Posted 12th November 2009 | 2 Comments

London Midland on warning as Remedial Notice is issued

The troubled London Midland franchise has been issued with a formal Remedial Plan Notice by the Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis. The move is attributed to a particular day of disruption, but actually follows a long period of problems. Lord Adonis said: "The performance of London Midland on 6 September 2009 fell short of its customers’ expectations and was unacceptable to both passengers and Government."

LM services have been repeatedly affected by a dispute over Sunday working, and managing director Steve Banaghan was replaced by Mike Hodgson in July. But the problems continued to worsen, until on Sunday 6 September all LM services were cancelled for the day.

Transport Minister Chris Mole told the Commons that Lord Adonis had decided to require more investment from London Midland, which is owned by Govia.

Lord Adonis said: "First, I have issued London Midland with a Remedial Plan Notice for exceeding the Franchise Agreement threshold on cancellations. This requires London Midland to submit to me a Remedial Plan for addressing the level of cancellations.  Discussions are at an advanced stage on a range of measures to be implemented. The Remedial Plan will be contractualised as a Remedial Agreement. Second, a package of additional benefits for passengers has been agreed, including an additional obligation to invest in new, and additional, high-quality information equipment, spending no less than £4.4 million over the life of the franchise in addition to the investment that has already committed, and a promotion for 50,000 day rover tickets for travel over the Christmas period."
 
London Midland will also be required to offer an additional 400,000 Advance Purchase tickets over the next two years on some of its most popular routes.

Reader Comments:

Views expressed in submitted comments are that of the author, and not necessarily shared by Railnews.

  • G Steel, Northampton, United Kingdom

    Too little; too late. What with the debacle at NX and now the problems at LM and FCC how much more proof does the Government need to acknowledge that the whole franchising process is in tatters and should be scrapped. On top of this we have Virgin services protected from competition which is against the whole ethos of privatisation which was to bring competition to the railways and to reduce the burden on public spending.

    Privatisation has done neither of these things. All the DfT appears to be doing is subsidising the share holders of the TOCs whilst the promised premium payments are clearly not being delivered to the levels expected leaving the tax payer to pick up the tab. What a shambles.

    In my view, it is now the right time to start the process of bringing the whole lot back under one roof for operations and one for infrastructure. If it can work successfully in other parts of Europe such as in Spain under RENFE and ADIF (infrastructure) where they are benefitting from massive investment in rail then it could work here at and at a much reduced cost.

  • Tom Watson, Coventry, W Midlands

    Call me cynical but...

    - what's the point of "high-quality information equipment", if the dispute remains unresolved, other than it will tell us trains are cancelled?

    - what is the point of "a promotion for 50,000 day rover tickets for travel over the Christmas period" when on 2 days there are no trains and the rest of the time its a Saturday service or worse?

    - "London Midland will also be required to offer an additional 400,000 Advance Purchase tickets over the next two years on some of its most popular routes" - if my calcuations are correct, that equates to 547 apex tickets per day. Big flipping deal - some penalty ?

    What a shame the money cant be used to run faster services with shorter journey time.