Meeting of the Parliament 14 November 2018
Today, Parliament has a chance to put Scotland’s rail passengers before the profits of our privatised rail firms and to say to commuters that we are listening. We will not sit idly by in the sidings while passengers suffer from a railway system where fares rise more quickly than wages, new trains run late before they have even been built and passengers wait on platforms wondering whether their train will even stop—and, if it does, whether it will be late or overcrowded.
Labour’s starting point in this debate is to be clear about what our railways are for: they exist to connect people and goods and to support a vibrant economy and a thriving society. That might seem obvious, but the reality is that, under the fragmented privatised rail system that we have today, public transport has become detached from public service. Our trains should be essential services, but instead they are being used by private companies simply as an opportunity to make profits—that is, until the private firm fails and the Government has to step in, and stepping in to end Abellio’s mismanagement of the current ScotRail franchise is exactly what this Scottish National Party Government needs to do.
On every measure of performance in the franchise—punctuality, cancellations and capacity—it is a case of fail, fail, fail. We have the worst performance since the franchise began. On punctuality, ScotRail has not met its target since 2015. Performance is now so bad that it has hit breach level—or rather, it would have been in breach of the franchise had the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity not struck a backroom deal in December to give ScotRail a licence to fail until June next year.