MONDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2003

MR PAUL HARLEY, MR ANDREW GOODWIN AND MR CLIVE WILLIAMS

  Q500  Albert Owen: Can I ask where you got the figures of £20-30 million from, because they are in line with what Virgin said; that it would be tens of millions?

  Mr Williams: It is from the evidence that Virgin Trains gave to this Committee.

  Q501  Albert Owen: Nobody else has quantified that sum; it is just something that Virgin Trains, who obviously want to run their trains faster, have plucked out of the air. I do honestly believe that that is a good investment, particularly as the line is a main European network, and bearing in mind the £9 billion that the West Coast Main Line has had for upgrading, which is a considerable sum. The Pendolino trains, which will be introduced in September 2004, are to be used from Crew onwards by loco. How practical do you think this is?

  Mr Goodwin: I have to say I am not an engineer and not an expert in this sense. I am expert user of the railway, but not the operational side. Based on experience, however, what worries me is clearance of bridges and tunnels and that sort of thing. The question I would like to ask Virgin Trains, and will do, is: "Have you carried out a controlled trial yet on this?" We have seen situations in other parts of the country, for example with the introduction of the First North Western's 175 trains. The trains were all ready to go, and then suddenly there were problems over clearance. We also saw in the south of England, where the trains had been standing in the sidings, that the electric current issues had not been resolved. The question that we, as a committee, would like to ask Virgin, sooner rather than later, and perhaps as a result of today's meeting, is whether a control test has been undertaken, and whether Network Rail is satisfied with the clearance arrangements.

  Q502  Albert Owen: What worries me is that you are going to lose the10-15 minutes—you spend £20-30 million enhancing the line, and you would lose it by changing the locomotive at Crewe. It seems to be back to the bad old days.

  Mr Harley: It is extremely frustrating. At the moment, the locomotive change that happens on some services, where the diesel motor is taken off and an electric one put on—Virgin say they can speed that up because they have special couplings on their diesel locomotives. I would look a little more to the future and just bring in a proposal that First Great Western are looking into at the moment, which is a high-speed train replacement, HST2, or HS2 as it is now called. They have been talking to Siemens in Germany, and the design they have in mind at the moment is a dual energy train, one that has a diesel engine each end, like the current HST, but it also has a pantograph so it can run off the overhead electric wires. I am certain this is going to come in, because something has to eventually replace the HSTs which run between Swansea and London. They are great trains, but they are getting extremely tired. When the HST2 comes in, I would like to see Virgin Trains buy a few of them, and then they can zoom up the West Coast to Crewe, under electric; drop the pantograph, start up the engines, and within a few minutes you are off up the coast again without any delay. In theory, in a few years down the line, these should be even better for passengers internally than the Pendolinos, because as time goes on they can make things more sophisticated. The Pendolinos have power points for people to operate laptop computers; and the talk now is of giving people wireless Internet access on the move, and perhaps the HST2 will have that feature. This definitely needs SRA involvement as well, and funding, to bring in this replacement. FGW cannot do it on their own. GNER are also very interested in it because they can run under the wires then to Edinburgh, and under diesel power on to Aberdeen. There is a quite substantial demand for this concept of train. FGW has done a lot of passenger research, very commendably, into what people want to see in these trains. At the moment there is nothing on the drawing board; it is just being talked about; but certainly the concept is feasible.

  Q503  Albert Owen: We have waited long enough for the Voyagers and Pendolinos without going into the 22nd century.

  Mr Harley: Indeed.

  Q504  Adam Price: I will take you now down to south Wales and the place near my heart. There has been some curtailment of the evening services from London, and the service to London as well from Swansea is not as good as it should be. What do you think of the possibilities of reinstating or enhancing the services by First Great Western to and from London?

  Mr Harley: Are you talking about the late evening services?

  Q505  Adam Price: Yes.

  Mr Harley: There is nothing to stop them. I would guess they would say it is not commercially viable to run them, but on the other hand my response to that would be: "If you did run them, then more people would use your trains during the day. People, for example, want to attend the theatre in London or just have a day, an afternoon and evening out in London." They would benefit from it enormously, and it would bring greater opportunities for travel. You would find that people would then travel to London outside the morning peak, which would benefit First Great Western in terms of additional revenue and patronage on their mid-morning trains, which can be quiet-ish at certain times, though not during school holidays for example. Then they ought to balance the extra income they get from those trains against the cost of the evening services you talk of. I would suggest, Mr Price, that it does not necessarily have to be a straight Paddington to Swansea service. At that time of the evening, nobody is in any real desperate rush to get home as quickly as possible if they have had a nice evening out, so there might not be any objection to running the train via Bristol Templemeads, and therefore bring additional patronage. If it is a case of making it commercially viable for the company, I think they should do far more in terms of investigating what options there are available to them, in terms of ensuring that as many people as possible use this service. The last train, from my recollection, is 22.10 from Paddington, and that is far too early. There are other places throughout the UK, for example Birmingham, which is slightly nearer to London than Cardiff, but they have trains right up to midnight and beyond. Brighton has trains right through the night. My colleague, Andrew, has mentioned that we are very concerned about Sunday services and the fact that there are very few on a Sunday morning. Passengers are concerned that they are constrained to a certain degree by the fact that the late-night services do not run.

