“Those delays occur every day, so actually if we’re not managing those delays how can we expect the train service to run properly?
“The principle of sub-threshold is hugely important to the industry. It’s more important than we’ve previously understood and recognised. So that’s a learning. We didn’t know that. The people in the Route and the people in the TOC did not know that. There’s no contractual regime that applies to it. There’s no money that applies to it. It isn’t that no one cared, it’s just that it wasn’t a priority.
“So what we’ve been able to do is understand - and it’s a bigger issue for us than it is for many TOCs, and that is very clearly because of the fact that our railway is at the leading edge of overcrowding and capacity challenges.
“Inevitably the more passengers we carry, the more sub-threshold delay matters. The more we put in lifts, the more prams and buggies get on the trains, the more delays we’ll get because, actually, it’s still an effort to get from the platform onto the train. You can get to the platform OK, but if you don’t make it easier to get on the train because there are no ramps, then we haven’t thought that all the way through. We’ve thought ‘great, we want to do lifts on platforms’, but how do you get onto the train? How do you do that at a place like Clapham Junction?”
Once more in his stride, he continues: “Because we can then see the factual issues, we can then take actions and measures that we would never otherwise have been able to do. Not least because with the financials in the Alliance aligned, then it doesn’t matter who creates the delay, it costs me money. Even if there’s no Schedule 8 regime against it, it still costs me money because it’s passenger inconvenience.
“So you don’t think of it in terms of what’s the regulatory issue
or what’s the contractual issue, because actually the issue is the bloody revenue. Our revenue this year is nearly a billion pounds. If I’ve got a lot of delays, I’m not growing that revenue. Or the revenue is constrained because of the train service.
“So it matters less what the regime says or what the contracts say, because the revenue is the true indicator of success.”
Shoveller has opened a wider debate here. A large part of the railway’s regulatory regime is in place to act as a proxy for a market, or to counter a view that a railway is a monopoly supplier.
However, he argues: “The regimes are there to act as a proxy for the market where no true market exists, but we have a true market and it’s called a billion pounds worth of passengers. We can see very clearly when we do well and when we don’t. When we have a problem in the morning peak, then we don’t just think about the Schedule 8, we also think about how much money that didn’t come to our ticket offices.”
