How ScotRail managed to spend £800 on just one taxi for passengers
SCOTLAND’S rail operator paid almost £800 for one taxi trip as the cost of hiring cars for stranded passengers spiralled beyond £200,000 since nationalisation.
The payouts came in the first ten months after ScotRail was brought into public ownership, when it was unable to source replacement buses for cancelled services.
Around £5,000 a week was spent on taxis, including another £624 trip to ferry a group of passengers from Edinburgh to Darlington, County Durham, after they missed their connection because of cancellations.
In September ScotRail paid £798 to take passengers from Wick to Inverness. And a journey last November resulted in a taxi fare of £550 to take people from Inverness to remote Forsinard Station, Sutherland, via Wick and then Thurso.
Meanwhile, £522 was spent on a taxi from Motherwell to Preston, Lancashire, after a group of passengers missed their connection in Scotland. More than £21,000 was spent by ScotRail on taxis in December alone.
Despite SNP pledges to give Scotland a rail service that the country can be proud of, performance data indicates that ScotRail’s services got worse after nationalisation in April last year.
Figures for the final nine months of last year show reliability was down on the same period for 2021, when the franchise was run by former operator Abellio.
More than one in ten of all new ScotRail services was late.
In addition, ScotRail’s own statistics for the month up to February 4 showed that at least a quarter of all trains were late at no fewer than 77 out of 83 terminus stations.
At the worst, Helensburgh Central, only 24.5 per cent of services arrived on time.
On top of that, last week, the spectre of further rail strikes emerged after the RMT union criticised the Scottish Government’s public sector pay policy. The union warned that a ‘summer of discontent’ could be on its way.
Scottish Tory transport spokesman Graham Simpson said: ‘These taxi fares are eye-watering sums to fork out in less than a year and they wouldn’t have been necessary if the services had run as intended.
‘The SNP’s justification for nationalising the railways was that passengers would get a better service.
‘It would probably be easier and cheaper for everyone just to get a taxi in the first place.’
Phil Campbell, ScotRail’s head of customer operations, said: ‘The use
‘Eye-watering sums to fork out in under a year’
of taxis is a measure of last resort. We know how much of an inconvenience it is to customers when things don’t go to plan, and we have an obligation to help people get to where they need to be when that happens.
‘We are absolutely committed to providing the best possible service for our customers.’