| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
10 Mar 2010 : Column 102WH—continued
Understanding that Govia's Keith Ludeman and Southeastern's Charles Horton were effectively pawns on the DFT chessboard, I wrote to the Secretary of State on 6 January, after a disastrous Christmas rail transport season in east Kent. In that letter, I said that I would be meeting Southeastern's Charles Horton to discuss the flow of complaint e-mails that I was receiving from dissatisfied customers, and I invited the Secretary of State to attend the meeting.
Having met Mr. Horton, I wrote again to the Secretary of State on 18 January, saying:
"With regards to the bigger picture, Mr. Horton places the responsibility on the terms of the franchise agreement laid down by your Department."
Southeastern is in no doubt either about where the buck stops. I continued:
"It is clear that now that the new timetable has been imposed it cannot be changed piecemeal and will require a thorough review. To establish how best the present unacceptable position may be rectified in the shortest possible time and in order that I may apprise you of the detail of the views of travellers, I am formally requesting a personal meeting with you".
On 26 January, the Minister responded to my first letter of 6 January on behalf of the Secretary of State:
"Your constituents are well served by the December 2009 timetable",
citing additional services to London Cannon Street, London Victoria and London Bridge stations, as well as the unloved St. Pancras service. We will hear the views of the travelling public in due course.
In a further and-forgive me-crass observation indicating his lamentable understanding of the geography of east Kent, the Minister then prayed in aid of his improvement claims services to Tunbridge Wells, Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Bexleyheath, Greenwich and Grove Park, none of which is of interest to those using the Kent coastal services. He was, however, gracious enough to acknowledge that
"The Department has received some negative feedback".
On 12 February, the Minister wrote again on his Lordship's behalf, this time in response to my letter requesting a meeting with the Secretary of State:
"I am unable to attend such a meeting due to diary commitments",
his diary having presumably been rearranged for the general election. He asserted in a further letter on 22 February that
"Southeastern is now the best connected London-serving Train Operating Company, serving seven London terminal stations"
and told me and those whom I represent:
"forecast modelling tools used by the rail industry suggest that it will take up to three years for a new market to reach 100 per cent. of its potential. It is, therefore, too early to be seeking to reach a judgment on the recently introduced service to St. Pancras."
My constituents are travelling now, not in three years' time. Their working lives are being disrupted now. They are paying vastly inflated fares-way above the Department's alleged increase of RPI plus 3 per cent.-now. They are travelling on dirty, overcrowded, unreliable trains, and arriving home late from work to cold dinners and children already in bed, now.
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con):
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way while making a powerful speech, and I congratulate him on fighting a remarkable campaign. May I add one more item to that
extremely unappealing list? Those who commute across Kent rather than into London face a pathetic collapse in the timetable arrangements for transitions. Some transitions have dropped from 10 minutes to one minute, so people keep missing connections.
Mr. Gale: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Some of the changes dramatically affect his constituents. If he can stay until later in my speech, he will hear me refer to one of them. If he cannot, I understand fully, as I know that he has other commitments in the House this afternoon.
I want the Minister-and the Secretary of State, who I trust will read this debate in the Official Report-to hear from the mouths of the travelling public precisely what they think of his Department, Southeastern trains and Govia. Michael Alderton, a gold card season ticket holder, says:
"The introduction of the High Speed (?) service to the timetable is a shambles and highlights the lack of consideration of SE Trains for commuters...I have had to start getting this earlier service because the later train (6.44) is regularly late and at work I do not have the luxury of being allowed a five-minute window".
Five minutes, of course, is the amount by which trains are allowed to be late without being regarded as late.
Working up the line from Margate-a two-hour journey on a good day-Vivien Viggers says:
"The introduction of this service and the downgrading of the original service to Cannon Street and Victoria has been of little use to me. Because there are no trains at Westgate in the morning at 6 am, I now have to walk to Margate. Whereas I could walk to my workplace from Cannon Street, I now have to take a tube...the journey is no quicker and I have been forced to pay the inflated fares for no improvement in service."
