[from The Guardian, Wed 29 May 2019]
“Manchester and Liverpool mayors call for termination of Northern rail franchise”
Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram urge transport secretary to take action after year of misery
The mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool city region have called on the transport secretary to terminate the Northern rail franchise after a year of sustained misery for passengers.
Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, and Liverpool’s Steve Rotheram, speaking on behalf of the 4.3 million people they represent, made the demand 12 months on from last May’s rail timetable chaos.
They believe Northern – which is owned by Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway – has consistently failed to show it was able to take the action required to restore public confidence or deliver its legally-binding franchise requirements. These include:
- Failure to deliver a significant and sustained improvement in performance, with nearly a fifth of all services arriving late; 28,000 services cancelled in the last year; and a huge increase in services being “shortformed” (reducing the number of carriages on the train) from 2,825 in December 2018 to 4,172 in April 2019.
- Failure to resolve the RMT industrial dispute, which has led to 46 days of strike action since March 2017.
- Failure to operate Sunday services: last Sunday alone there were 165 unplanned cancellations on top of 90 planned cancellations.
- Failure to deliver new services, such as a range of promised additional hourly services in much-needed parts of the network.
- Failure to introduce new trains, which means the hated Pacer trains may not be gone by the end of the year as promised.
On Tuesday the government announced an “exciting” competition, which invites northern towns and villages to bid for Pacer trains to be turned into “community spaces, cafes or new village halls”.
The proposal was greeted with incredulity by northern MPs, after nine years of austerity cuts from central government in which councils have lost almost 60p in the £1 from Whitehall for local services in the decade to 2020, with northern authorities worst hit.
“I am not sure my constituents will agree that this is an ‘exciting opportunity’, unless one of them is turned into a museum dedicated to highlighting years of under-investment in Northern transport,”
the Stalybridge & Hyde MP Jonathan Reynolds told the Manchester Evening News.
“My personal suggestion would be to invite my fed up constituents to dismantle them piece-by-piece, a bit like when the Berlin Wall came down.”
The Greater Manchester and Liverpool city region mayors are now urging the department for transport to implement an “Operator of Last Resort” and bring in a new board and team of directors to run the company as soon possible.
Ministers should keep all options on the table, including further devolution to the north and the option of public operation.
Last year Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, terminated Virgin Trains East Coast’s contract and took the service in-house.
The Northern franchise is supposed to last until 2025, with an option for an additional year which is dependent on performance.