Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has written to the Transport Secretary urging her to require Avanti West Coast to increase timetabled services between Manchester and London to at least two per hour by the end of the month – or remove the contract.
In a letter to Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, the Mayor said that the company’s plans to return to an increased timetable on 11 December would cause too much disruption to passengers and damage to the Greater Manchester economy. As a minimum, he has 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 are unable to make this commitment, the Mayor believes 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 per cent 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, over a quarter of services (27 per cent) have failed to arrive on time.
The Mayor has also highlighted that urgent action needs to be taken to improve the experience of passengers, with tickets still being released only a few days in advance and seats regularly double-booked.
A letter from Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to Transport Secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP on Avanti West Coast rail
It was a pleasure to meet you and your team on 21 September. Thank you for your positive reception to our transformation of Greater Manchester’s transport into the integrated Bee Network. We are very grateful for your department’s support, and I look forward to building on our partnership over the coming period.
I welcome the more constructive approach you have taken to resolving the crisis on Avanti West Coast services. As you will recall, in our meeting, I spoke about the profoundly negative impact this having on the regional and national economy, and on thousands of passengers and businesses every day. I do now need to return to this issue on the eve of your decision on Avanti’s contract.
Late last month, Avanti published a plan to restore three trains per hour between Manchester and London from the next timetable change on 11 December. This would mean two more months of chaos on the West Coast Mainline in the interim, with resulting damage to our city-region’s economy.
If 11 December is to be acceptable, Avanti must also commit to providing a consistent two trains per hour service between Manchester and London by end of this month, as a staging post to full restoration of the timetable. Unless this happens and is clearly communicated, train travel between our most important economic regions will continue to be chaotic, forcing people into their cars or into abandoning plans to travel entirely.
Without this commitment, I will be unable to support a new contract for Avanti.
At present, Avanti customers continue to report very poor levels of reliability. Even on the current, massively reduced timetable, trains are still regularly delayed or cancelled at a time when we are told by Avanti that they have more drivers available than ever. I urge your officials to study Avanti’s performance metrics which demonstrate this.
Passengers face other challenges too. Tickets are still only being released a few days in advance, making planning for individuals and businesses impossible. Seat double bookings remain a significant issue, leading to arguments between passengers and people having to stand for long journeys. Poor maintenance is resulting in broken toilets, air cooling and onboard café equipment. These dreadful conditions would be unacceptable at any time but are particularly so now given the wholesale collapse of the timetable, something no other train company is experiencing at anything like this scale.
I am grateful for any support you can offer in finding a way through these issues as quickly as possible to deliver the rail service that people using the West Coast Mainline deserve. I stand ready to help you in any way I can.
