Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
100-119)
DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORT, NETWORK
RAIL, OFFICE
OF RAIL
REGULATION AND
ASSOCIATION OF
TRAIN OPERATING
COMPANIES
4 JUNE 2008
Q100 Nigel Griffiths: I am not sure
in the Report why eight years were chosen as the sort of timescale.
Was there something horrendous the year before that?
Ms Barker: No, it is fairly standard
to look at Hatfield and then look at performance thereafter. It
is just a way of looking at it.
Q101 Nigel Griffiths: What has been
the trend in passenger satisfaction?
Dr Mitchell: Passenger satisfaction
is currently running at a very high level. It is approximately
80% of people being satisfied or very satisfied with performance,
but of course I would be the first to admit that that is an average
figure across the whole of the railway and may not necessarily
reflect the position on individual services or individual lines.
Q102 Nigel Griffiths: One of the
things that I did find distressing and shocking, although not
as terrible for the train crews and the emergency services, is
the number of fatalities and incidents. If I look at table 21
in appendix two, am I right in interpreting that the external
fatalities and trespass amount to what is almost one year of delays,
a delay of 522,000 minutes?
Dr Mitchell: Yes.
Q103 Nigel Griffiths: In Sussex I
see the problems that are highlighted in paragraph 23 on page
36 where fatalities on the Sussex route caused over 40,000 delay
minutes, that is a month of delays. Am I interpreting the data
from the Report correctly?
Mr Franks: This is a continuing
trend. In East Anglia alone this year there have been more than
50 fatalities.
Q104 Nigel Griffiths: Can more not
be done to prevent such fatalities?
Mr Franks: It is an incredibly
difficult problem. We have been working with the Samaritans, particularly
in East Anglia, because it seems an extreme set of circumstances
there. We have tried to adopt a number of things, providing contact
details and alerting our staff and training our staff to look
out for potential signs that somebody may be attempting to commit
suicide. There are some things you can do, but it is a really
difficult problem.
Q105 Nigel Griffiths: The Jubilee
Line at Westminster in particular is like the Moscow Underground
and does have a non-access closed door system. Has that been considered
at all for stations or do fatalities take place mainly away from
the stations?
Mr Franks: It is a mix. Some are
at stations; some are away from stations. It would be an incredibly
expensive exercise to try to protect people on every single station.
It is not an easy thing to do.
Q106 Nigel Griffiths: I see train
crew causes, which are fourth highest for causing delay minutes.
Presumably that is a mixture of non-attendance, sickness or what?
Mr Franks: It can be but it can
also include displacement of train crews because of other disruption
earlier on on the network.
Q107 Nigel Griffiths: Knock-on effects.
Mr Franks: Yes.
Q108 Nigel Griffiths: The examples
that the National Audit Office have helpfully given us, the case
studies, you clearly seem to be in the hands of the emergency
services. If we take case study three, they seem to be able to
respond fairly quickly to a potential incident around acetylene
gas cylinders. These must be difficult problems to get to grips
with.
Mr Coucher: Yes. Fire is a particular
concern for us. There was a change in the fire regulations which
extended the cordon zone which fire officers would put around
a burning fire to 200 metres. Regrettably, because of the nature
of the railway, we do get a lot of industrial work sites along
the side of the railway and we have been caught with that a number
of times. You can see from example three just how impactful these
things are. We have been working very closely with the London
Fire Brigade to look at new ways in which we can use technology—remote
robots for example—to reduce the impact of these but they
are disruptive. We have got some great ideas of how we can reduce
it and hopefully we can roll those out in the next few months
or years.
Q109 Nigel Griffiths: I think it
might be helpful to have a summary of that in a note. [5]
Mr Coucher: Of course.
Q110 Nigel Griffiths: On fatalities,
I notice it is not listed in the 44 categories and I presume that
it is not in the top 44, but there are dangerous operating conditions
obviously for contractors. Do you have at your fingertips the
trend in terms of fatalities on railway lines by staff and contractors
working and whether action that you have taken has eliminated
those? [6]
Mr Coucher: I can certainly provide
that. These are all the categories of delays, not just the top
44. We have worked long and hard to improve the safety of our
workforce over the last four years. The safety record of the workforce
is at an all time high. The previous year we had zero workforce
fatalities for the first time in the history of the British rail
network but sadly since then there have been one or two instances
and we are constantly looking for ways in which we can improve
safety for our workforce.
Q111 Nigel Griffiths: On page 35
the NAO make the pretty sensible point that shows that the routes
that have the highest number of incidents and delays also I think
have the highest loads and they are contrasting London and the
Northeast and Scotland. Do you monitor a per mile usage or per
passenger usage figure that shows you that some areas are actually
much better at dealing with incidents than others and if that
is the case are you able to showcase and adopt best practice from
those areas?