  Q506  Adam Price: They have agreed to look again at this issue, and they would be grateful for any submissions you could give them. Mr Carroll from First Great Western told us that back in 2001 infrastructure on the South Wales Main Line was below average compared with others in Gt Britain. Would the committee share that view? If you do share that assessment, what action would you propose?

  Mr Harley: I would go beyond that and say that the whole of the Great Western Main Line from Paddington to Swansea is in need of renewal. It is very tired. It is one of the reasons why Great Western perform so poorly. We have seen figures they have produced. On the south Wales route performance is far worse than on any of their other routes, for example the Bristol route or West of England route. It is simply because the infrastructure is so bad. There are delays at Slough, a delay perhaps at Didcot, and they build up, so that people regularly turn up in Swansea thirty or more minutes late. As regards south Wales, Andrew has mentioned that there needs to be an intermediate signal in the Severn Tunnel to increase capacity. There also needs to be in our opinion a thorough plan which looks into using, to the fullest extent, the four tracks between the Severn Tunnel and Cardiff. Two of those are predominantly used by freight services at the moment, and we feel that with enhanced services to London, plus all the services to Portsmouth Harbour, up to Birmingham and so forth, the strain is beginning to show. If the freight lines were increased to a similar speed as the main lines, it would allow the main lines to be taken out of service, say on a Saturday or Sunday, and you would still have trains running at normal speed on the freight line, and losing no time on their schedules. There needs to be additional investment there, in my opinion. There is also constraint of course between Cardiff and Swansea. It is basically a twin-track railway. There is the diversionary route via the Vale of Glamorgan, but that adds additional time. You are absolutely right that that is also tired and well used by freight. That, obviously, takes a toll on the infrastructure.

  Mr Williams: It is fair to say that there has been major investment on the East Coast Main Line. We now currently have major investment on the West Coast Main Line, and many people would argue that it is now time for investment in the Great Western Main Line. We made a detailed submission to John Prescott when he was Secretary of State for Transport in February 1999, about the need for a Great Western Main Line upgrade, and we can provide that to you, Chairman, if you would like it. People find it hard to understand that a journey from Swansea to London, Paddington, of 200 miles takes three hours, when from Cardiff to Paddington you can travel 160 miles in two hours. It is a 40-mile journey taking 50-60 minutes, and that is a disincentive for people to follow government advocacy of persuading them to travel by rail rather than by car on the very congested M4 network. We do need investment on the Great Western Main Line, and it is long overdue.

  Mr Goodwin: In the English section as well, I understand that there are numerous problems on a daily basis between Paddington and Reading. Basically, if a train is late arriving at Reading from Paddington, you can forget any chance of it being on time at Cardiff or Swansea. The chances are it will just get later and later. A holistic approach is needed, and it is long overdue for significant upgrade.

  Q507  Adam Price: You mentioned the Severn Tunnel as one of the problem areas, and a short-term solution to the signalling. You have also got some long-term suggestions; can you elaborate on those?

  Mr Harley: That was a bit of "blue sky" thinking by me really. I am always envious of the fact that there is this nice new second Severn crossing going across the estuary, which is road only; so I wondered if any engineers had ever looked at the possibility of putting up a rail track along the bridge in place of one of the roadways. It is about three carriageways wide plus the hard shoulder, so there is a possibility there perhaps if in future years global warming meant that road traffic had to be controlled in some way. The alternative would be to put a railway track across there. Looking further ahead—and this is very much "if" it happens rather than "when"—if there is a Severn barrage—which is perfectly feasible given that we need to generate more power from renewable sources—that would be absolutely ideal as an alternate rail route across the Severn estuary. It would open up new journey opportunity because it would hit the West Country at a different point from the existing Severn Tunnel. More importantly, any alternative routes such as the two I have just described would avoid a long diversion via Gloucester, which is currently the only alternative when the tunnel is either scheduled for engineering or closed due to some mishap. There has been at least one occasion within the last year or 18 months when the tunnel had to be closed on a day when there was a big event at the Millennium Stadium. I can well remember the fall-out and the adverse publicity the railways had as a result of that. If you had two routes open, that would ease things and allow Network Rail to do proper maintenance within the tunnel.

