TransPennine Express bosses have been warned to sort out “unacceptable” rail services, ministers said, as northern mayors demanded that the government “get a grip” on the operator which is on track to cancel more than 20,000 trains this year.
TPE has already cancelled about a quarter of services in 2023, with 40% scrapped in one week in January because of a lack of staff.
Commuters are also facing higher costs after rail fares in England and Wales increased by an average of 5.9% on Sunday.
Tracy Brabin, the Labour mayor of West Yorkshire, said it “cannot be right” that the First Group-owned operator should be allowed to continue running the TransPennine service, with its contract potentially being extended for another eight years in May.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said the company should be axed and the service needed “a fresh start”.
Brabin, who was meeting mayoral counterparts in Newcastle on Monday, said the northern economy was being “battered” by poor rail services, with TPE alone projected to cancel 23,000 services in 2023 at the current rate.
She added: “Today [ticket] prices have gone up – and they’ve doubled the charge on a penalty ticket for people who’ve got on the wrong train. The narrative is so shocking.”
She said: “It’s affecting our West Yorkshire economy to the tune of £2m a week, and across the north £8m a week – our economy is being battered by this company that’s holding us back. Government must get a grip, step in and end this crisis.”
Brabin said her planned train to the Transport for the North conference in Newcastle had been cancelled on Sunday night, reinstated, and eventually ran 45 minutes late. “It causes complete confusion and chaos. Even on the train today, people were telling me their stories of having to move jobs, having stress levels really high because of transport, choosing to work from home,” she said.
Asked if First Group and TPE should retain the contract, Brabin said: “It can’t be right that a company provides a really poor service and carries on.”
Burnham said TPE managers had “sadly run things into the ground”, adding: “I’m sure passengers would want a fix more than anything, but I don’t think that’s possible without a fresh start.”
TPE’s sister company Avanti West Coast, run by First with Trenitalia, was given a short six-month extension and warned to improve or lose the contract after similar performance problems last year. A third struggling rail company, Northern, is already run by the state-owned operator of last resort.
The transport secretary, Mark Harper, told the TfN conference that he could not pre-empt a “properly made and legally defensible” decision on TPE’s contract. However, he added: “The services that customers have had to put up with are not acceptable – and I met the managing director of that company recently with the rail minister and we made that very clear.”
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He said in making a decision over a new contract, “we will be looking very carefully at their performance and their plan – and whether that plan is credible”.
He said that the 23,000 cancellations figure was “slightly made up” but added: “I listen very carefully to what people are telling me and clearly the services are not yet where they need to be.”
Labour said it would strip TPE of the contract. Louise Haigh, the shadow transport secretary, said: “We’re clear that things wouldn’t change overnight just by bringing operators under public control. But it is clear that TPE has been a poorly managed service for a long time, and there is a very damaging relationship between the workforce and the management. We don’t think we should continue to reward them for failure.
“The operator of last resort has capacity to take over – and at the very least it would help improve the culture and resolve some of these industrial issues.”
TPE said it was working with the Department for Transport to improve overtime rates for drivers to almost £500 a shift. It added: “We know the service levels over the past year have not been good enough and we are pulling out all the stops to make things better.”
In more positive news for passengers in the north, the DfT announced that the Northumberland line between Newcastle and Ashington would reopen for passengers in summer 2024.
