House of Commons - Transport

Select Committee on Transport Fifth Report

4 Barriers to increased use of rural railways

25. It was clear from our meeting in Shrewsbury that there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the services on offer. The most cited problem was the fact that Shrewsbury was the only large county town in England without a direct service to London.[37] We were also told about poor connections to long distance destinations. Gloucester County Council has an aspiration for an hourly or two-hourly through-service to London from Hereford to London via Great Malvern.[38] Currently there is only a two-hourly service between London and Great Malvern. We heard that the availability of rail services may determine where people live, and that threats to local services may force people to move.

"And recently we've become very disenchanted with a number of different problems affecting the railway commuting to Hereford, especially Central Trains pattern of turning round trains at Malvern or Worcester even, rather than putting them through to Hereford, and we feel that the designation of Malvern to Shelwick Junction as a potential Community Rail development may make that tendency even worse. And what it will do in effect is make people move up the line, in fact I am already looking at houses in Malvern, because I'm wondering what on earth is going to happen to Hereford."[39]

Service standards

26. A recurring theme in the comments at the public meeting in Shrewsbury was poor standards on the local railway. People complained about poor connections, dirty trains, filthy lavatories, the absence of travel information on stations and a lack of integration with other public transport.

Infrastructure constraints

27. We were given many examples of infrastructure constraints which prevented improvement in services. The most common constraints are stretches of single line track with insufficient passing loops, often a legacy of the Beeching cuts. The Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth Rail Passenger Association told us that:

1.4 There have been proposals to upgrade the service to Aberystwyth to an hourly one. However, these ideas have stalled because of the insufficient number of loops on the single line where trains can pass each other. Several of these were removed by British Railways during the period 1960-1990.[40]

Long sections of the Cotswold Line were downgraded to single track in the 1970s to save on maintenance costs. The infrastructure can only cope, therefore, if there are no delays. If a train from Paddington is more than 15 minutes late it has to wait at Moreton-in-Marsh for the train from Great Malvern to clear the single line section.[41] Gloucestershire County Council said that the timetable could be improved by a modest investment: the installation of an automatic block signalling system to replace the token block working between Moreton and Worcester,[42] which involves the train driver physically exchanging tokens at the signal box before entering the single track section.

Competition law

28. Dr Roger Sexton of Nottingham Trent University told us that "One of the reasons why rural railways in countries such as Switzerland and Denmark are so good is that they are protected from bus competition. By contrast, one thing which makes the remaining rural railways in Britain so vulnerable is that, unlike in the rest of Europe, rural railways are not protected from bus competition."[43] A key to the success of the rural railway in Jönköping has been that the transport authority also controls the buses, which it plans and uses as feeder services to the railway:

"Mr Donohoe: Do buses compete with rail?

Mr Lundin: No. That is the reason we are responsible for the bus and rail service. We have had the bus service from 1981 and the rail service we started responsibility for from 1985. The bus service is not on long distance. In the area we are responsible for we use buses for feeder lines and city transport and rural areas without rail. We give priority to the railway."[44]

29. It appears that in the United Kingdom competition law can act as a barrier to integration in a way which frustrated many of our witnesses. For instance the LGA said:

"We would need a change in the current regulatory regime to deliver that greater integration of timetabling and also of ticketing, and then that leads us on to our old friend the Office of Fair Trading and competition issues when it comes to delivering greater co-ordination over ticketing. The current regulatory regime is not really conducive."[45]

There are three separate issues, the deregulation of buses outside London under the Transport Act 1985, co-ordination of timetables and through-ticketing.

Bus deregulation

30. 85% of the bus network outside London is run on a commercial basis: the other 15% of the network consists of socially necessary services run through a local authority tender. This of course means, as the LGA said, that unless a bus service has been tendered by the local authority, train operators are dependent on the bus operator to fit their timetables around the train timetable. A local authority can encourage bus operators to run services to stations by measures such as the building of transport interchanges at stations. But if a commercial bus operator does not want to run to a railway station there is nothing a train operator or local authority can do about it. We were told that the local bus operator in Moreton-in-Marsh cannot be persuaded to operate to the railway station, even though it is a little way from the town.[46] The Tyne Valley Users Group gave us several examples of local buses which could run to stations on the railway line but do not:

In Prudhoe, the 604 terminates tantalisingly short of the station. A short extension would see it provide an easy connection for passengers.