  Mr Williams: If it would help the Committee, I did consult Owen Williams, our former deputy chairman, who was a civil engineer, thinking this question might come up this afternoon. This morning he has agreed that if it would help you we can provide another memorandum within a week's time.

  Q508  Adam Price: To some extent you have anticipated my next question, which was about the fiasco surrounding the sporting events at the Millennium Stadium earlier in the year. What lessons have been learned from what happened?

  Mr Harley: Are you talking about the fiasco or where the train operators decided not to run any services because of late kick-offs?

  Chairman: As many fiascos as you would like.

  Q509  Adam Price: Take them in order.

  Mr Harley: We certainly did sympathise with the rail industry and expressed our feelings at the time. It is unfortunate that WRU could not talk with the railway industry and agree a kick-off time that was appropriate to get everyone back home. We recognise that had people tried to get back to London on the train, they would have ended up in Paddington after the last Underground service had run; so there was little point in running the trains. Also, we recognised as well that in running all these very late-night services, you would end up with the trains in the wrong part of the country for the next day's service. You have a lot of trains down in London, whereas you need them in Swansea to run the morning services. So we also had to think of the ordinary day-to-day passengers and the effect it would have on them. As regards a solution, Andrew has already highlighted that there are service trains at the moment on various MOD storage sites, out of use but still serviceable, along with locomotives. We feel that more use could be made of these, provided the public train crew are available. If it was all brought together properly, I think the railways could shift quite well the volume of people who attend the Millennium Stadium, which is about 70,000. The station handles those numbers fairly well. It is unfortunate that sometimes people have to queue, and queue in the rain, but that is the way it is. As regards the fiascos that have gone on, it is a question of people talking to each other and agreeing to compromise as well. It was not just the WRU—they are tied into television contracts—

  Q510  Albert Owen: I thought you were going to say it was Murdoch's fault.

  Mr Harley: Perhaps I had better not totally agree with you. If it was that television station, then you could blame it on him.

  Q511  Adam Price: You have mentioned the Heart of Wales line and I know you have some ideas there in terms of improving commuter access to Swansea and the position at Llanelli. What proposals are there?

  Mr Harley: There are two steps to this. First, we want to see the Heart of Wales line operated from the centre. It would be nice if the units could park at Llandovery or Llandrindod Wells overnight, because at the moment they have to start off at Carmarthen and Crewe, and we think it should be worked from the centre outwards, so that you get a commuter service into Shrewsbury in the morning and one into Swansea. The current service, the first down service of the day, arrives in Swansea too late for most commuters, I suggest. The suggestion you referred to, which we have put in our list of aspirations, is to reinstate the curve that once ran and headed towards what used to be Swansea-Victoria, from my recollection, but it would swing round and re-join the West Wales Main Line, missing out Llanelli station. It would reduce journey opportunities to and from Llanelli, but we feel that particularly with proposals from Swansea City Council and SWITCH to put in park-and-ride facilities at some of the Heart of Wales line stations, that it would be a viable project. It requires new lines. If they are going to be costed at £16 million a mile for a new line, then it does call into question the viability of this; but nobody has really looked at it. The route, thankfully, seems to be protected and is available; it just needs somebody to look into the cost benefits of it and put it into the transport plan for that area.

  Q512  Chairman: Does Arriva have a proposal for north-south links, for a Holyhead to Cardiff service? Can you outline those proposals? Do you know what they are and, if so, do you think they are achievable?

  Mr Goodwin: Chairman, we do not have the details. We have heard of the possibility of operating a Holyhead-Cardiff service every two hours. Obviously, we would welcome an improvement in the links between north and south Wales. As a committee we will want to know greater detail about this as soon as possible. We have to make sure we do not solve one problem by creating another one. A lot will depend on the routing of these services, and whilst we are very anxious to see more trains serving Wrexham, we have to also ensure that the north Wales service to Birmingham, via Crewe and Stafford, is not completely lost, because the journey time between Wrexham and Shrewsbury is quite a bit longer. It is a balance. We want to see an enhanced direct service from north to south Wales and back, but we do not want to lose the services to Crewe. It has got to be "both and" not "either or". I think that we welcome it in a sense, but we do need more information. There needs to be a lot more discussion, both with Arriva and with the SRA, because the SRA will be stating the terms of whatever service is to run.

