First Capital Connect pays passengers bigger refunds as threat to franchise looms

The railway operator that has been called the worst company in Britain said last night that it would pay passengers additional compensation after three months of disruption and cancelled trains.

First Capital Connect (FCC), owned by First Group, the transport group, is trying desperately to resurrect its franchise after a torrid three months, which ended last week with Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, threatening to remove the operator’s franchise and effectively put the train service into public ownership.

The rail operator, whose service runs through the heart of the City, will pay regular travellers compensation worth 5 per cent of the value of a season ticket or ten free days of travel. Standard-class season tickets on the route cost up to £4,000 a year.

For almost three months, more than 200,000 commuters a day have suffered severe disruption on the line, which runs between Bedford and Brighton, after drivers refused to work voluntary overtime in a dispute over pay.

The franchise relies on staff goodwill at weekends because contracts do not include Sunday working.

Even when the train operator settled the dispute with Aslef, the train drivers’ union, during December, drivers failed to volunteer for shifts, leaving the company running an emergency timetable.

This month heavy snow damaged a number of the operator’s oldest engines, causing huge numbers of trains to be cancelled. However, First Group hit back last night, saying that, since restoring the full timetable on January 18, the company had managed to make a huge improvement to the service.

At its worst, only 2,019 trains a week were running, out of a total of 3,900. Last week, the first full week since the timetable was restored, 3,868 out of 3,970 trains ran.

Neal Lawson, the managing director of FCC, said: “We know the service hasn’t been good enough. The dispute with drivers has now been resolved and trains that were damaged by the snow are returning to service.

“Last week and this week we were running services to the full timetable for the first time since November. I hope customers have noticed an improvement — but I know we’ve still got a long way to go. So please accept my assurance that everyone at FCC is working as hard as possible to provide a high quality, reliable service.”

Analysts expect the compensation package, which is on top of the normal compensation paid by train operators for trains delayed by more than 30 minutes, to cost FirstGroup about £1 million.

However, the damage to FirstGroup’s reputation could cost the company considerably more, especially when it comes to tendering for new franchise business.

Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrat MP for Sutton and Cheam, lodged an early-day motion last week calling on FCC’s franchise to be withdrawn, which would make it the second route to be taken back into public ownership, after National Express’s East Coast route was nationalised. “It has been registering in complaints from my constituents in ever-increasing volume,” Mr Burstow said. “FCC has severely under-invested and used the bad weather as a pretext to completely collapse the service. It went into total meltdown. It makes the daily commute an endurance test and is seriously stretching the relationship between people and employers at a time when jobs are at risk.”

A Department for Transport spokesman said: “The Secretary of State has been clear that First Capital Connect needs to improve their service very significantly and we are monitoring the service on a daily basis. All options are open to him if they fail to do so.”

The RMT rail workers’ union said that Thameslink was a “basket-case franchise” and called for it to be renationalised.

FirstGroup received £140 million in subsidies from the Government last year.

Source: Times Online UK News

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