Meeting of the Parliament 02 October 2019
It is decision time for the Scottish Government. It is time for the Government to decide whether to reward failure by extending the current Abellio ScotRail franchise until 2025, or whether to put passengers and rail workers first for once by serving notice that it will end the failing franchise at the first expiry date, in March 2022.
Parliament previously discussed the ScotRail franchise in a Scottish Labour debate, because the Scottish National Party does not have the guts to hold a debate in Government time to defend its record. In Labour’s debate, I highlighted the fact that, on every single measure of performance—including punctuality, the number of cancellations and capacity—it was a case of fail, fail, fail, despite the SNP Government having gone to every length to bail out Abellio through backroom deals to move targets and give Abellio a licence to fail.
Little did we know that that was just the start. Since that debate, the low performance record has been broken over and over again—so much so that Abellio has now breached the franchise not once, not twice but three times. The franchise has been breached on punctuality, on the number of cancellations and, unsurprisingly, on passenger satisfaction. Abellio does not even expect to hit the passenger satisfaction target for another two years, and it expects to do so then only because Transport Scotland has lowered the target. Missing the passenger satisfaction target once is a breach of the franchise. Missing it for two consecutive years is an event of default and is supposed to be ground for Abellio to be stripped of the franchise altogether. However, had Transport Scotland not lowered the target, ScotRail would be on track to miss its passenger satisfaction target a shocking five years in a row.
The record on punctuality is equally abysmal. Abellio has failed to hit its target since 2015. I give the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity this challenge: will he stand up and tell the chamber and—more important—Scotland’s hard-pressed rail passengers whether he believes that Abellio ScotRail will ever meet its punctuality target and, if so, when? I see that he is refusing to do so because, frankly, no one seriously believes that Abellio will hit the target in the lifetime of the franchise. What is the point of performance targets and a franchise agreement if the Government and the transport secretary are not prepared to enforce them?
The truth is that, despite two improvement plans and a remedial plan to improve punctuality, performance has got worse, not better, since the franchise began. Since the SNP handed Abellio the franchise in what it described as a “world-leading” deal, a shocking 75,000 trains have been cancelled—that is an average of 47 each and every day. In 2018-19, the number of cancellations increased by more than 60 per cent to an average of 74 a day.
Despite the arrival of the long-awaited new rolling stock, ScotRail’s performance under the service quality incentive regime is not much better. The scheme monitors the state of trains and stations across a range of measures including cleanliness, safety, accessibility and staffing. Abellio consistently misses two thirds of the targets that are set under SQUIRE, and it has not hit more than half since 2016, having racked up £13 million in fines.
To make matters worse, rail fares have rocketed under the Government. The price of season tickets has increased by an eye-watering 54 per cent since the SNP came to power, with the Government set to impose another rail fare hike in January. No wonder rail passenger figures failed to increase last year for the first time in decades.
The Parliament has the opportunity to deliver change. Agreement to Labour’s motion would mean that the Government would need to serve notice on Abellio and bring the failing franchise to an end in 2022, instead of extending it to 2025. Extending the franchise would reward failure and send a signal to private rail operators that, no matter how poor their performance, they will never have to deliver on their franchise targets. Ending the franchise in 2022, however, would give the Government two years to put in place a public sector operator bid.
I hope that, in that time, we will see a change of United Kingdom Government. A Labour Government would end the wasteful and inefficient franchising system altogether, repealing the Tories’ Railways Act 1993 so that we can have proper public ownership of our railways. We should bring train and track together under a single publicly owned company, with all decisions on Scottish routes being made here in Scotland.