Are the cracks finally showing!

[sandwhich]

After what can only be described as the East and West Coast franchise debacle it was obvious that the passenger franchise system is now on what could be described as a last chance saloon. What we now hear is that the Southern franchise may be under threat of possible loss to the GoVia organisation if things don't get better. Southern is of course part of the Thameslink, Southern & Great Northern which is talked about being a monster spiralling out of control. If GoVia should have the franchise taken away from them would any other organisation want to take it on as it is. Cannot see it. So the next step would be a state takeover until such a time that someone else would want it. Then of course Government would have to decide whether this ^monster^ should be broken up into two or more franchises. A Tory MP when asked about re-nationalisation said she was against it but all things might have to considered in order to make things better. Are the cracks finally showing!

[Andy W]

It's a DfT management contract rather than a real franchise so effectively it is already nationalised with the DfT just contracting out their delivery vehicle. The DfT are the architects of this chaos, going for the lowest cost bid and not properly going over the deliverability of the winning bidders proposals before award.

Of course their bid evaluators are keeping a very low profile at the moment!

p.s. I don't buy the unexpected shortage of traincrew statement. When you take over franchises, you put a mobilisation team in so they should have known it. I wonder if they just didn't have enough in their budget and when it got too low, they had no headroom in their establishments.

[sandwhich]

Yes Andy W it is a management contract rather than as a straightforward! franchise, but who is going to be interested if it all comes apart as it surely might. I remember when GoVia took over what was FCC they complained that they were more short of Drivers than they were led to believe, yes they should have worked that out for themselves if they didn't then they were really naive to say the least.
It has been said that only three people understood the railway franchise system, one died, one went mad and the thirds forgotten all about it.

[sandwhich]

I go back to this subject again because of the Shaw report and the East Coast franchise. I have not read the report but it would seem buckpassing is the name of the game. Everybody knows the pitfalls of privatising Network Rail (son of Railtrack). Shaw says maybe without fully commiting herself, the government must be disappointed because they are wary themselves because nobody is fully saying yes to them.
Then we have the East Coast franchise with reports of already showing signs of trouble over premium paybacks to government, okay this is early days, but the previous state franchise paid back one billion pounds to the government over the years they were in charge, but then they did not have to worry about shareholders to pay out. Time will tell if Stagecoach/Virgin have over committed themselves and we end up with another Nat Ex mess. If it should come to that then the cracks will really show and the system will be very difficult to paper over.

[sandwhich]

I will make no comment on the Southern dispute, but I will not be surprised to see the franchise taken away from GoVia by the end of this year and placed into state hands,I give two reasons, political expediency to pacify the voters in Surrey and Sussex, the other is that it must surely now be realised that the GTR franchise is too big to run as one company and has to be split into two as quickly as possible, Thameslink & Great Northern and Southern & Gatwick Express. I doubt if anybody will be interested in running these franchises until after 2018 when the planned work at London Bridge and other places is finished and the Thameslink service is up and running.
I do seem to remember when franchising kicked off Gatwick Airport would be served by three individual franchises to open up competition on this route, wonder what happened!