First Great Western close to losing its franchise
Britain's least popular rail service, First Great Western, is close to being stripped of its franchise after it misled the public over service standards.
Transport secretary Ruth Kelly today ordered FGW to buy more carriages, increase passenger compensation payments and hire more staff or else the franchise will be terminated. The Department for Transport found that FGW, voted the worst service in Britain last month, misled passengers by under-reporting the number of service cancellations last year.
"First Great Western has breached its franchise agreement by exceeding the limits on cancellations, and also by misreporting those cancellations," she said.
FGW's reputation among passengers and ministers has reached a nadir after the company admitted that it had miscalculated the number of train cancellations between August and December last year. After blowing the whistle on the error, FGW subsequently accepted that it had breached the cancellation threshold in its contract.
Kelly effectively issued a yellow card to FGW, saying that failure to comply with a series of service changes worth £29m "could lead to the Government terminating First Great Western's franchise".
She added that instead of fining the franchise, which operates throughout the west country as well as the London-to-Cardiff route, she had imposed an improvements package including higher compensation for commuters affected by endemic punctuality problems.
"Any penalty would be paid to central Government. Having considered this carefully, and given that a penalty would not, itself, help passengers, I have opted instead for passengers to receive a better benefits package," she said.
FirstGroup, FGW's owner, declined to reveal how many "cancellations" had been misreported, but it is understood that FGW overshot the cancellation threshold in the run-up to Christmas when a shortage of drivers and crew forced it pull a slew of services. Sources close to the group said the miscalculation was "more cock-up than conspiracy" and FGW staff had not attempted to cover up cancellation levels in order to avoid a punishment notice.
Anthony Smith, chief executive of commuter watchdog Passenger Focus said: "Passengers have for some time been telling us about the consistent failures of First Great Western to deliver and our National Passenger Survey showed them as the worst performing train company. We have consistently fed back this information and pushed for improvements. We welcome the action being taken by the DfT and we will be watching First Great Western's progress very closely. Clearly if First Great Western cannot get this right then they should not continue with the franchise".
Andrew Haines, FGW's chief operating officer, told the Guardian last week that the company had underestimated the task it faced when it renewed the franchise in 2006: "First Great Western underestimated the scale of the challenge. It underestimated the strength of passenger feeling ... be it timetable changes, be it fare rises, be it service levels. It was a complex task, integrating three franchises into one, re-engineering and refurbishing a high-speed train fleet in three years."