One stop further on, in Westbrook, Paul Dexter writes that
"a new trend that is becoming more frequent is that when a train is running late on the return journey...Southeastern are not stopping at a number of stations between Faversham and Ramsgate to enable them to make up time (presumably so they can meet their targets)...customers for smaller stations between Faversham and Ramsgate have to terminate their journey at Faversham and suffer a further delay...whilst we wait for the next train to come through."
Mr. Dexter, who pays £3,780 a year out of taxed income for his season ticket, adds:
"It's all the more difficult to take increases to the price for this year on the basis of the vastly deteriorating service we have received since the new timetable came into place...The delays may not sound significant...but...the impact it has on the time I have to spend with a young family in the evenings is."
Dawn Dale, who travels from Birchington-on-Sea, asks:
"Why are they running a 'high speed' service on a line that...cannot reach any high speeds until it leaves the commuter line at Ebbsfleet and the trains only get into London 10 minutes earlier than they would on the main line-time that you then have to spend getting back to where you need to be?...When are Southeastern going to admit that they have made a mistake on this line"?
I would add: when will the Minister?
The next stop is Herne Bay. Sharon Reeve pays £4,150 out of a salary of £26,000 to get to work. Because of the changes to the timetable she has to
"rise at 04:30 to catch a 05:35 train which will deliver me to London for 07:07-where upon I will have nearly ONE WHOLE HOUR before I need to start work."
"If I lose my job through being late for work I will be another 'benefit' statistic, and if I have to take a local job, I will join the low paid, be unable to pay tax.
Why is the government not stepping in, to ensure that those of us willing to work, are able to get to work"?
Moving up the line to Teynham, Duncan Law used to catch the 5.27 to London Bridge and get to his Greenwich office by 7 am. Now
"the train doesn't stop at my Local Station, meaning I have to travel to Sittingbourne and pay £4.50 per day just to park".
He goes on:
"The train from Sittingbourne is NOT direct to London Bridge or Cannon Street anymore, you have to change at Gillingham onto a local train to complete your journey."
He concludes by saying that he is
"so angry and let down"
Antony Loveland from Faversham works in north-west London, an area that the Department says is favoured by the run-through to St. Pancras. He says that
"the St. Pancras terminal is of limited use to me. Furthermore, I would be required to find an extra £1400-£1500 for my annual season ticket if I were to use the 'high speed' service which only gains me 6 minutes each way. I find it difficult to see how Southeastern can deem this value for money."
"Whilst I'm sure it had its drawbacks I would welcome a return of the old timetable".
We now move towards the constituency represented by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Gillingham (Paul Clark), who presumably speaks occasionally to the Secretary of State. Dennis Hamer from Newington tells me that he faces
"a reduced number of trains in peak hours"
and 50 per cent. fewer trains during off-peak hours. He adds:
"Needless to say these journeys take considerably longer than under the old timetable".
Neil West, who lives on Sheppey and works in Fulham, says that
"the new timetable has increased my journey to work from 2 hrs to 2 hrs 20 minutes and the journey home from 2 hrs to 2 hrs 30 minutes on a normal day. I have lost almost an hour of my own free time each day."
And so to Gillingham and Rainham, home of the Under-Secretary, who wrote on 1 March to his constituent, Jennifer Coles, saying that he had met with Southeastern's Charles Horton, who was
"very quick to acknowledge Southeastern's disappointment with regard to the general performance of the service."
"Southeastern's entire focus is currently being directed at driving up performance levels".
Faced across the table by a Transport Minister defending a marginal seat and beset by angry commuters, he would say that. The Minister went on to sing from the Department song sheet:
"I do believe that the high-speed rail service is a great asset for the residents of Medway and that it will provide increased opportunity for the area. I hope that in time, and with the return to high performance levels of your standard commuting services, you will begin to think so too."
It is debatable whether Amy Overy from Rainham, another constituent of the Under-Secretary, will be impressed by his observations. She said that
"the Medway Towns are worse off from the new HS1 service!"
"I do not want to hear that commuters are better off elsewhere in Kent, because I don't live elsewhere and I don't want to move either. I want a reliable service to and from London Victoria, in less than an hour, which is what I could expect before the timetable changes in December 2009."
