Peer review: David Sidebottom
Passenger Director, Transport Focus
What needs tackling on the railway? Everyone has an opinion on this. We talk to huge numbers of rail passengers (about 80,000 this year), plus a huge number of stakeholders - people working in the rail sector from the front line to the chief executive. I am regularly told that the key issues for passengers are overcrowding, unreliability, bikes on trains (for and against), trackside litter, visible staff, ticket prices and having your ticket checked. Take your pick!
Michael is right in that, broadly, passenger satisfaction is high. Our most recent National Rail Passenger Survey showed a slight increase in overall rail passenger satisfaction to 83% across the country, reversing previous declines. However, the overall score for commuter satisfaction was 76%, compared with 85% for business and 90% for leisure travellers.
When we asked passengers about their priorities for future improvement, at a country-wide level we found that value for money continues to top the list. We know from other research that when passengers are answering this question they are, of course, focusing on the price of their ticket. However, they are also taking into account the service basics of getting a seat, punctuality, frequency and how delays are dealt with. There is then the fact that priorities change by train company, route, season, where you got on (a seat is a luxury on some journeys, an absolute necessity on others) and many other factors.
What rarely comes up is the structure of the railway - who runs the network or the individual train company. The name Railtrack provokes shudders, but few outside of the industry could even tell you who controls Network Rail.
A long time ago we did some focus group research with passengers about what they would like to see from industry structures. Once passengers had recovered from the shock of understanding just how complex the industry is, they came forward with powerful points.
Above all else, they wanted to see improvements to their rail services - any review or change to structures or processes must focus on how to achieve this. They wanted a clear sense of strategic direction and the assurance that ‘somebody’ has a strategic vision for the railways. But they also wanted a sense that there was ‘someone’ in charge when it comes to the delivery of services to the passengers.
It would be interesting to re-run this work to see what has changed of late. But we think the message remains the same: think about structure if that’s what it takes, but the top priority is delivering a service that meets passenger needs.
Huge amounts of money are being invested in the railway, but the headlines are all about disruption and delay. This is a prime opportunity to look at lessons learned from projects such as the Bath line closures, which benefited from involving passengers right from the start in the planning, giving them realistic expectations of the ‘pain’ to be endured during delivery, and compensating them for particularly inconvenient periods.
In this way, the conversation will remain focused on the important issues of what passengers want or need - and not internal industry wrangling over who does what.
