Troubled Northern Rail is to be nationalised
The Government has announced that train operator Northern is to lose its rail franchise and will be nationalised from 1 March.
Operator Arriva Rail North has been under fire for months for unacceptable delays, as well as the poor standard of its rolling stock.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the public had “lost trust in the north’s rail network”.
And he added: “People across the north deserve better, their communities deserve better and I am determined to achieve that.”
The decision to nationalise comes after a series of failures by Northern Rail, which won the contract in 2016.
Most notable were serious reliability problems in the wake of the May 2018 timetable introduction. Since then the company has failed to fully recover despite bringing in new trains onto a number of its lines.
Reacting to the news Henri Murison, Northern Powerhouse partnership director, said: “In stripping Northern of their franchise in favour of a return to public ownership under the Department for Transport’s Operator of Last Resort, the Transport Secretary is dealing with the symptoms, but not necessarily the root causes of the problems, which relate to infrastructure.
“And his absence from the House of Commons to make a statement in person and answer questions today is frankly unacceptable and will not have gone unnoticed amongst many Northern business and civic leaders.
“We are still waiting for Platform Zero at Leeds station – two years late and a building site – with other delayed work meaning longer trains and more frequent services cannot be delivered to Harrogate, Skipton and Bradford for instance.
“There are issues getting trains through the Castlefield Corridor. Payments made by Northern for poor performance ring-fenced for improvement projects that have been held up in Whitehall.
“The problems, performance-wise and financially since the May timetable debacle, all the result of promises made to build infrastructure made by the Department of Transport during the bidding process, but never actually delivered on.
“Other train operators such as Trans Pennine Express should now consider themselves ‘on notice’ for their unacceptable performance levels last month, with their issues more clearly a result of their own mismanagement.
“While the forthcoming Williams review will rightly address issues with the franchising process in the North, government should urgently act to undertake the engineering works needed to allow operators to run services more effectively, as well as get started with the £3 billion long-awaited Trans Pennine Route Upgrade.
“Otherwise we risk a situation where the North faces years more misery on its rail network – regardless of who runs the trains.
“The only permanent solution is to give the oversight of both upgrade schemes and services to the North for our leaders here to take responsibility for them.”
This is the second time in two years that the Government has had to intervene to fix a failed franchise. It follows the state run operator taking over control of LNER in June 2018.
