There’s no doubt that Lord Peter Hendy, the rail minister, is good at adapting to new situations. He was, after all, the man who kept his job as transport commissioner in London despite the change in the political complexion of the mayor. Being able to cope with the vagaries and foibles of both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson was a remarkable achievement and, similarly, Hendy needed to draw on his legendary flexibility to move from being chairman of Network Rail to becoming, effectively, the organisation’s political boss as rail minister. And now he is in the process of abolishing it.
Hendy was keen to provide an interview for my podcast, Calling All Stations as the Bill setting out the powers of Great British Railways will soon be introduced in the House of Commons and Hendy is convinced it will be the source of a radical improvements in the railway. He makes no apology for the fact that change has been rather slower than expected after the amazingly rapid passage of the legislation allowing franchises to be taken over permanently by the government given the historic importance of the Bill. ‘This is substantial legislation. There hasn’t been a big railway Act for 32 years.
The 1993 Railways Act has been, like it or not, extraordinarily enduring.’ Therefore, ‘we have to make sure that this act, which might last for another 30 years, has to cover all of the subjects that actually need to be addressed in reforming the railway’.
Moreover, Hendy is open about the fact that this is a power grab in that Great British Railways will take over aspects of the railway currently overseen by the Office of Rail Regulation. He told me that the situation over who controls the railway is so confused at the moment, it was he, as minister, who had to decide on the timetable for the East Coast, which had been the subject of controversy for years between the regulator, operators and Network Rail. Therefore, it will be GBR which determines which trains should be run, not the ORR: ‘famously, one [former] chief executive of Network Rail, when asked who his customer was, said it’s the regulator. That is nonsense: the customer of the railway are the people standing waiting for a train and the people who send freight.’ He stressed that whereas 30 years ago when the railway was privatised there was a slack in the system and ‘you could double some services without anybody noticing and without congestion, you can’t do that now and therefore a plan for the future and what you do in terms of in terms of enhancements, in terms of getting additional trains on the network, the length of the trains, the capacity of them has to be much more attended to’. Would that not give GBR too much control, something that open access operators and freight providers are worried about? No, disputes, he said, would be sorted by the ORR in an independent appeal process.
Hendy did not hold back in his criticism of what has happened with HS2 which he described as being in ‘a terrible state’. He is confident that Mark Wild, the new CEO, will sort it out: ‘The first thing he’s got to do is find out how much work has been done, what’s left to do, how long it’s going to take and
how much it’s going to cost, and the fact that we’re in that position is dire’. He says that there is a commitment to reach Euston, without which ‘few people will use the line’ but as yet there is no date for when the tunnel boring machines, currently at Old Oak Common, will start their journey southwestwards.
Moreover, he is infuriated by the fact that HS2 was conceived as a separate railway rather than part of the existing one which he says was a fundamental mistake: ‘The railway is one network. When you turn up at Euston, eventually it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a passenger to Bushey, or
Milton Keynes, or to Birmingham Curson Street on HS2’. He is convinced that eventually it will be built through to Crewe and become a great asset, but it is not difficult to see that he is, like so many in the industry, iin utter despair about what has happened.
On fares reform, he said that ‘a lot of work’ is being carried out, but gave no hint about what might lie ahead, apart from praising the LNER scheme that involves having advance fares that are semi flexible on some of its routes, but which many people have found incomprehensible. I put to Hendy my scheme of having a default off peak fare, and then certain trains that would be more expensive or cheaper, but he dismissed it as oversimplistic. And he ruled out the idea that England could follow the Scottish idea of scrapping peak fares: ‘The most crucial thing in railway finance finances that the subsidy from the Treasury has doubled since COVID … one of our jobs has to be to reduce the
subsidy on the railway and when you make fares decisions the balance has always been between
what the taxpayer pays and what the fair payer pays.’
Few political careers start in people’s seventies, but Hendy is actually relishing it though he is incensed sometimes by the pointlessness of the posturing: by the opposition which keeps him up late: ‘The bit I don’t like is getting home at one o ‘clock or two o ‘clock in the morning because the opposition have been fruitlessly arguing for a long time’. But that, he accepts, is politics. And what really stimulates his enthusiasm is that he is convinced real change will come out of this process, which will come about through integration, his key theme: ‘Taking train operations back into public
ownership is an essential part of making the change to make in the railway better’.
You can listen to the full interview by searching for Calling All Stations, Series 3 episode 22,
Just one journey……
If there is one fundamental task for Great British Railways, it is to make the railways great again. And that means putting passengers at the heart of the service.
It is to a great extent down to the little things. And there are lots of them. Take the journey I made recently from London to the Peak District, which necessitates a change at Derby. I had plenty of time to buy a ticket at St Pancras which was fortunate because I went to the office downstairs, waited in the queue and then was offered a return at £90 with my railcard. Querying this, I was told it was an anytime return, and that I could not book a cheaper one through this office, but had to go upstairs to buy the ticket off the East Midland ticket office, whose existence I had not been aware of and where I did get a cheaper deal. This is insane. We should be working towards a unified railway, not perpetuating the fragmented one.
Then on the return journey, there was another bit of nonsense. The train I was due on from Derby was late, but so was the one before. I got on that one at precisely the time my one was due but then the conductor announced that those people booked on my train should get off at Leicester and wait for their booked late running service. I ignored him and so did everyone else, but this is a fundamental failure to understand what ‘service’ means. Basically, he was saying we should not accept the service we have paid for but the one that the railway wanted to provide. The advent of Great British Railways must change the ethos that makes staff behave like that.