Railway franchises in the coming year

[royaloak]

On 28/12/2019 at 10:04, APOLLO said:

Northern Rail  New trains and no drivers

 

All the money on new trains & depots is a wast of time if there is insufficient staff.

 

Brit15

As I have previously stated, it isnt that they dont have enough drivers just that due to late delivery of the new trains the existing drivers havent been able to learn the new trains, now there is a mass influx of new trains but the driver training is not only late starting but cant keep up with the deliveries of the new trains.

 

It can take several weeks for drivers (and guards) to learn the new trains, it isnt like buying a new car where its just a question of putting it in first gear and work the rest out on the hoof!

[royaloak]

2 hours ago, mdvle said:

Just think of what your local authority or government could do today if given the budget to do it,

What happens next year when the budget is cut, do they reduce the NHS, bus, bin collections etc budget or reduce the railway budget?

That assumes they get a decent amount for taking the railways on in the first place!

 

Quote

and the authority to force through their decisions regardless of what they pesky voters or landowners thought, and didn't care how many people were killed or maimed in the process...

 

Much of what some consider a great era, where as you say "men got things done", was the result of an abundance of money, cheap almost slave labour, no regard for H&S, and a total disregard for what anyone but the nobility thought.

 

I don't think many here want to return to those working conditions, or have entire homes/towns/neighbourhoods destroyed in the name of progress.

100% spot on.

[rockershovel]

5 hours ago, mdvle said:

 

Just think of what your local authority or government could do today if given the budget to do it, and the authority to force through their decisions regardless of what they pesky voters or landowners thought, and didn't care how many people were killed or maimed in the process...

 

Much of what some consider a great era, where as you say "men got things done", was the result of an abundance of money, cheap almost slave labour, no regard for H&S, and a total disregard for what anyone but the nobility thought.

 

I don't think many here want to return to those working conditions, or have entire homes/towns/neighbourhoods destroyed in the name of progress.

 

You misunderstand, or misrepresent my point. 

 

As has been discussed at length in this forum, our railways appear to be operated under a system which no one, least of all its authors, can understand or direct, in which critical skills are in short supply. I see from the news, that those charged with operating our National Health System have lately reached the conclusion that staff shortages are, in all likelihood, the result of abandoning the system by which they were trained, which might usefully be reinstated. 

 

I’ve lately been employed in a sector (renewable energy) which is dominated by foreign companies, whose governments appear far more able than ours to form coherent notions of what they are about, and act upon those notions. 

 

On the wider stage, our government has spent several years locked in a crisis, precipitated by their own actions, in which the inability to understand, predict or direct the forces in play, appears to be universal; indeed, most of those involved appear to be undergoing a process of Testing To Destruction. 

 

None of this, leads me to the conclusion that demonstrable competency in strategic planning and direction, is abundant in the public domain. 

[APOLLO]

7 hours ago, royaloak said:

As I have previously stated, it isnt that they dont have enough drivers just that due to late delivery of the new trains the existing drivers havent been able to learn the new trains, now there is a mass influx of new trains but the driver training is not only late starting but cant keep up with the deliveries of the new trains.

 

It can take several weeks for drivers (and guards) to learn the new trains, it isnt like buying a new car where its just a question of putting it in first gear and work the rest out on the hoof!

 

I was involved introducing new technology in the Gas industry (mains renewal) over many years. First thing we always looked at was manpower, training requirements, implementation and ongoing continuity of service to customers. A different animal to Railways but we served our customers.

 

Northern Rail is a FAIL, all the way up to the top, including government. Strip their franchise now and get some customer oriented management in. Sort the rail unions out also. It's hell on the rails up here, and has been for a very long time, well before these new fangled trains came.

 

Brit15

[royaloak]

2 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

 Sort the rail unions out also.

In what way?

[APOLLO]

3 minutes ago, royaloak said:

In what way?

 

Perhaps in the way Government has recently suggested - legislation to provide a minimum service during disputes. 

 

NEVER forget its the poor paying customer usually trying to get to work to earn a crust who is the real looser during most Rail industrial actions.

 

Brit15

[royaloak]

1 minute ago, APOLLO said:

 

Perhaps in the way Government has recently suggested - legislation to provide a minimum service during disputes. 

