Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
40-59)
DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORT, NETWORK
RAIL, OFFICE
OF RAIL
REGULATION AND
ASSOCIATION OF
TRAIN OPERATING
COMPANIES
4 JUNE 2008
Q40 Dr Pugh: The Report mentioned
difficulties you have with coroners when there are incidents and
so on. I did not understand how coroners could generate difficulties
for you; could somebody explain to me how?
Mr Coucher: We do sadly get some
240 suicides a year; they are very, very disruptive to the network.
The British Transport Police do a very good job in trying to clear
these up and they try to get them sorted out in 70 minutes but
that does cause us a big problem, particularly if they are very
messy. The coroners are the people who decide whether this has
been a suicide or not and there are a number of coroners around
the country who insist on using their own undertakers and their
own people to assert death. That causes us problems in one or
two pockets.
Q41 Mr Mitchell: I would just like
to ask the National Audit Office, why did you not talk to the
victims? You have used general surveys from Passenger Focus or
whatever it is called, but they are very general. They just say
whether there is dissatisfaction and, if there is an incident,
was it well-handled. I was involved in a major incident just before
your survey began in 2005. There was a big break down on the East
Coast Line and the train was stuck for hours in conditions which
approximated those on the Bridge on the River Kwai in an overheated
train with no information. I could have given you a very graphic
story about it. Why did you not talk to the victims?
Ms Barker: We did talk to Passenger
Focus and use their information.
Q42 Mr Mitchell: You could have taken
an incident and talked to those people who had live through it.
Ms Barker: To be honest it is
the practicalities of how much we can do within a period on a
study and unfortunately we did not have the time to do that. We
had a good source of information from Passenger Focus about passengers'
experiences.
Q43 Mr Mitchell: If you talk to the
companies and you talk to the Department and to Network Rail and
the rest of it, they are all going to put the best possible gloss
on it. You need to get the harrowing stories and try to come to
some conclusions from that.
Mr Burr: I agree with your point,
Mr Mitchell, that it is always better if you can talk to the consumers,
the users of the service, and not just to those who provide it.
We did try to cover that through Passenger Focus.
Q44 Mr Mitchell: It is not so much
the consumers, it is the victims.
Mr Burr: The victims, yes.
Q45 Mr Mitchell: Just one more point
for the Audit Office. Why are there no figures company by company?
I see on page 15 at paragraph 2.2 the most common incident category
was train faults: "with some 48 incidents (65% of our sample)"
had train faults. Those are related, presumably, to the up-to-date
rolling stock, to the maintenance of the rolling stock, to the
way the companies invest in new rolling stock. Surely we need
to know that on a company by company basis.
Ms Barker: The data we had was
on the basis of routes and, given the sample size, if we had broken
it down by companies I think it would probably have been misrepresentative,
there would not have been a big enough sample size. The best thing
for us to do was to do it by routes; that was statistically more
valid. You might have more than one train company operating on
a route and given that we were looking at a constrained period
that might not have been a fair picture of what was going on with
particular companies.
Q46 Mr Mitchell: Mr Mitchell, does
the Department have company by company information on who is investing,
whose trains are most likely to break down, who has the ancient
rolling stock? Certainly when it comes to Grimsby we have been
served by ancient, appalling stock. First Group has now put in
some new rolling stock, but the adequacy of that service and the
rolling stock was appalling. Do you have company by company break
down information?
Dr Mitchell: There is a body called
the National Task Force which is made up of representatives of
Network Rail and the train companies and attended by ourselves
and the Office of Rail Regulation. They review, on a company by
company basis, how companies are performing across a whole range
of issues, including the performance of the rolling stock. However,
you are correct in saying that over the past few years this feature
has declined in importance as new rolling stock has been brought
into use.
Q47 Mr Mitchell: I cannot see from
the Network Rail point of view that it is any achievement to have
got the rate of breakdowns and problems back down to the level
it was before 2000. That is no achievement.
Mr Coucher: We are proud of our
contribution to pushing rail punctuality to the highest level
it has been in recent memory. The trains are now running at 90%
punctuality; that has been a huge effort by the entire rail industry
and we are proud of our record.
Q48 Mr Mitchell: The improvement
has not gone on, has it?
Mr Coucher: We are now running
considerably more trains; it is a lot more congested out there
and that means that every time you get a single failure it does
cause more delays, but on a like for like basis it is performing
in many parts at pre-Hatfield levels.
Q49 Mr Mitchell: Mr Franks, I would
like National Express to put trains on to Grimsby so I will be
very deferential. I have had a brief experience of this disaster
but there are others that have happened when the cables get tangled
on the East Coast line and the whole line is put out. It struck
me that a lot of the problems were those of the operator because
as a passenger first of all I am struck by the fact that supplies—water
and food supplies—just were not available. The trains do
not carry enough supplies to cope in case of a breakdown.
