“The government is holding GTR to account for their role in the unacceptable performance following the introduction of the May timetable,” says Mr Chris Grayling, secretary of state for transport. “GTR will make no profit from its franchise in this financial year and looking ahead, we have also capped the amount of profit that the operator is able to make for the remainder of its franchise, which is due to expire in September 2021.

“Furthermore, GTR will be contributing £15m towards tangible improvements for passengers. This is in addition to the £15m the operator has already contributed towards compensation for passengers since the May timetable disruption. GTR has agreed to work with the rail user groups representing passengers of Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, who will determine what improvements this package will fund.”

However, Grayling has ruled out early termination of the GTR franchise as he says it “would cause further and undue disruption for passengers and is not an appropriate course of action.”

Grayling also says the DfT will continue to monitor GTR’s performance, particularly during the launch of the new timetable on December 10, which will see the introduction of another 200 services on weekdays. “These measures do not make GTR immune from further sanctions in the event of any subsequent failure to perform,” Grayling warned.

The May timetable expanded the original Bedford - Brighton/Sutton Thameslink network to Peterborough, Cambridge, Horsham, Orpington, East Grinstead and Rainham, but resulted in widespread disruption and cancellations of train services. GTR says it has processed compensation claims for 68,000 season ticket holders and has extended the deadline for claims to January 31 2019.

Grayling’s announcement follows the publication of reports into disruption to rail services across the country resulting from the May 20 timetable change by the British parliament’s Transport Committee on December 4, and a three-month inquiry by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) led by Professor Stephen Glaister. However, Grayling’s decision to sanction GTR ignores the role his own department played in the timetable fiasco.

The Transport Committee report says the May timetable change involved 43,200 individual changes to the national timetable and affected 46% of passenger services. “The implementation was chaotic and resulted in a prolonged period of intensely inconvenient, costly and potentially dangerous disruption for passengers across the north of England and in London and the south,” says the Transport Committee. “The crisis was partly due to the astonishing complexity of a fragmented railway in which inter-related private train companies, operating on publicly-owned and managed infrastructure, have competing commercial interests. This complex system could not cope with the scale of the changes. There was a collective, system-wide failure across Network Rail (NR), the privately-owned train operating companies, the DfT and the ORR. Governance and decision-making processes were not fit for purpose.”

The Transport Committee wants:

  • effective oversight of the next national rail timetable changes
  • independent oversight of the timetabling process
  • the worst-affected 2018 season ticket holders to receive a discount on 2019 season tickets
  • effective contingency plans for disabled passengers and stringent enforcement, and
  • the introduction of automatic compensation schemes.

The Glaister inquiry also found that NR, GTR, Northern, the DfT, and the ORR all made mistakes, which contributed to the collapse of services, particularly on the GTR and Northern routes. “The System Operator (SO) function within NR was in the best position to understand and manage the risks, but did not take sufficient action, especially in the critical period of autumn 2017,” the inquiry says. “Neither GTR nor Northern were properly aware of or prepared for the problems in delivering the timetable and they did not do enough to provide accurate information to passengers when disruption occurred. Both DfT and ORR are responsible for overseeing aspects of the industry, but neither sufficiently questioned the assurances they received from the industry about the risk of disruption.

“There is an apparent gap in industry responsibility and accountability for managing systemic risks, and that needs to change,” the inquiry concludes.