Interestingly, the Minister got the Department's franchise manager, John MacQuarrie, to reply to that comment. Mr. MacQuarrie said that
"the Department will review jointly with Southeastern how successful the implementation of December 2009 timetable has been."
"Successful" is perhaps not the word I would have chosen.
I appreciate that this debate is a lengthy journey. If the Minister is beginning to lose the will to live, perhaps he understands how Kent's travelling public feel on a daily basis. In case he is tempted to think that this problem affects just a few people on the line that is the subject of the debate, Daniel Sargent states:
"I commute to London Cannon Street everyday from Dover and my journey has been increased by 20 minutes in the evening, it now takes 2 hours in total."
Gwyn Prosser (Dover) (Lab): I have listened with interest to the hon. Gentleman's speech and to the complaints from many of his constituents and the constituents of other hon. Members. If I manage to catch your eye, Mr. Benton, I will give my view on the difficulties in Dover. However, I put it on the record that the volume of complaints in Dover about the impact of High Speed 1 on domestic services does not reflect the jaundiced and grim story we are hearing.
Mr. Gale: The hon. Gentleman will no doubt make his view known and I am sure that his constituents, such as Mr. Sargent, will pay attention.
I am representing the daily experiences of real people who pay real money, after tax, to travel from homes along the Kent coast, through the Medway towns, and into London. Whether the hon. Gentleman likes it or not, the introduction of high-speed trains has had a dramatic effect on the performance of the standard service. Passengers are demonstrating with their feet that they do not want to go to St. Pancras. I have done that journey, as I am sure has he. After travelling to St. Pancras, it takes 25 minutes and costs £2.50 to get back to Westminster. The same is true for Aldgate and other places, as I will show. That is not an improvement.
Mr. Sargent goes on to make that very point:
"I cannot afford to use the High Speed trains and even if I could they do not take me to where I work. My office is a 10 minute walk from Cannon Street, so why would I want to get a train to St. Pancras and then have to pay for another season ticket to use London underground?"
It does not make any sense. No sane person would regard that as an improvement. No time is saved and money is wasted. By my miserable maths, people without season tickets have to pay an additional £13.50 a day for a standard return fare to London to use the high-speed service-and that is before paying to park. That is a lot of money for a mediocre service. I will be interested to hear the hon. Gentleman justify it. Trevor Allison from Preston, near Canterbury, states:
"The introduction of the high speed service has resulted in an inferior service for passengers who travel to London from Kearsney, Shepherdswell, Aylesham, Adisham, Canterbury East and Selling."
Even for people coming from Ashford-the raison d'être of the high-speed link-all is not perfect. Julia Blackwell, a gold card, first-class traveller, reports that
"until the introduction of the revised timetable in December I was travelling to and from Cannon Street by semi-fast service. What SouthEastern fail to understand is that High Speed to the wrong destination is no gain at all for many people."
Again, that is the point I have been making. She states:
"St Pancras is useless for the City...as it takes at least 20 to 25 minutes journey by tube back to Aldgate...thereby negating the benefits of a fast arrival at St Pancras."
To add insult to injury, people who have to travel on the high-speed link, but do not pay the high-speed premium due to the failure of the train operator to provide adequate ticket purchase and upgrade facilities, such as Peter Jaquiss from Cliftonville and Sharon Gregory from Westgate, are faced with penalty fares on arrival at St. Pancras. Remember, this is progress.
Even the local Kent services have not escaped the impact of this ill-conceived plan. Julie Gurr from Herne says:
"I travel from Sturry to Chartham, a journey of 11 minutes each way on the old timetable but...it now takes over 35 minutes each way!!"
"It has been a complete nightmare because if the train from Chartham is delayed or cancelled I can't get the connection at Canterbury. I thought the idea of public transport was to take cars off the road but with this new timetable I think that the opposite is going to happen."
I will bring this litany to a conclusion shortly, but I said that I would refer to the impact that this matter has had on leisure traffic. Terry Davidson from Folkestone tells me that
"we have lost the fast trains to Charing Cross twice an hour on Saturday...and one is forced to use the high speed line to have a sensible journey time.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |