Meeting of the Parliament 14 November 2018
ScotRail has recruited more front-line staff to deliver those enhancements; there are 126 more posts now than there were at the start of the franchise and a further 140 are being recruited. Indeed, ScotRail now provides a total of more than 5,000 jobs. The rolling stock that is needed will be freed up by the class 385s and refurbished high-speed trains entering service in the coming months.
Not only will the cascade support new services; it will enable more trains in Fife, the Borders, Inverclyde and Glasgow to run with more carriages, boosting the total number of carriages in the ScotRail fleet to more than 1,000. That is an increase of more than 50 per cent since 2007.
Although Colin Smyth and his colleagues might not recognise this, ScotRail is delivering its revolution in rail for passengers across the entire Scottish rail network. [Interruption.] If Labour members do not mind, I will continue. Growing numbers of passengers use the ScotRail franchise, continuing the constant growth in patronage throughout the life of this Government.
We have consistently stated in the chamber that performance is not where it should be, and we have reiterated to ScotRail and Network Rail the need for a robust and resilient plan to deliver improvements across the network and provide customers with a more reliable railway. Although ScotRail remains one of the best-performing large train operators in Great Britain—the moving annual average of its public performance measure is 1.9 percentage points better than the GB average—clearly the deterioration in performance needs to stop in order to return reliability and punctuality to our challenging but achievable targets.
The recommendations in the Donovan review that aim to support performance improvement and deliver a resilient railway are welcome, but we are yet to see those improvements take effect. However, we recognise that the suspension of skip-stopping services at stations to recover operations has been welcomed by passengers, with skip-stopping now at the lowest level on record.