If the DfT were to take over, who would be in charge? Directly Operated Railways is the holding company set up in July 2009 to run franchises should it be necessary to bring them into public ownership. It had a subsidiary, East Coast Main Line Company, which took over from National Express East Coast. This ceased operating when Virgin took over on March 1 2015.
Since then, the operator of last resort has been on pause. Consultants SNC Lavalin (formerly Interfleet) and Arup babysit the dormant business. In effect, the in-house company has been outsourced. The DfT decided that would be cheaper than maintaining a just-in-case team themselves.
SNC Lavalin Managing Director Richard George once ran Great Western and later joined the FirstGroup board. That was 20 years ago. But he also stepped into the breach when Connex South Central (now Southern Railway) was stripped of its franchise. So he has previous experience.
“He’s a really bright leader but I don’t think he would be expected to run it himself,” said the boss of another train operator. “Even handing back to the state, franchise changes take months and he would put a team together. SNC Lavalin’s experience is reasonably current and they could choose who to keep and who to dispense with in GTR management.”
Running GTR could reasonably be viewed as one of the most challenging jobs in the rail industry. George would not take over himself directly - he would find a small team of senior people to take charge, perhaps as few as four or five executives. All the other staff would remain in place, as they are employed by Govia Thameslink Railway and not by the parent company, Govia.
The other train company head said: “If I was at DfT I would take it off Govia and break it up into Great Northern, Thameslink and Southern, with TfL taking the Great Northern and Southern inner services in due course. But I don’t think DfT wants to be directly responsible for something that might not get better any time soon. With 30 DfT franchise managers, their fingerprints are over most things GTR have done.
“Backbench MPs want action, though. I suspect a costly fudge. Additional rolling stock to reduce crowding and a fares freeze for 2017 - easy, as DfT holds the revenue risk. Then a firm commitment to transfer the ‘inners’ to TfL, Cambridge fast services to Virgin East Coast and restoration of a separate Southern/Gatwick Express.”
Unions’ future at stake
“This is not about pay or jobs,” the RMT has repeatedly stated. “Our members are taking strike action and losing pay because they are concerned about passenger safety.”
But the rest of the industry is clear that this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Over the past decade, the number of fatalities and injuries across the network has fallen by 15%, according to RSSB. Most of those fatalities have been caused by people trespassing. The vast majority of injuries are from slips, trips and falls at stations. The actions of train conductors have very little bearing on these figures.
The RMT claimed a “massive mandate” for action. Among the 393 Southern conductors who were balloted, 306 voted to strike. So there was indeed a strong mandate among the 6% of GTR staff involved. The strikes halted 900 trains a day.
The strike ballot took place before the new Trade Union Act came into effect. This states that strikes can only go ahead on a turnout of at least 50% of those balloted. For “important public services” unions must ballot “all eligible members”.
Keeping a ballot to a small group of key workers, slicing and dicing their membership, unions are not finding these new restrictions arduous. Look at the separate strike ballots on ScotRail, Virgin East Coast and the four separate ones on GTR. At Eurostar the RMT ballot over a better work-life balance for train managers was conducted among just 80 staff.
Yet despite the impressions that strikes are breaking out all over the rail network, industrial action is rarer than it used to be.