 

NEVER forget its the poor paying customer usually trying to get to work to earn a crust who is the real looser during most Rail industrial actions.

 

Brit15

So not actually fixing the things that cause the disputes in the first place just force the staff to accept whatever is thrown in their direction, it takes two sides to have a dispute!

 

Why arent Sundays in the working week?

It is actually in ASLEFs charter to have them inside, and yet you continually blame the staff and Unions for the poor Sunday service, how does that work?

 

At my TOC several depots have lost valuable (mainline) route knowledge so when there is disruption on the one remaining route they sign the trains cannot be diverted, is that the Unions fault who fought to retain that RK but Management wouldnt allow it, but I suppose when people are turfed off the train it will be the drivers fault he doesnt sign the alternative route! 

[APOLLO]

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year !!

 

Brit15

[royaloak]

So no answers as normal.

[Talltim]

53 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

 

Perhaps in the way Government has recently suggested - legislation to provide a minimum service during disputes. 

 

NEVER forget its the poor paying customer usually trying to get to work to earn a crust who is the real looser during most Rail industrial actions.

 

Brit15

Perhaps the government could introduce legislation to provide a minimum service when there is no industrial action...

[Torper]

You may have noted that Abellio's Scotrail franchise is to end in 2022 (three years earlier than planned) after the Scottish Government refused to increase the subsidy yet further for the final five years of the contract (the Scottish Government currently provides about two thirds of the cost of running the railway).  Abellio have apparently lost millions so far on the franchise.  It is expected that a not-for-profit public sector provider will a bidder for the new franchise (now permitted in Scotland but not, I think, in England).

 

DT

[62613]

8 hours ago, royaloak said:

What happens next year when the budget is cut, do they reduce the NHS, bus, bin collections etc budget or reduce the railway budget?

That assumes they get a decent amount for taking the railways on in the first place!

 

100% spot on.

Local councils haven't  run either of those since the mid-1980s. They lot control of tertiary education (6th form colleges, technical colleges and the like) at about the same time. Round our way, the police are run by a county-wide authority, as are the fire services and waste collection, relics of the strategic authority also abolished in the mid-1980s. About 18 months ago, our local council lost control of its social housing stock, when the stand-alone company running it privatised itself. Increasingly, primary and secondary education is being taken from LA control. You want me to go on?

 

Besides, the new government has said it's going to increase its transport budget for the North (we'll see!)

 

[rockershovel]

There is a definite problem with the working of weekends in this country, and it’s another issue in which the EU have not actually created the problem, but certainly don’t usefully contribute to its solution. 

 

I’ve had a good deal of experience working with European companies, if rarely FOR European companies, and it doesn’t take long to realise that labour relations there are a  good deal less adversarial than ours. A lot of this is because they are much more successful in engendering a feeling of mutual, shared interest. Again, I wouldn’t over-emphasise this, they have their problems too but they are different problems. 

 

Case in point, I have just completed a short offshore mobilisation for Total, in Denmark. In the course of this, one of my certificates was found to be unacceptable - some incompatibility between the documents issued, and the local specification. Total immediately arranged for me to travel a day early, catch the necessary course in Esbjerg and paid me to do so. I was asked in return to accept the travel day as unpaid, and I thought this reasonable. 

 

Now I’m off to work for a British contractor, at Werrington. They realised, rather belatedly, that I didn’t possess a certificate called SMSTS, which has no relevance in the oil industry. This isn’t a new question; it was a background issue during my time at Volker Stevin, and never brought to any sort of useful resolution. VS would have been quite happy for me to lose a weeks earnings, pay £500 plus costs for the course, and return to a job I was already doing without it; I was less enthusiastic, pointed out that I held several other certificates which none else had, at no cost to them, and there the matter rested. Morgan Sindall have fretted about the certificate but otherwise, there the matter rests still. 

 

I COULD do SMSTS over 3 weekends, but now we come to the EU part; specifically, the 48-hour week, averaged over 6 weeks. To achieve this, the nominal rota is 7 days on, 3 days off, 7 nights on, 4 nights off. Everyone hates this, because it means that you work two weekends out of three for no extra money, and contractors get 14 days paid every three weeks instead of 15. Hard to see any advantage, and frankly I don’t really see how it is intended to operate on this section of the work. That scotches any sort of day-release or weekend scheme. I’ll probably end up doing it next time I’m out of work. 

