Railway Operator and DfT slammed by NAO!

You won't be surprised that Govia Thamelink, who run Southern Railway, has the most delayed and disrupted trains in Britain, three times worse than the average on the rest of the railways. The heaviest-used sections Govia run are on Southern. The lines from Sussex constitute four-fifths of their operations, with around three-quarter of a million journeys made each day, sometimes.

Travellers have spent £3.6 billion on tickets over the past three years, of which around one-fifth has been pocketed by the DfT. Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), the franchise holder, has so far lost over £5m on the troubled contract. The National Audit Office (NAO) report on the franchise finds it had “not delivered value for money”. On average commuters have found one in 13 trains either cancelled or so late (over half-an-hour).

Many cancellations were the result of staff shortages, partly because of the ongoing industrial dispute, we have been suffering. The Department for Transport (DfT) had wanted the extension of 'Driver Only' trains, expecting Govia to do its dirty work, but the NAO report says it had failed to “fully evaluate the possible effects on passengers of different scenarios of industrial action before awarding the contract”.

This dispute is now in its third calendar year; the latest stoppage in this long and bitter conflict took place on Monday for Southern, but other services in other parts of the country will have more industrial action today and on Sunday. Even if the franchise had enjoyed no industrial action, it would still have had staffing issues: Govia had begun with an insufficient number of drivers to operate published timetables. The NAO asserts that before awarding the contract, the DfT failed to “seek sufficient assurance that Govia Thameslink would have enough train drivers when it took on the franchise.”

The report adds: “The Department and Network Rail did not have a good understanding of the underlying condition of the existing network at the point when the Department set the requirements of the franchise. 

If there is any comfort for the very long-suffering commuters, it is that occasional travellers from London Victoria to Gatwick airport fared even worse than the rest of the franchise. More than a quarter of Gatwick Express trains have been more than five minutes late over the past three years. And that is despite a one-way fare for the 28-mile journey of £19.90, more than the price of the plane ticket for some."

The NAO concludes: “When designing future franchise contracts, the Department should give more consideration to the potential impact on passengers of its decisions.”

There's a surprise, not.