Mr Coucher: That is precisely
what we do do. A lot of the efforts we have done to reduce delays
over the last four or five years have been based on identifying
best practice and rolling it out, not just in dealing with incidents
but providing the best ways of maintaining the asset to reduce
the number of failures in the first instance. I have countless
examples I could provide—but I am sure you would not want
them all—about how we are taking best practice and rolling
it around the country. The charts are slightly misleading here
because they are not normalised by the number of train movements
but we could do that for you as well. You will find that although
places like Sussex and Wessex have relatively small numbers when
you normalise the number of trains, they are actually similar
in terms of complexity.
Q112 Dr Pugh: We touched briefly
on the weather and I think you said proudly that you were running
trains in times when Holland and so on were taking them off because
of bad weather. That is not the perception of the British passenger;
the British passenger often thinks that when trains go off because
we have some freak weather that over in Switzerland, Sweden, Finland
and all those sorts of places the trains carry on regardless and
there is something quintessentially British about the fact that
we take our trains off during bad weather, which is precisely
the times when we do not want to use our cars. You gave us the
anecdote—I was impressed by it, it was not what I expected—but
is there any hard data that either you have or the NAO have that
show whether our system is more vulnerable or less vulnerable
to bad weather?
Mr Coucher: I do not have the
statistics for that but I can explain that we do a lot of benchmarking
work. A lot of the European companies come to us to see how well
we manage autumn. Autumn has been a problem in the past and there
has been a lot of hard work with ourselves and the train operating
companies because it is a joint responsibility. We have improved
that. We still struggle from extreme weather conditions; it is
difficult to run trains when the railway is under water.
Q113 Dr Pugh: To be fair, our weather
is probably no more extreme than weather of most mainland continental
European countries.
Mr Coucher: It is much more variable
so we get swings in weather conditions which change in a matter
of hours rather than the more benign type of weather. The weather
in Switzerland, for example, is much more predictable and they
do have systems and processes designed to cope with their weather.
Q114 Dr Pugh: Is it possible for
you to share with us the results of some of your benchmarking
exercises? [7]
Mr Coucher: Yes, I would be happy
to do that.
Q115 Mr Mitchell: I see from the
Report that delays—passenger mile delays or whatever—are
up 30% in the period concerned due to vandalism and theft. This
is largely attributed to cable thefts in the Northeast. Why is
that? Is it that the scrap metal dealers live by the railway track
in Geordie-land? Or is the cabling more exposed there? What are
you doing about it? I know a kind of glad song of praise for Geordies
goes up at Doncaster Station every time the train is a couple
of hours late because of cable theft. Why is it?
Mr Coucher: In the last few years
the price of copper has risen dramatically.
Q116 Mr Mitchell: Yes but not particularly
in the Northeast.
Mr Coucher: It has risen dramatically
and we have seen a significant increase in the amount of cable
theft and the specific target areas—we are not entirely
sure why this might be—are the Sheffield and Nottingham
areas. Those are the most prevalent areas. We have had instances
in the Northeast but we are working long and hard with the British
Transport Police. It costs the industry millions of pounds a year
in sorting repairs out and causes huge amounts of disruption to
passengers. It is a real problem we are having to wrestle with
now; I do not think it is specific to certain people around the
country, but there are parts of the railway which are more easily
targeted, particularly where there are freight only lines which
are scarcely used. If you are trying to be a cable thief in the
Southeast where there are trains moving every few minutes you
do not get much chance to work. It is where they are lightly used
and exposed.
Q117 Mr Mitchell: Have you got on
top of it now? The stoppages have not been as frequent.
Mr Coucher: It is a difficult
problem to get on top of. We put a huge amount of resource in,
along with our customers and with the British Transport Police
to try to keep it in abeyance. It looks like it is coming down
but it could change drastically. There has been a lot of hard
work targeting thieves and the scrap metal merchants. We are using
helicopters and doing anything we can to try to track this down
but it is a real problem and it particularly affects the operators
on the East Coast.
Q118 Chairman: I see at appendix
two on page 33, Mr Coucher, that incidents are analysed by category.
There is an incident there: vegetation management failure. What
does that mean?
Mr Coucher: The railways are a
wonderful natural corridor covered with a lot of trees and when
it rains and branches fall down they can either fall onto the
overhead line or they can obscure signals and we have to fix them.
One of the solutions is to cut these things back but we appreciate
that is somewhat sensitive in many areas.
Q119 Chairman: Mr Franks, what difference
have you made in the six months since you have taken over from
GNER as far as the public are concerned?
Mr Franks: I can give you a couple
of very quick examples. Our National Passenger Service goals have
improved from 82% to 86% in our first go, and our performance
has also improved quite significantly such that in the last period
of results which have just been published we have managed to get
a PPM score of 89.5%. So performance is getting better.
5 Ev 13. Back
6
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