Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway — House of Commons, 2017-07-04
Topic: Transportation
Nick Herbert (Conservative, Centre-right): Let me start with something that I am sure hon. Members on both sides of the House will agree on: the service Southern has provided for passengers over the last more than two years has been completely unacceptable. There is no disagreement about that. Our constituents are at the end of their tethers, and the service last year, in particular, was wholly unacceptable—to the point that it was causing economic loss and real suffering on the part of our constituents. The question, therefore, is not whether the service has been poor, but why that is the case and who is responsible. There has been no shortage of criticism on the Government Benches of Southern and Network Rail for their part in the story. Two and a half years ago, at the beginning of 2015, I and other Conservative Members initiated debates in Westminster Hall, asked questions and held a succession of meetings with Ministers about Southern’s performance after it took over the new and expanded franchise There were clearly serious problems. There were not enough drivers, and the infrastructure was inadequate because of the London Bridge improvements. It is an irony that the £6 billion London Bridge improvements, which will result in a better service for passengers, have caused a temporary shortage of capacity for the new franchise, which has exacerbated the problems In response to the criticism we made on behalf of our constituents, the then Secretary of State and the then rail Minister convened a meeting of the industry. A performance improvement plan was introduced, whereby the industry agreed that it was necessary, step by step, month by month, to improve performance in the new franchise, recognising that it was a matter for not just the operator but Network Rail, which provided the track, and which is, of course, already in public ownership—a point that those on the Labour Front Bench might do well to consider As a consequence of that performance improvement plan, performance steadily improved again towards the end of 2015, but it then began catastrophically to deteriorate at the beginning of 2016, and specifically from April onwards. There was no coincidence about that. The reason it deteriorated was the industrial action that began at that time. That was not just the official industrial action on the part of the RMT, but the unofficial action, which the union has denied. There were suddenly very high rates of sickness, and there was a general unwillingness on the part of the workforce to co-operate with the management. It was undoubtedly the case that the operator was already having to improve its performance and already faced difficulties—there is no disagreement about that—but its performance declined catastrophically as a result of that industrial action. That action was then joined by the drivers, whose work to rule was official, rather than unofficial. The consequence was that the service last year was simply appalling What was that all about? It was about the alleged lack of safety as a consequence of the introduction of a system that has been operating on a third of the railways for 30 years. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) implied some kind of culpability—some kind of casual response to safety—on the part of the Government, but the Labour Government were in office for 13 years when driver-only operation trains were running. These trains run on the London underground; there happens to be a Labour Mayor responsible for that now. Indeed, the Docklands light railway has no drivers at all Currently, according to the figures that the unions gave us in a meeting this morning, over 97% of the trains that Southern is operating still have a safety-trained second member of staff on board. There have been no pay cuts, there have been no job losses, 97% of the trains are still running with a second person on board, and fewer than 3% of those trains are not, and yet the hon. Gentleman implied that there had been de-staffing. Far from de-staffing, there has been an offer of a 24% pay increase to ASLEF drivers. There is no doubt about the unions’ responsibility for what happened last year.