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Denis
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« Reply #30 on: July 05, 2009, 11:10:42 » |
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This really is my last comment before I disappear for a fortnight.
I^m glad some of you find FGW▸ kinder to its passengers, and more flexible than SWT▸ . That is exactly our experience. I have recently on two occasions seen FGW staff take no action against passengers with Advance tickets who had caught the wrong train. Two passengers who did the same thing on SWT were charged ^170 on top of their ^9 fares.
SWT, through its general attitude, does engender strong feelings. Passenger Focus called its 20% surcharge on morning off-peak returns to London an ^Abuse^ which would particularly hurt families (see RAIL). This applies from Southampton and Winchester, for example, but not from Basingstoke whence passengers have the choice of going to Paddington via FGW.
The latest personal attack against me on your website and speculation about how Hogrider started is frankly quaint. If you really want to know the truth, here it is:
BR▸ axed most of the Totton stops of the semi-fast off-peak Waterloo-Poole trains at a time when Totton was officially Britain^s fastest growing town. Totton was seeing increasing number of London commuters and some people were very inconvenienced. Commuters may need to use off-peak trains on occasions for all sorts of reasons: medical, domestic, medical. At the request of some fellow commuters who knew I was interested in railways, I put together a (two-page) newsletter which I copied to them, to local MPs▸ and Councillors, to the then RUCC» and to the managing director of what is now SWT, Peter Field.
At first, Mr Field didn^t want to know, but he did eventually offer us a meeting at Southampton Central with himself and other senior managers. This broke the ice and led to a second meeting at which there was so much friendly discussion that one manager held the Totton train for a couple of minutes so that we could finish talking. Mr Field thought we should form a rail user group, as he saw such groups as playing a significant role in the future.
An immediate result of these contacts was a later service from Waterloo to Totton. Restoration of the axed off-peak Totton stops followed later.
We did not form a group immediately because of the time restraints on long-distance commuters. When we did, it was because we impressed Carlton as a well-knit, knowledgeable group that they wanted to do a programme about us. In the meantime, I circulated more newsletters, which included updates on franchising. I copied in Brian Souter, who wrote to me on 9 January 1996 saying, ^Thank you for your letter and franchise newsletters of 8th December. I found the contents useful and informative and would appreciate if you would keep me on your mailing list.^
We expected that some kind of friendly relationship might continue: ^We want responsiveness to passengers^ wishes. We want, in the railways, all the characteristics of the best of British industry. The Sainsburys of this world respond rather well to their customers^ changing demands without any help from the state, thank you very much. We want some of that responsiveness for the railway too^ [Dr Brian Mawhinney, Secretary of State for Transport, in speech reproduced in DETR leaflet January 1995]
But Stagecoach doesn^t work like that:
^When we buy a business, we look at management structure, then administration, then engineering staff, and the last one we look at is the traffic. --- Once we have rationalised the network, we know exactly whether we are making money or losing it.^ [Barry Hinkley, former Stagecoach Director, quoted in ^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar].
^----there is a fundamental defensiveness about Stagecoach^s attitude to the press, borne of an arrogance and deep conviction that the company is right and everyone else is wrong.^ [^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
Awarding the franchise to Stagecoach was really taking the fight to the enemy --- It was the most aggressive decision we could take, and if we had tried to dress privatisation in its most acceptable form, it would have been better to award it to almost anyone else.
[Steve Norris, transport minister, quoted in ^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
^Thousands of commuters today faced delays and train cancellations as the decision to axe 71 drivers by one of the first rail companies to be privatised turned into a fiasco." [Evening Standard 17/2/1997]
^We are going to be an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, late for work but there is not much I can do about it.^ [Commuter Brian Church, quoted in the Evening Standard 17/2/1997]
^The South^s watchdog, the Rail Users^ Consultative Committee, said customers were confused and angry.^
[Southern Daily Echo 18/2/97]
^It has not taken long for rail privatisation to come off the track. Barely a year after being handed a ^54 million subsidy to run South West Trains, Stagecoach is cancelling 39 trains per day and receiving no more than a light tap on the wrist from the regulator^
[Daily Telegraph, quoted in ^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
^South West Trains have broken their privatisation pledges, leaving passengers cheated of the travel information and rail services they were promised a year ago.^ [Andrew Smith, Labour Party^s transport chief, quoted in the Evening Standard 17/2/1997]
^People have been ringing us feeling very confused and insecure. They still don^t know what^s going on.^
[Mike Hewitson, Secretary of the RUCC for Southern England, quoted in the Southern Daily Echo of 18/2/1997]
^We cannot be held to ransom over the needs of the present and the future by any company that fails to perform along the franchise grounds to which it signed up. The growing disenchantment of the operation of the franchise has only been added to by poor management and other decisions.^
[Councillor Mike Roberts, quoted in the Hampshire Chronicle o 21/2/97]
^We have the misfortune to live in the part of the country served by the worst single example of rail privatisation ^ South West Trains. Anybody who has travelled on the service recently will know that the whole system is in chaos, added to by South West Trains^ recent decision to scrap more than 190 of its services in a week. The problem arises through treating a public service as if it were just another marketing exercise.^
[Alan Whitehead, prospective Labour Parliamentary candidate for Southampton Test, quoted in the Southern Daily Echo, 8/3/97]
^After a few days of cutting services in a random way, which meant some much-used Portsmouth-Salisbury trains had been cancelled, prompting a host of complaints, Cox went to the franchising director, John O^Brien, to get his blessing for a programme of planned cancellations. They agreed a plan by which SWT cut 39 trains per day, 2.6% of its 1,500 daily total, in addition to the 1% or so unplanned cancellations that result from route mishaps such as sick drivers or breakdowns. John Watts, the Transport Minister, could hardly contain his anger, calling Stagecoach^s management ^inept^.
[^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
^SWT have until the end of April to convince me they are operating a proper service and will continue to do so. Otherwise they face a fine of a million pounds with the possibility of further sanctions, including franchise termination.^
[Franchising Director, John O^Brien, quoted in ^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
^We in the Conservative party were very happy at the way rail privatisation was going ^ new investment, new ideas, new services. --- SWT instantly unwound all that. It was so obviously a grave error of judgement, so obviously to the disadvantage of passengers, and so clearly an act committed by a private company. It left a bad taste instantly in people^s mouths about SWT. Even now, the intelligent non-transport buff will remember SWT and it will take years to get SWT out of the political lexicon.^
[Steve Norris, quoted in ^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
^A total of 28,000 complaints were lodged by passengers last year against the privatised South West Trains. That is more than 500 complaints a week and does not include the massive travel chaos in February and March this year after the company got rid of too many drivers to save cash and did not have enough left to run all the trains.^
[Evening Standard, 24/4/1997]
^Souter poured petrol on the fire by suggesting that some of his customers had nothing better to do than to write letters of complaint in office time and wondered whether their bosses knew they were doing this. --- Cox did not help by saying that ^critics were fully paid-up members of the hindsight club.^
[^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
I agree that Hogrider is robust. So is this:
^Souter was so ecstatic about his purchase of Porterbrook that soon after the deal, he regaled a bunch of railway bigwigs with the following ditty sung to the tune of the Teddy Bears^ Picnic, poking fun at Sir George Young, the Transport Secretary, who was based in Marsham Street in Westminster:
If you go down to Marsham Street, you^ll never believe your eyes;
If you go down to Marsham Street, you^re sure of a big surprise.
The Porterbrook sale was never expected,
Poor Sir George is feeling rejected,
And Mr Watts will never be re-elected.^
[^Stagecoach^ by Christian Woolmar]
Some five years later, Stephen Byers was threatening Stagecoach with loss of the SWT franchise for dreadful performance. So had SWT started listening to passengers? Hardly, they launched the powerful PR▸ document ^e-motion^ which included articles by the Passengers Panel, supposedly independent, though the articles were increasingly penned by Stagecoach Director Sir Alan Greengross, contained only the most anodyne criticisms, and used set phrases like ^SWT to their credit^. One article even attacked MPs who spoke up on behalf of passengers. I note that the FGW version of the Passengers Panel actually gives contact details of local representatives. SWT is much too centrist and controlled for that. Hogrider at least collects the comments of many people. It may surprise you that state departments do watch for trends illustrated by ongoing anecdotal evidence. It^s a kind of free research.
SWT has been hugely profitable, so much so that Stagecoach is now in a mess because it overbid for the current franchise by hundreds of millions. So there is a sting in the tail just as there was after the first franchise award, for example the ^abuse^ of the 20% fare increases, the loss of travel centres (always very busy and great for disabled people) and reduced staffing at stations (despite all the hype about secure stations, and the additional station staffing which is a requirement of the new Southern franchise.)
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