Rail Franchising - The Future

[DVL418]

RE: Rail Franchising - The Future
Ok, here goes.

London Midland have withdrawn 12 services every day for at least the two months. Lets round the numbers down to eight weeks and six days - 12 x 8 = 8 dozen, and that is at the conservative end of assumptions. If you care to check they have paid the lowest salaries for qualified drivers by a TOC and, until current crisis hit them, did not have an ongoing driver training programme.

John Major's admission that he got the privitisation of the railways wrong; He first hinted that they might have got 'some aspects' of the process wrong in his autobiography - Major, John (1999) – Autobiography.

In recent years he has spoken publically on several occasions on the issue, and has made more admissions that in retrospect the methodology used was largely untested on the scale it was implimented, rolled-out too hurriedly rather than piloted, and was fundamentally flawed in several key aspects that resulted in poor VFM for the taxpayer. He may also have repeated these comments in print - but I have better things to use my time on that failed politicians jottings.

Finally, how can I offer an alternative set of KPIs for a system that is fundamentally broken? The only KPI that matters to the TOCs are profit and dividend payments - the rest are an inconvenient neccesity to grab the keys to the franchise.