My Lords, public ownership is a vital step towards reforming our railways and rebuilding trust and pride. On average, publicly owned train operators perform better on punctuality and cancellations than those yet to come under public ownership. They are already delivering improvements, with lower cancellations on the TransPennine Express and Northern, and South Western quadrupling the number of new trains entering service. I expect all operators, both public and private, to deliver good performance for passengers.
My Lords, when the figures were published a month ago, cancellations were reported to have risen by around 50% on South Western services in the months following nationalisation in May last year, alongside a marked increase in delay minutes and late arrivals. Clause 18 of the Railways Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State to promote high standards of railway service performance. Can the Minister explain how the Government intend to incentivise and enforce those standards in practice, given that the proposed passenger standards authority appears to have no direct enforcement powers and the Office of Rail and Road’s remit in this area is being restricted?
The discussion on the forthcoming Railways Bill will happen in this House in due course. Meanwhile, the Government are pursuing reliability very strongly. If a train company is left, by a combination of the previous Government and the previous operator, desperately short of drivers, with 83 of 90 new trains parked in sidings for nearly five years, it takes a bit of time to recover from that position. That position is being recovered from, in respect of South Western. More than 30 of the new trains are now in service, and two-thirds of the drivers have now been trained to drive them. That takes time. It should have been done before, but it is now being done by this Government.
My Lords, what progress has been made to address the poor Sunday levels of service and high levels of Sunday cancellations as part of train operator nationalisation? Can the Minister say when passengers can hope to see any improvements in Sunday services?
The Sunday position, particularly for drivers in a number of train companies, is very difficult. A number of them, after 30-odd years of the previous regime, have no contractual commitment to work on Sundays and volunteer. That is unsatisfactory. In several train companies, negotiations are taking place to incorporate Sundays into the working week.
In the case of Northern, where a dispute about guards has been going on for seven years, Sunday services have never been satisfactory because there are a number of guards in that company who have never been contractually obliged to work Sundays. We have worked extraordinarily hard with the management of Northern, and I hope that will come to a conclusion very shortly.
Just to produce a cheerful note, I can tell the Minister that despite appalling South Western journeys, I travelled a fortnight ago and it was excellent.
My Lords, I have asked the Minister a couple of times about transition payments made during the renationalisation process by the Government to the private operators, and the way that happened previously when franchises changed hands. Is he yet in a position to tell us—this is nearly 12 months later, so he really ought to be—how much money has actually been paid in transition payments to the private operators so far?
I should have foreseen that the noble Lord would ask that question. I will have to write to him because I knew he would ask it, but I forgot to research the answer.
Does my noble friend acknowledge that the spokesperson for the Conservative Party has a pretty thick skin to ask this Question? After all, the last Conservative Government renationalised no fewer than four train operating companies during their period of office because of the incompetence of the operators at that time. Can the Minister assure the House that we will not return to those days and that the improvement we have seen in punctuality and service, so far as the nationalised companies are concerned, will continue in future?
My noble friend is right. LNER, in particular, has demonstrated all the excellent characteristics that a public service train company can deliver. The previous Government did not attempt to put back into the private sector any of the other train companies that came into public ownership during their term of office. All those companies are now doing better under this Government’s supervision than they were.
Has the Minister assessed the impact of the new timetable on east coast main line punctuality? There have been some very severe delays, which are mainly infrastructure-related and therefore the responsibility of Network Rail, a different nationalised company. It appears that the new timetable does not give space to deal with delays when they arise.
I am sure that I have just written to the noble Lord on the same subject, but I have been monitoring the east coast main line timetable daily since December when it went in. There have been some very good days, but he is right that there have been some infrastructure failures. There have also been some train failures, one of them really rather catastrophic. On a good day it works quite well; on a bad day it recovers reasonably well. There are a whole host of people working really hard to make it work. It is tight, but it follows £4 billion of investment in both infrastructure and trains, and it is right that the railway should operate as many trains as it can and operate them well.
My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that it is ridiculous to expect, after the ruinous privatisation of our rail system and 13 years of neglect by the Tory Government, that we can fix something in 13 months that they took 13 years to wreck?
One of the interesting things that has been going on since this Government took office is re-establishing some pretty basic rules about staff allocation—the numbers of drivers and guards and the way in which they are utilised—which in some of these companies was miles away from what ought to have been established. As my noble friend says, it takes a long time to put things right, but we are putting them right.