  Q513  Mr Caton: Moving on to your relationship as a committee with the train operators and indeed with the Strategic Rail Authority, First Great Western tell us that they have regular dialogue with stakeholders. What meetings do you have with First Great Western and indeed Wales and Borders trains? What is the format of those meetings and what do they achieve?

  Mr Harley: The format is informal mainly because apart from the stakeholders to which you refer, they are principally between the RPC and First Great Western. I am involved, for example, with a GW200 Group, which is looking at a new high-speed line from London to Bristol, and beyond into Wales. This is the one that the SRA pooh-poohed about nine months ago because they felt it was not viable, but First Great Western think it is worthy of investigation, so we are involved with that. The Stakeholder Forum is a very positive thing. They feel that First Great Western certainly listen to what people say. It is not just ourselves that go to its rail user groups but cycling organisations, local authorities—the managing director attends. It is a very worthwhile forum. All train operating companies come to our public meetings, which are held around Wales. There is one coming up at Cardiff coming up in January, which will be publicised fairly soon. We anticipate that most of the train operators will attend. On the whole, our relationships with the TOCs is very good. We feel they are willing to listen. They may not be able to deliver everything we want. They will often say, "we will have to go away and think about that". Sometimes, they come back with a positive response; and sometimes they say, "sorry, it is not possible" for whatever reason. On the whole, it is a good relationship. They do listen to our representations when we take up passenger complaints. Very often, we can bring a satisfactory resolution for the individuals involved.

  Q514  Albert Owen: Mr Goodwin, you mentioned earlier that your relationship with Network Rail was not so good, particularly recently. Do you think that is down to Railtrack becoming a new company and the restructuring that is causing that, or do you think it is an attitude?

  Mr Goodwin: I think there is an attitude element in it. I hasten to say that I think there are some very good people in Network Rail, who are struggling, probably through no fault of their own. The whole problem is the history of Railtrack, and the very turbulent history, which has been inherited. They are finding it very, very difficult to be strategic. Therefore, they are tending to be very defensive. On the one hand, they are essential for the whole network, are they not? Without the infrastructure in all its forms, everything is lost; yet they are not really able to take a strategic view. I think there are real problems there. There are real identity problems. As I mentioned specifically in relation to the Bangor and Holyhead, there are development schemes—and there are other schemes in Wales where this would be equally applicable, but it is just that I am directly involved very much in those. We need Network Rail to give us the say-so and information and to help us make certain decisions, and yet they say they are not allowed to be involved until matters have moved further. Their role and their position needs a degree of definition and a degree of clarity. There are attitude problems there, but I think they are struggling a little bit.

  Q515  Mr Caton: What you are saying about the partnership approach is quite helpful. Can I press you a little further on specific projects. We have mentioned Cardiff station already, and you quite rightly point out you do need a partnership involving the local authority as well as the railway players. At the moment we are seeing some work done at Swansea station, and it is very welcome—certainly the improvement in the toilets, which is well overdue. Hopefully, the layout changes and other enhancements outside will be a big improvement. It was not that long ago they changed things round before. Are you the voice of the passengers involved in those sort of projects?

  Mr Williams: Absolutely. As a committee, we have been very proactive within the RPC network nationally in terms of engagement with the local authorities in Wales, certainly since local government reorganisation and the creation of the 22 unitary authorities. Even with our limited manpower resources, within the secretariat based in Cardiff and our members based throughout all parts of Wales, we have tried to get amongst the local authorities and our approach has been to get them organised on a consortium basis, where there has been real success. From a time management point of view, it is much more cohesive and more co-ordinated to get local authorities thinking on a strategic basis. I serve on the South-East Wales Transport Board, which represents ten authorities, representing over 50% of the population of Wales. I have involvement with SWITCH in south-west Wales, and TAITH in North Wales. We want more involvement there. We think there is a real need for catching up with what was achieved in south and mid Wales in association with Welsh Assembly Government, particularly through the provision of transport grant funding, particularly on station enhancement developments. Swansea is my home station, and we have been very pleased indeed at the proactive stance that that local authority has adopted, very much through our membership of the South-Wales Rail Forum, which involves all the local authorities in south Wales. We have had very good dialogue with Swansea, and we want to extend that concept to other local authorities in Wales.