 

I’ve seen various forms of this rotation; 6 on, 3 off is the worst of the lot, for my money. None of them are undertaken willingly, because none offer any identifiable benefit to the workforce. It’ll just continue to be a problem, I suppose. 

 

 

 

[62613]

7 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

I COULD do SMSTS over 3 weekends, but now we come to the EU part; specifically, the 48-hour week, averaged over 6 weeks. To achieve this, the nominal rota is 7 days on, 3 days off, 7 nights on, 4 nights off. Everyone hates this, because it means that you work two weekends out of three for no extra money, and contractors get 14 days paid every three weeks instead of 15. Hard to see any advantage, and frankly I don’t really see how it is intended to operate on this section of the work. That scotches any sort of day-release or weekend scheme. I’ll probably end up doing it next time I’m out of work.

I suspect that that is the then UK government's interpretation of what was an EU directive. Did the Working Time Directive mandate the 48-hour limit? Genuine question to anyone who might know.

 

[jim.snowdon]

17 minutes ago, 62613 said:

I suspect that that is the then UK government's interpretation of what was an EU directive. Did the Working Time Directive mandate the 48-hour limit? Genuine question to anyone who might know.

 

From the EU Directive -

Article 6

member states must ensure weekly working time is limited by law, or collective agreement

average working time should not exceed 48 hours for each 7-day period.

 

How individual states translated that into national laws was up to them - the EU did not specify any period over which it could be averaged, and how employers choose to comply is up to them, save that they will be trying to extract maximum working time for minimum cost (which isn't exactly in the spirit of the principles behind the Directive). Strangely enough, the UK was the one nation in the EU that objected to the Directive, but ended up having to accept it by virtue of a majority vote.

 

Jim

[Adamski94]

50 minutes ago, Talltim said:

Perhaps the government could introduce legislation to provide a minimum service when there is no industrial action...

I agree, TOCs don't really seem to have any accountability at all for their own actions. Everyone is quick to accuse staff of being lazy and greedy when they strike to protect their jobs and livelyhood but no one seems to care about all the hard work staff have to do when disruption occurs or all the unsociable hours they do. Not to mention the abuse they recieve when things go wrong often because of the inconsiderate actions of the TOC they work for.

[mdvle]

1 hour ago, APOLLO said:

Northern Rail is a FAIL, all the way up to the top, including government. Strip their franchise now and get some customer oriented management in. Sort the rail unions out also. It's hell on the rails up here, and has been for a very long time, well before these new fangled trains came.

 

So, again, for those reading this thread who haven't followed this on the numerous other threads.

 

Stripping the current operator of the franchise will change absolutely nothing, as it doesn't matter who is running things for the DfT - you get the DfT level of service - given that the Northern franchise requires a subsidy and thus there are no "profits" to re-invest in the service.

 

Similarly, it isn't the rail unions causing the problems in this case, it is DfT refusing to provide the necessary money to hire additional drivers and presumably other staff to run the trains on a 7 day schedule without relying on voluntary overtime.

 

So given that the problem isn't the unions (it's lack of staff), and it isn't the TOC (they simply provide the DfT level of service), why do you continue to blame them?

[mdvle]

44 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

I COULD do SMSTS over 3 weekends, but now we come to the EU part; specifically, the 48-hour week, averaged over 6 weeks. To achieve this, the nominal rota is 7 days on, 3 days off, 7 nights on, 4 nights off. Everyone hates this, because it means that you work two weekends out of three for no extra money, and contractors get 14 days paid every three weeks instead of 15. Hard to see any advantage,

 

So, your employer comes up with a money saving scheme (more profit!) for your schedule, and it is somehow the EU's fault?

 

The EU simply is providing a limit to the hours worked, something most western governments do of some form or another.

[rockershovel]

37 minutes ago, jim.snowdon said:

From the EU Directive -

Article 6

member states must ensure weekly working time is limited by law, or collective agreement

average working time should not exceed 48 hours for each 7-day period.

 

How individual states translated that into national laws was up to them - the EU did not specify any period over which it could be averaged, and how employers choose to comply is up to them, save that they will be trying to extract maximum working time for minimum cost (which isn't exactly in the spirit of the principles behind the Directive). Strangely enough, the UK was the one nation in the EU that objected to the Directive, but ended up having to accept it by virtue of a majority vote.

