TravelWatch SouthWest ^ Public Transport Users Forum - meeting, Taunton, Saturday 1 March 2008
Representing the admin team from this forum: Graham Ellis, Lee Fletcher and Chris Hankin attended this meeting.
Notes from Chris: This was my first such meeting, and I found it a very interesting day: lots of input from all sorts of other groups, representing public transport issues throughout the South West. The following is a summary of my impressions of Andrew Haines^ presentation only, based on the hand-written notes I made during the day: please note, it is not a complete or official record, and where ^soft quotes^ are indicated, they are not necessarily verbatim.
Also, our collective thanks to First Great Western for providing the refreshments!
^All Change for First Great Western?^ Andrew Haines, Chief Operating Officer, First Great Western:
Andrew, (wearing a daffodil for St David's Day and also later emphasising that he is an optimist by nature!), started by reviewing recent events:
^ issues with Network Rail (saying that he was working with Dave Ward to resolve these);
^ a ^relatively small scale but, in terms of public relations, very significant local fare strike;
^ the recent announcement of a breach of the franchise ^ which he affirmed was due to ^cock-up, not conspiracy^.
He then reviewed what he found when he took over at
FGW▸ ^ examples he gave were:
^On-train staff have half the number of managers you would expect^- compared with other
TOCs▸ . For example, there was a train waiting at a platform and a train crew were in their restroom - but nobody put the two together ^ Andrew stated, ^Frankly we made a pig^s ear of how we resource it^.
Andrew then summarised the
HST▸ refresh programme, and covered in more detail this week^s announcement. He also talked about improvements FGW have already made ^ for example, the Customer Information System is now based in Paddington, rather than Swindon, because in times of disruption, Paddington is the busiest station for FGW.
Andrew then explained his management ethos ^ people working for FGW are ^colleagues^ he has a ^swear box^ on his office for ^1 each time they are referred to as ^staff^ or ^employees^! He wants to strengthen local operations management: he gave an example of there being over 400 catering colleagues ^ but with no one manager responsible for them.
In terms of FGW resourcing for the future, Andrew gave an example of ^500,000 worth of spares at Laira ^ so FGW don^t have to rely on warranties. Also, all gateline staff will be given lots more training in customer service.
However, on the question of additional trains, Andrew emphasized that there is a national shortage of rolling stock: this does not affect just FGW, but all TOCs.
Turning to the subject of fares, Andrew confirmed that the increase in fares this year will raise ^30m ^ but the FGW subsidy drops by ^50m. In other words, for every ^1 raised by FGW through fares, they have to pay ^1.60 to the
DfT» ^ Treasury. Andrew said that we ^need to have a much more intelligent debate about fares in this country.^ He went on to emphasize that we need to obtain ^political engagement^ with politicians being committed to helping to resolve issues, rather than ^fare strikes and placard waving^.
In the ^question and answer^ session following Andrew^s presentation, he was joined by Mark Hopwood and Julian Crow.
I jotted down some points from this session:
There will be more timetable changes ^ this is an evolving situation: extended journey times need to be allowed for, as there are more people travelling, and the use of HSTs at local stations is causing dwell time issues on the timetable;
There is no ^newer/better stock available: Andrew told us that he had a letter from the DfT stating that ^there is no more rolling stock available and no matter what case you had put, you would not have got any more^;
On the possibility of franchise specification reviews (as the franchise specification was ^unfair^ to FGW: questioner^s point), Andrew pointed out that FGW would only have a case for such a review if they were able to show they ^had got their act together^;
There were several other questions, but due to time constraints, it was unfortunately not possible for these to be addressed fully.
Further details of this meeting are available at
http://www.travelwatchsouthwest.org 
