Grayling’s intervention to help commuters
THE Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, writing on the page opposite, is a commuter, which helps in recognising the sheer frustration that Southern passengers feel when trains are so often delayed and cancelled. He is setting in motion a plan of action intended to address some of the most critical problems.
First, he has appointed Chris Gibb, who has 30 years’ experience as a rail man, to co-ordinate efforts to keep services running. Mr Gibb will be the name and face of the service; the buck stops with him. That helps. He will lead a team which will, crucially, bring together Network Rail, which deals with tracks and the rail infrastructure, and the operator. Equally importantly, the team will have substantial funding — £20 million — to spend on the most important areas, including increased staff to keep trains moving at big stations, more rapid-response teams to fix faults; faster train maintenance; extra signal supervisors and damage-prevention to bridges. All this is crucial, though it will plainly take time to come into effect.
There remain, nonetheless, underlying difficulties. The logic of bringing together rail infrastructure and the train operators into a single entity is, of course, nationalisation: one of the problems with privatisation was that it separated these two intertwined, critical areas. Yet Mr Grayling is right to emphasise that what matters is what works; if he can achieve a co-ordinated rail service by bringing together the people responsible for tracks and trains, the question of ownership will matter less.
The other problem is that the new 12-coach trains he is introducing on the Brighton line will be managed by CCTV from the driver’s cab. That raises the fraught question of retaining guards, the issue on which the unions went on strike. RMT station staff are still considering a 24-hour strike; so are guards — for 48 hours. The victims of all this would, of course, be commuters.
We shall see how the reforms work in practice but Mr Grayling has made a good and useful start in addressing the misery of Southern commuters. His intervention is welcome. Fingers crossed.