‘Passengers pay price for broken rail franchise system’

THE DEPARTMENT for Transport failed to learn the lessons from previous failures when it handed out the contract for the East Coast Main Line franchise and allowed its operator to promise more than it could deliver, MPs claimed today.

The influential Commons Public Accounts Committee says Transport Secretary Chris Grayling’s department’s management of two other important franchises has been “completely inadequate” and could be indicative of wider weaknesses in its contract management capability.

Suggesting that passengers are paying the price for the “broken model” of rail franchising, its report also said an “appalling level of delays and cancellations” has marred the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern (TSGN) franchise.

But Government officials hit back at the criticism, saying the committee had produced “an imbalanced report that fails to grasp the complexity of the situation”.

A spokesman said: “Our franchising model already puts passengers and taxpayers first and has doubled the number of passengers using trains since privatisation reversed decades of decline and underinvestment under British Rail.”

Less than two thirds of trains arrived on time at one point in the TSGN franchise. The PAC accused the DfT of being “too ambitious” about what could be achieved by the operator and overlooked the “poor condition of the infrastructure”.

There has been “some improvement” in services in recent months, the PAC accepted.

With the DfT in the process of agreeing new arrangements for the East Coast route, the committee expressed concern that the existing operator could be allowed to run the franchise again in the future.

In February, Mr Grayling told the Commons that Virgin Trains East Coast – a joint partnership between Stagecoach and Virgin – would only be able to continue in its current form on the route between London and Edinburgh via Yorkshire for a “very small number of months”.