For people at Mickley, Branch End and Birches Nook, the 602 currently passes their front door and could provide an easy connection to Stocksfield station, which the bus also passes.
At Corbridge, the station is south of the river, while the main settlement is to the north. Both are linked by the 602 route.
Greenhead and Gilsland are now left out by the 685 in a bid to save a few minutes off its end-to-end journey time. A good connection at Haltwhistle could see public transport links to these villages restored.[47]

We heard that the bus to Oswestry actually stops at Gobowen station but leaves 5 minutes before the train arrives.[48]

31. To make the problem worse buses frequently compete with trains over the same corridor. This was recognised in the SRA consultation document:

There are many cases where bus services compete with, rather than feed local rail services, or are simply planned in isolation from them. In some cases, subsidised rail and bus services are competing for the same market.[49]

32. All local bus services are subsidised, at a minimum, through the bus service operators grant. It is absurd for the state to subsidise bus and rail services to compete against each other. We consider that rural railways in Britain will be unable to realise their full potential unless local authorities ensure that bus services are integrated with rail. This may entail an end to deregulation in rural areas.

Through-ticketing

33. The LGA thought that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) would block through-ticketing schemes under the Competition Act but the OFT argued that most through-ticketing schemes would be allowed because of ticketing block exemptions.[50] Mr Vincent Smith, Director of Competition Enforcement, Office of Fair Trading, explained that a genuine through-ticket is one that "enables you to add together different components of a public transport journey to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I think generally we would not see a problem with that."[51] Mr Nooman Haque, Principal Case Officer, elaborated further:

"The other thing to add, I would say, is that one of the key considerations has to be that the two routes which are being joined by the through ticket do not significantly overlap - i.e. they are not effectively routes in competition with each other, in which case through ticketing cannot be used. So it is for routes that are, more or less, separate; for a connecting service from A to B to C, for example, a through ticket can be used."[52]

34. Mr Smith said that where there was interface between the largely unregulated bus industry and the more regulated train industry it could cause difficulties and misperception. This difficulty is more than misperception. If a bus runs from place A to place C via B from where there is also a train to C, a passenger wanting to go by bus from A to B and by train from B to C would not be able to buy a through ticket from A to C, although this might be in the passenger's interest. This is because the bus is in competition with the train on this route. Even the example cited by the Mr Haque might not qualify under certain conditions. If a passenger lives in place A and wishes to catch a bus to railhead B en route to station C then it would be most convenient to buy a through ticket from A to C. However if the same company operated the train and the bus leg this would not be permitted because it might squeeze out competition on the bus leg.[53]

Co-ordination of bus and train timetables

35. The OFT also told us that they did not see competition law as an impediment to co-ordinated timetables.[54] This runs counter to the findings of the Commission for Integrated Transport (CfIT). CfIT commissioned a consultant, TAS Partnership, to carry out a review of competition within the public transport industry, which was published in October 2004.[55] On the question of the co-ordination of timetables the research found :

… there remains an issue concerning the co-ordination of timetables, which the Office of Fair Trading continues to regard as in breach of the Competition Act …

36. The report found that price alone was not the main determinant of demand for public transport. The key factor was the generalised cost of public transport, a combination of fares and travel time. The report concluded that it would be in the public interest if public transport operators were allowed to co-operate to produce co-ordinated services.

37. In rural areas, particularly, the private car is the main competitor to bus and rail services. The Office of Fair Trading should recognise this. In the short term the extent to which through-ticketing and service co-ordination are permitted should be made absolutely clear to transport providers. Once this is done we believe that the Government will need to examine the competition regime to ensure that it works in the best interests of public transport users.

38. There are clearly significant barriers to increasing the use of rural railways. Despite this, we were left in no doubt that rural communities value their railway and feel frustrated that in many cases its use is not maximised, either because of the poor service or lack of integration with other transport modes.

37 RR 12 Back

38 ibid Back

39 Visit Note A: Public meeting in Shrewsbury Back

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41 Visit note A Back

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44 Q 16 Back

45 Q 233 Back

46 Visit Note A, Gloucester County Council Back

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48 Visit Note A: Public meeting in Shrewsbury Back