  Mr Goodwin: On the Swansea issue, it will be two years last May at a statutory meeting we held in Wrexham that we made Swansea station a major issue. We found that the SRA were not as helpful as they might have been. Their representatives did not even appear to know what level of facilities were required at a station of that size. They were not able to tell us whether there should be toilets or not, et cetera. That is where we set things moving on Swansea. I am sorry to keep mentioning Bangor and Holyhead, but in each case we called all the parties together and set the whole thing going. We called the various rail industry players, the WDA, local authorities and so forth. We do play a major role. We actually chair the Holyhead Transport Interchange, even though it is the local authority that has to lead on managing the project. We do try to be very proactive. Going back to a point I made earlier, we feel there should be a strategy for each station. We obviously cannot do them all at once, but where we see a need or are made aware of a need, we will do whatever we can. In north Wales, our next target station is Llandudno, to try to lift that up. If you have been there recently, that is terrible. Some time next year, sooner rather than later if possible, we shall be trying to get a partnership together to get something moving there.

  Q516  Mr Caton: Perhaps naively, some of us thought until fairly recently that a passenger service requirement was there to ensure services are not removed. I understand that your committee considered legal action to enforce the passenger service requirement in respect of the Swansea/north-east England service. Can you tell us more about that, and if you did not proceed with legal action what that says about the passenger service requirements?

  Mr Harley: That was at the time when there was one through service a day, run by Virgin Trains, from Swansea to Newcastle, at least north-east somewhere, which terminated at York. The SRA decided to instruct Virgin to withdraw that at very short notice. It did not consult the rail passengers and did not consult local authorities. It was not just our organisation that was upset about it; people all over the country were upset at the fact that services that they had seen running for years were suddenly being withdrawn. For example, there are no Virgin services at Blackpool, whereas there have been since time immemorial, at least since Virgin came into existence. We considered a judicial review of the SRA's decision because we believe they should have consulted; it was a requirement that they should consult. We wrote to the Rail Regulator because we thought they were in breach of the Transport Act, and the advice we had back from various quarters was that in an emergency or in exceptional circumstances, the authority is allowed to make variances to what you quite rightly describe as a passenger service requirement, PSR. They can only do it for a limited time before which they then have to consult with all the interested parties. That is why we did not progress it any further. We were acting on behalf of passengers, many of whom were extremely irate that it was being withdrawn. Not only that, there was a principle here: people were not being consulted. Also, it might set a precedent as well. If that service could go at the drop of a hat, what else might have disappeared from the railway network? We understood that PSRs were there to protect what existed under British Rail. We think they are an essential part of the railway system. They might need changing here and there to take account of different travelling patterns and habits compared to, say, ten years ago; but there must be some mandatory minimum service level set down for all train operators. We are very diligent in protecting, where we can, PSR and similar facilities such as station services and also through ticketing, for example.

  Q517  Mr Caton: It seems almost surreal that the body that finances a committee to provide it with the voice of passengers, then chooses on a major decision not to consult that body.

  Mr Goodwin: We have been very surprised as well. Our robust stance, following the specific instance you mentioned, has not made us friends in certain quarters. We feel very strongly that the PSR, or something like it, needs to be in place to protect services on all routes to a certain minimum level. As my colleague Paul said, sometimes social needs and changes in circumstances means there has to be some fine-tuning. We have co-operated with the SRA and its predecessor organisation and with train operating companies in facilitating certain changes where we believe it would be of overall benefit to passengers. We do feel that it is terribly important, and the whole RPC network thinks it is very, very important that there needs to be the PSR or something like it. It cannot just be meddled with at whim, or certainly not just thrown on one side for an indefinite period of time.

  Mr Harley: Our actions were successful in so far as more recently the SRA has consulted with us at an appropriate time. I think it has acted as a warning shot across their bows, and they now realise that they need to consult. They just gave the reason that at the time they had to act very, very quickly to sort out the Virgin cross-country network. There were just too many trains introduced on the network in what Virgin called Operation Princess. It needed expedient action and there was not time to consult. Now, they have changed quite a lot and do talk to us in advance. We input passengers' views on their proposals and hope that they will take them into account.

  Q518  Mr Caton: The rules have not changed, so if there were similar crises, there is nothing to stop them.

  Mr Harley: Clearly, no.

  Q519  Mr Caton: Do you think there should be a strengthening of rules to make sure at least consultation happens except in very exceptional circumstances?

  Mr Williams: This is very much a case for ministers in the directions and guidance they give to the Strategic Rail Authority. Our committee made the stance that it did, and there were pressures from passengers. Rightly or wrongly, we proceeded on that basis, and it has had an impact in terms of relationships with the SRA, and indeed in reference to what the Chairman said about better consultation arrangements for other changes to the timetable.

  Mr Harley: Most successful businesses should be customer-led and I think railways should be no exception. The passenger should take the lead and say what they want from the railways, and then it is up to the operators to discuss with the SRA as to how much of that they can provide.