Mr Franks: There are a few issues
there. On the point about supplies on the train, we should carry
enough supplies. You referred to the incident in GNER time when
there was a big problem when the train overheated; because the
train was stranded for a long period of time the air conditioning
was not working.
Q50 Mr Mitchell: They ran out of
water within a quarter of an hour.
Mr Franks: Yes, they did, and
there were a number of lessons learned. As a consequence the trains
now carry big supplies of water in the guard's brake van. There
was a very deep inquiry into that particular incident I remember
well because it was brought and shared with the industry.
Q51 Mr Mitchell: In that incident
a helicopter had to bring in bottles of Perrier water which was
slightly humiliating, I thought, for the train company. The other
thing that struck me—we were several hours on the train
in overheated conditions—was that nobody knew what to tell
us. Staff were running up and down but nobody could tell us anything.
The passengers were anxious to know but nobody could give us any
information. You are very adept at huge announcements when people
get on the train telling you to get off if you do not have this
ticket or that ticket or you have got an advanced booking ticket;
announcements flood out that you should not really be there. However,
in this particular incident announcements dropped off.
Mr Franks: That was before we
were operating that piece of railway.
Q52 Mr Mitchell: I accept that.
Mr Franks: There was an investigation
and a lot of lessons were learned. What I would say is that the
guidance that we have issued from ATOC to all industry partners
actually does pick up a number of these issues. It picks up a
number of things that have come from previous investigations and
I hope you will find that it is properly implemented across the
industry and we have a group making sure that the recommendations
of the guidance are implemented. When implemented you will see
a difference in the way we handle these things. Sometimes things
have not been done well; we want to make a big difference.
Q53 Mr Mitchell: We were eventually
pulled or towed or whatever back to Peterborough. Peterborough
Station was milling with thousands of people because all the trains
had stopped and they were just being disgorged there. We were
told to go to the Peterborough Railway Hotel which was crowded
out. Five minutes after my arrival they ran out of meat pies.
There was nobody from the company in a position to tell us what
was going on. I accept again that this is your predecessor but
it seemed to be a major weakness that nobody was coordinating
anything and giving the information to the passengers.
Mr Franks: We have been running
the East Coast Main Line now for six months and in that period
of time one of my urgent tasks has been to review all of our contingency
plans up and down the line. There was a good reason for that because
soon after we took control we had the overhead wires down on a
number of occasions and as a consequence we have had similar types
of incidents to deal with. Because of that, as I said, we have
reviewed the contingency plans up and down the East Coast Main
Line and our contingency plans do address the issues that are
shown in our guidance notes. I hope you will see a difference
in the future.
Q54 Mr Mitchell: Moving on to Mr
Coucher, the Report finds at 2.17 and 2.19 that often the emergency
services do not know who to deal with and there seems to be inadequate
communication between Network Rail and the different emergency
services. Is this being put right? What are you doing about it?
Mr Coucher: We had already picked
up on that but on the basis of the NAO Report we have gone back
and looked at precisely what we do here. We recognise that this
was a weakness. I know the Report highlights many failings here
but in general a single emergency service will not have anything
to do with the railway for months and months—maybe years—before
they have to deal with something significant. We recognise in
that period of time that phone numbers may have got out of date
and we need to do more in that area. We have looked at this and
we have a rolling programme to go out and re-brief emergency services.
From our perspective there are one or two slight issues to deal
with. We do have co-located controls with our operators so that
they can be geographically separated from the incident itself—for
example trains as far as Carlisle are controlled out of Birmingham—so
we need to work more closely with the local areas. Yes, it needs
to be put right and we will do so.
Q55 Mr Davidson: Can I ask about
compensation to passengers? Do we have figures about how much
has been paid out in compensation for delays to passengers by
company?
Dr Mitchell: I am afraid we do
not have a figure broken down by companies. We can send you a
note on that. [1]
Q56 Mr Davidson: That would be helpful.
Do you know how many incidents occurred in which compensation
was paid?
Dr Mitchell: Yes.
Q57 Mr Davidson: Can you tell me
what it was?
Dr Mitchell: We can supply that
too. We do not have detailed figures.
Q58 Mr Davidson: Give me a feel for
it as a percentage of journeys for which a compensation claim
ends up being payable.
Dr Mitchell: We do not have that
data to hand.
Mr Franks: I can give you a feel
in terms of revenue that we hand back to customers. Using an East
Coast example we will be paying back about 1% of our turnover
in compensation to customers, about £5 million per annum.
Q59 Mr Davidson: For how many of
your journeys do you think payment would be due? Is it only 1%?
Mr Franks: We offer compensation
to anybody who has been delayed for more than 30 minutes. If their
journey has been delayed for an hour or longer then they get much
bigger compensation. For a journey delay of 30 minutes they get
half of their ticket price back.
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