Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has written to the transport secretary urging her to require Avanti to increase services between Manchester and London by the end of the month – or remove its contract.
But one rail expert warned that stripping Avanti of the franchise would not necessarily lead to an improvement in services, as it would not solve the shortage of drivers.
In a letter to Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Burnham said the company’s plans to wait until 11 December before returning to an increased timetable would cause too much disruption to passengers and damage to the Greater Manchester economy.
He called for a consistent service of at least two trains per hour between Manchester and London by the end of October as a staging post to a return of three trains by December.
If the company were unable to make this commitment, Burnham argued, the company’s contract should be terminated when it is considered for renewal next week.
It is now more than six weeks since Avanti West Coast reduced services between London and Manchester to just one per hour.
The company promised the move would bring “stability and certainty” for passengers – but an average of 10% of Avanti West Coast services between Manchester and London over the last three weeks were either cancelled or significantly late. Over the same three-week period, 27% of services failed to arrive on time.
The problems are not limited to passengers going from Manchester to London. As a result of the cuts, there is now just one direct train each day from London to Holyhead, the Anglesey gateway for ferry services to Ireland.
Earlier this week five Conservative MPs from Welsh constituencies wrote to the rail minister, Kevin Foster, to call on the government not to renew Avanti’s franchise. The service has become “deplorable”, the MPs said.
But one expert warned that stripping Avanti of the franchise would not necessarily lead to an improvement in the service.
Dr Tom Haines-Doran, the author of Derailed: How to Fix Britain’s Broken Railways, said: “The problem is a lack of drivers. Avanti chose to reduce their spending on drivers, leaving the service even more reliant on overtime working. When waves of Covid cases are thrown into the mix, the result is an unreliable service. The problem is that, while it is easy to quickly cut staffing to save money, it takes a very long time to build it up again.
“Training drivers takes a long time. Even recruiting drivers from other companies is no quick fix, as it takes months to accumulate ‘route knowledge’, which is vital for safe operation. Whether it’s the government or Avanti running the franchise, it’s going to be months before services are back to anything like the three trains an hour which passengers were used to.”
The Department for Transport said: “The government will consider all options when Avanti West Coast’s contract expires on 16 October.”
It added: “The problems facing Avanti are a prime example of why we need to modernise our railways, so passengers benefit from reliable timetables that don’t rely on the goodwill of drivers volunteering to work overtime in the first place.”
