Avanti West Coast

Question

15:00:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review the service provided by Avanti West Coast between Manchester and London.

My department is clear that the performance of Avanti West Coast has not been good enough. Officials routinely meet Avanti and Network Rail as part of a relentless focus on improving railway performance, bringing together track and train far more than previously and holding both sides accountable. The Secretary of State met the managing director in January to understand Avanti’s plans to address industrial action. I will meet him, together with the Network Rail route director, on Friday, to further discuss performance.

I thank my noble friend the Minister for that reply and note my interest as a weekly user of Avanti trains and praise the many excellent staff on these trains and the brilliant services provided by Stockport booking office. However, the performance during November and December 2024, as the Minister has mentioned, was utterly woeful and frustrating. Journey after journey was subject to huge delays, with numerous cancellations and subsequent declassification throughout the trains, standing room only or people sitting on the floor of the carriages, and no refreshments, not even the smallest bottle of water, throughout the train. On behalf of Avanti’s long-suffering passengers, will the Minister carefully study again the contract at his meeting with management later in the week, to end this misery and ensure that customers and taxpayers get the value for money that they so deserve?

I strongly sympathise with my noble friend on his experiences in his weekly travelling. My postbag, email and every other means of communication is full of criticism of Avanti West Coast. It was given a contract for three years in October 2023. I assure noble Lords that as hard as we look at the contract, the company has not yet failed to meet the performance target standards that the previous Government set it.

My Lords, I pay tribute to Macclesfield station staff for their excellent work. I have an idea for how we can monitor the number of delays. There is something called Delay Repay. Does the Minister know much how is paid out by Avanti to passengers? If not, perhaps he could let us know. It may be a good thing for him to keep his eye on, for key performance indicators in terms of staffing and getting staff to work—particularly at weekends.

I will have to write to the noble Lord about the amount of Delay Repay. I have statistics here about the number of trains on time and the number of trains cancelled. Although the number of trains being cancelled has been reducing, it is still far too high. Passengers dislike cancelled trains even more than they dislike them being later than in the timetable. I will write to him and put a copy of that letter in the Library. However, I think that the evidence of Delay Repay is the same as the evidence of the performance statistics—that the performance is just not good enough.

My Lords, Avanti has a simple objective in life: to supply three hours of train from Manchester to London. It is not complicated. It is a straight line. I will give a snapshot of this weekend. On Friday morning, the 8.43, a peak-time train, was cancelled with 20 minutes’ notice. On Saturday, five trains were cancelled due to a lack of staff or extra maintenance being required on trains. This morning, the 8.43, a peak-time train, was again cancelled. Five more trains back to Manchester were cancelled this afternoon. It is utterly unacceptable. I feel for the staff, who try to give us a good service every day on the up and down journey, but the management is lamentable. If you gave Avanti a local pub in London with a 24-hour licence, free beer and free food, it would still not make a profit. It is astonishing. I am lost for words.

Oh!

He is not.

I am rarely lost for words. Seriously, the customers are at the heart of this, day in, day out, with children, having the service that the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, has described. It is unacceptable. I hope that the Minister will take cognisance of what is going on. This is nothing to do with the weather, strikes or lines. This is incompetent management.

The noble Lord is clearly not lost for words. However, it is not within my gift to award free tenancies of public houses in London—probably wisely. A lot of what he says is right, and I will reflect on that with the Avanti management on Friday. My only cautionary note is that the effect of the storms on Friday and Saturday has led to significant disruption to most of the railway in northern England and certainly in Scotland. I have some sympathy with train operators in those circumstances, because there are occasions on which their staff cannot get to work simply because of the effects of the wind and associated damage. One should therefore be a bit careful. As a former operator of public transport, I know that it is sometimes difficult to get the right staff in the right place at the right time, when those circumstances happen. When they do not happen, however, you would expect train operators such as Avanti to have sufficient staff to be able to resource the service and have some reserve of resilience to keep it going in difficult circumstances. I sympathise entirely with what the noble Lord says.

My Lords, I speak as another regular Avanti user. Has my noble friend noticed that, increasingly, the company seems to regard the northern point of its franchise as Preston, without running trains on to Carlisle and Glasgow, which has very damaging effects for tourism in the Lake District and the Borders? Is this not a breach of its franchise obligations? I notice that Avanti is now telling us that, because of Network Rail improvements, the railway will be closed at certain points in the next two or three years. Is it not the case that it must be deprived of its franchise? It is just not doing its job.

I thank my noble friend for that question. Indeed, I have discussed with him and others the rather too frequent regularity of cancellations north of Preston. I will not reiterate what I have just said about the effects of the storms last week. There have been other occasions when the railway infrastructure has not been up to withstanding the weather and storms. However, I agree with my noble friend, as I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, that one expectation of those who run railway services for the department is that there should be sufficient resilience in what they do to cater for the exigencies of normal operation. It is this that I will be discussing in some detail with Avanti and Network Rail on Friday. In respect of the future renewal and upgrade of the west coat main line north of Preston, the news that was in the papers in the past few days is premature because it was Network Rail’s proposition to renew the overhead wires between Preston and the Scottish border. The arrangements are not yet agreed, and the release of that information to the public—I think by one of the train operators—was premature. That was industry’s consultation, and there will be more to be said about it at a future date.

My Lords, I would simply like to ask the Minister exactly the same question that many of his own noble friends felt it was fair and reasonable to ask us when we were working hard to solve the Avanti issue. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, asked: “What will it take for the Government to do their job and relieve Avanti of any responsibility for being involved in our railway system?”.—[Official Report, 26/10/22; col. 1527.] The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked: “Why have the Government not acted, as a decisive Government would, and withdrawn the franchise from these disastrous operators?”.—[Official Report, 1/12/22; col. 1947.] Finally, the Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, asked “why the Government are not doing something immediately to end this shambles and outrage on one of our country’s major lines?”.—[Official Report, 7/9/22; col. 261.]

The answer to those questions is that the contract that these people have been given does not allow the withdrawal of the franchise for performance that many people in this House think is lamentable. Of course, the other action that the previous Government took was to allow Avanti to offer an extraordinary amount of money—£600 to drivers working rest days—which has been the subject of much criticism ever since, particularly recently, but is rarely attributed to the previous Government’s action in allowing Avanti to pay it.