Great Western Coffee Shop

Weston-super-Mare MP John Penrose is calling for more competition in local rail services, putting an end to “monopolies” on the railways.

The conservative MP says having more operators on the Great Western mainline and beyond will provide travellers with cheaper fares and drive up standards.

“I’d like to see more choice for local rail users in Bristol, Weston, Swindon and everywhere else so that if they don’t like the service that is being provided by First [owner of Great Western Railways], then they don’t have to wait 10 years until the franchise ends – they can wait 10 minutes until a different train company’s service comes past and they can get on that instead,” Mr Penrose told Bristol Live.

“It may be cheaper or more comfortable – all the variation you expect when you buy a car or when you choose a toothpaste, or whatever it may be. I’d love to see that.”

Great Western Railway (GWR), owned by First Group, currently has the contract to run inter-city trains between Weston-super-Mare, Bristol and London Paddington, having won the franchise for 2015-2020.

But Mr Penrose said the franchise system operated by the Department for Transport (DfT) amounted to “selling monopolies” for a set time period.

He added that passengers would be better served if multiple companies could compete on the same stretch of track because it would force them to become “innovative” in an effort to please passengers.

Mr Penrose said he wanted to see “two or three bidders” on the Great Western mainline “running different trains with different time slots over the course of the next 10 years”.

He said: “It means [train companies] don’t have one spasm of competitive activity every 10 years [to win the franchise] and then they relax.

“You have to carry on trying really hard and peddling hard to keep you and me as the travelling public happy every single day for the next 10 years.”

What has GWR said?

A spokesman for GWR said it was for the DfT to decide how rail franchising was carried out in future.

He added that there was already “competition on many parts of our network” with the line through Weston served by GWR and Cross Country, while South Western Railways also serves Bristol and the West of England region.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for DfT said the current franchise model had brought investment to the Great Western mainline.

She said: “Billions of pounds are being invested in projects to transform the Great Western network and give passengers new services and new, more comfortable trains.”

Here's how the public has responded

The idea, which Mr Penrose shared on social media, has received a mixed reaction from his followers.

Some have praised him for his innovative thinking, believing competition is the way forward.

Mike Dolley commented: "This is a good idea and needs pursuing. The franchise holders are arrogant and dismissive, because they know they can get away with behaving that way in a near monopoly situation."

Robert Sugar added: "Monopoly doesn't leave room for competition. If passengers cannot make a choice then nothing motivates train service operators to improve. We just get what we get."

Meanwhile, others suggested it might be easier said than done.

Mike Harding wrote: "I love the idea but unless trains are very frequent we are still going to be tied to that which gets us into work at the correct time."

Others argued competition for low ticket prices wouldn't necessarily result in an improvement in services.

Railway licensing isn’t a bold, radical or exciting alternative, but a rebadged version of franchising, or nationalization-lite, but with the same faults.

One of the early casualties of coronavirus was railway franchising. It had been in intensive care for months already, poor thing, as timetable meltdowns and franchise collapses weakened its immune system. The pandemic sent passenger numbers and ticket revenues tumbling and, soon after the lockdown began, it breathed its last. The Government had to step in, and now train firms are being paid a management fee to run the same services as before, with taxpayers footing the bill for mounting losses. 

If licensing isn’t the future, what is? The answer is to give passengers a choice of different train firms to take them wherever they want to go, rather than just one. If you or I prefer one company’s carriages over another, or a timetable melts down, or a train breaks down, or there’s a strike, we shouldn’t have to take what we’re given. We should be able to switch to another firm’s service and carry on regardless.

It’s an idea we already take for granted whenever we travel by air. If you want to go from London to Paris there are dozens of different airlines you can choose, but only one train firm. Giving train passengers the same choices as frequent flyers puts them in charge, and makes services far less brittle because no single company can dictate the entire timetable. And that means fares rise more slowly, with fewer delays and less overcrowding too.

Treating trains like planes would revolutionize our railways. Fortunately, Keith Williams used to work in air travel, before he was drafted in to care for our dying rail franchises. Let’s see whether his training makes him bold and radical, or whether his nerve will fail.

Unfortunately he is my MP and lives fairly close to us. 

Unfortunately he is my MP and lives fairly close to us. 

In other circumstances I would have been able to suggest this when he opens a local fete and then circulates, but it has been cancelled.

Good customer service is not just about what happens when things go wrong (which as you say is all too often), it's about the all round customer experience. The attitude, accessibility, helpfulness, courtesy and availability of staff, accuracy and timeliness of services and information, transparent pricing, comfort, cleanliness, environment ownership of problems amongst others.

These experiences influence customers when it comes to choosing a supplier. If the supplier knows that the customer has no other realistic choice but themselves, it generally follows that commercially they will place less influence on these factors and become complacent, taking their customers for granted. GWR is an excellent example of this.