingly created by industrial relations issues. The IR issues need to be resolved to create short-term timetable stability, while completion of electrification and the consequent train cascades are essential for long-term service reliability.

Above all, Northern needs to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror, because the way it has handled passengers in terms of information, communication and customer care has been dreadful. Likewise TOCs in the South. No way can Northern’s self-inflicted customer service problems here be laid at NR’s or Government’s door. I can’t believe I have to say this - it was as foolish as it was unacceptable, given the level of meltdown, to refuse to talk to journalists, as Northern did for several days. That made already partial media coverage much worse. ‘No comment’ is the most dangerous comment in such circumstances. You can neither set nor control the agenda when you refuse to even engage, as uncomfortable as engaging might turn out to be. You merely hand the microphone to your critics, who then don’t even have to shout you down.

It was the same in the South. I listened, slack- jawed in dismay, to a senior Rail Delivery Group spokesman give a halting, hesitant and uncharacteristically stilted radio interview in which he said (several times) that the timetable change “had not gone as well as expected”. Back in 1979, during the winter of discontent, when rat-infested rubbish piled high in the streets and we could not even bury our dead, Prime Minister Jim Callaghan was derided for his perceived ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ attitude. This approach rightly invites contempt. It was embarrassing, naive and damaging for a railway letting its customers down so badly to use such inappropriately disconnected language. The message it sent was very damaging

On Thameslink, the inquest into the appalling timetable meltdown continues, but it still generates more heat than light. The two big questions are”

Everyone knows this has been coming