The government has announced TPE’s contract will not be renewed and the company’s operations will be taken over by the DFT’s OLR Holdings Ltd (DOHL) from 28th May. There can be no doubt the level of cancellations on TPE had been appallingly and unacceptably high. They had turned the corner, and were getting better, though their recovery efforts were hampered by ongoing industrial action.
It is important to note this is not a mid-contract termination, as has happened with other operators, and as some sections of the press are incorrectly portraying. So it is not a “penalty” type contract termination. Franchising, as far as we can tell, is out of the window under the new Williams-Shapps GBR regime, so in the interim, government had to decide whether to award a new contract non-competitively to a company with a poor performance history.
Personally I’ll be sad to see TPE go. I can’t justify their performance figures, but what I will say about them, their parent company First Group, and the other First Group subsidiaries, is that they were good at listening. We made our case for Morpeth, and it is no coincidence that all the First operating companies were happy to stop their trains here, fully understanding the commercial arguments SENRUG was making about the Morpeth – Edinburgh market, and other aspects of their routes.
Taking a company into DfT ownership does not immediately solve the problems. Northern are already DfT owned, but we have seen some poor performance instances on individual routes, and astonishingly a complete failure of senior management to engage with us on that, which we therefore had to refer to the Secretary of State. See here. That should never have been necessary with a government owned company, but it was. My own opinion is that TPE’s business model of relying heavily on rest day working is flawed. The company should resource up and employ enough drivers to run a full service without ongoing recourse to rest day working. I’m old enough to remember the Clapham Rail Disaster (caused by a signalling engineer working his rest days and not having a day off for 2 weeks), and 1 for one would like to think the driver of my train has a reasonable work / life balance and is not working his rest days.
So let’s see if the new DOHL company can do better. It will be called “TransPennine Trains Ltd”, the word “Express” is dropped from the title. Let’s hope that really is a coincidence.
