Avanti West Coast's contract to run passenger services has been extended by the Department for Transport after significant improvements were made since October.
The contract extension is for a further six months and comes after the operator was ordered to develop a recovery plan aimed at addressing poor performance on key routes between Manchester, Birmingham and London.
Shortly after being placed on this contract, the Transport Secretary travelled to Manchester to see what needed to be done to improve services, whcih led to the introduction of a recovery timetable. This recovery timetable reduced the reliance on overtime working and has seen services increase from 180 trains a day to 264 on weekdays.
Improvements made by Avanti West Coast include:
- Weekday services have risen to the highest level in over two years.
- Reducing cancellations from nearly 25% of the service in August 2022, to 4.2% in early March 2023 – the lowest in over 12 months.
- 90% of trains now arriving within 15 minutes of the booked time.
- Over 100 additional drivers have been recruited, reducing reliance on union-controlled overtime working.
Although progress has been made, further work is needed to restore the punctuality that passengers expect.
Similarly, the TransPennine Express contract expires on the 28th May, and will be considered seperately to the AWC contract.
Transport Secretary, Mark Harper said: “The routes Avanti West Coast run are absolutely vital, and I fully understand the frustrations passengers felt at the completely unacceptable services seen last Autumn. Following our intervention, Rail Minister Huw Merriman and I have worked closely with local leaders to put a robust plan in place, which I'm glad to see is working.
“However, there is still more work to be done to bring services up to the standards we expect, which is why over this next six months further improvements will need to be made by Avanti West Coast.”
Commenting, Graham Sutherland, FirstGroup Chief Executive Officer said: “We are working closely with government and our partners across the industry to deliver a successful railway for our customers and communities.
“Performance at Avanti is steadily improving and since the introduction of the new timetable in mid-December, the number of services operated has increased by more than 40% compared to last summer, with more seats and better frequencies. Today's agreement allows our team to continue their focus on delivering their robust plans to continue enhancing services for our customers, including further progress on our train upgrade and refurbishment programme.”
We had a situation whereby, the previous operator Virgin Trains, constructed, a brilliant service and grew the ridership ( don’t know the historic figures , but from about 8m to about 23 m per annum).As per British practice, we decided that “what was not broken” should be fixed and the Government cancelled Virgins (then franchise).
The whole train industry and the Government’s policy on rail is a case of “curate’s egg”.For example, the HD2 project was going to take decades (given our country’s complexity), it is not surprising are completex..I say this to express how much costs but is important for jobs and infrastructure suppliers.The announcement about Derby is good.
The two things within he “gift” of the Government is to stop the “p code” cancellations, asap, because it is injust,.Why the heck have they given Avanti West Coast another chance.In my opinion, they are a basket case.
Avanti are not introducing “improvements” but are merely making adjustments to restore the service to some standard of acceptability. They have made some headway in this but the bar was set very low.
So the Avanti West Coast “West Coast” franchise has been extended for another 6 months. With the introduction of the Class 805 and Class 807 IETs to be introduced in service later this year.
Trans-Pennine next? ‘WorstGroup’ must have some very influential ‘influencers’ !
Cancellations still happening, and timekeeping especially later in the day is still poor.
Absolutely disgusting.
Rewarding for failure, yet again.
No accountability whatsoever in today’s society, whatsoever.
Absolutely scandalous.