 

Jim

 

Which was my point, more or less. The construction industry, accustomed to treating its workers as it does, used the Directive to attempt to exclude premium payments for weekend work. The workforce, accustomed to the idea that their employers are likely to kick them in the teeth if given the chance, and perceiving a likely loss of earnings from their insecure, seasonal employment, responded with their habitual recalcitrance. 

 

The EU, having contributed the original problem, followed this with a flood of contract workers (over 40% of the construction workforce are East European) and established themselves as the villains of the piece, at least from some points of view - although as so often in other such matters, much of the blame rests either in Westminster or in the actions of its agents and franchise holders. The apparent attitude in Westminster, that by letting a franchise they absolve themselves of further responsibility, serves them about as well as it served Pontius Pilate. 

 

That said, Pontius Pilate died in retirement at a ripe old age, as far as is known, while affairs in Jerusalem continued much as before. I don’t doubt that the authors of the whole “rail privatisation” debacle will fare much the same. 

 

Edited December 31, 2019 by rockershovel

[jim.snowdon]

4 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

The EU, having contributed the original problem, followed this with a flood of contract workers (over 40% of the construction workforce are East European) and established themselves as the villains of the piece

Although I suspect you do not tink that way, it wasn't the EU who sent a flood of contract workers from Eastern Europe - it was simply the Eastern Europeans making the most of the right to work anywhere in the EU and contractors exploiting the fact that they were prepared to do the work where the British weren't, or where there simply weren't sufficient of the right tradesmen available. The lack of skills in the workforce is very much a Westminster generated problem, as is certain factions within Westminster wanting to portray their failings as being down to the EU. But, enough, as I shouldn't go too deep into politics on this forum.

[mdvle]

6 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

You misunderstand, or misrepresent my point. 

 

As has been discussed at length in this forum, our railways appear to be operated under a system which no one, least of all its authors, can understand or direct, in which critical skills are in short supply. I see from the news, that those charged with operating our National Health System have lately reached the conclusion that staff shortages are, in all likelihood, the result of abandoning the system by which they were trained, which might usefully be reinstated. 

 

I’ve lately been employed in a sector (renewable energy) which is dominated by foreign companies, whose governments appear far more able than ours to form coherent notions of what they are about, and act upon those notions. 

 

On the wider stage, our government has spent several years locked in a crisis, precipitated by their own actions, in which the inability to understand, predict or direct the forces in play, appears to be universal; indeed, most of those involved appear to be undergoing a process of Testing To Destruction. 

 

None of this, leads me to the conclusion that demonstrable competency in strategic planning and direction, is abundant in the public domain. 

 

Your point, as stated, was that somehow things were better 100 years ago or so, when "real men" got things done.  I merely pointed out that their ability to "get things done" was the result of deliberate decisions made both by those men, and the government/nobility of the time, that are (thankfully) no longer valid.

 

Now you are changing and instead saying that government bad / private sector good.  This is also problematic, as it ignore the good/bad on both sides of the equation.

 

I mean, Carillion didn't exactly demonstrate a competency in strategic planning and direction did it?  It must take some unique skills to go bankrupt on government contracts.

 

Or maybe you were referring to Thomas Cooke, that beacon of competency.

 

Or perhaps First group, whose winning bid for Southwestern Railway was in financial trouble apparently from the first day of operating the franchise.

 

The reality, unfortunately, is that very few companies are very good at strategic planning because they have all become beholden to the quarterly earnings report and keeping the investors happy so the stock price goes up.

 

Or, to put it another way, any problems with the way the UK government works is more a reflection of wider UK society (given that society votes in the government) and the underlying belief system (private good/public bad) that isn't shared with the populations of other countries.

 

 

 

 

[rockershovel]

11 minutes ago, jim.snowdon said:

Although I suspect you do not tink that way, it wasn't the EU who sent a flood of contract workers from Eastern Europe - it was simply the Eastern Europeans making the most of the right to work anywhere in the EU and contractors exploiting the fact that they were prepared to do the work where the British weren't, or where there simply weren't sufficient of the right tradesmen available. The lack of skills in the workforce is very much a Westminster generated problem, as is certain factions within Westminster wanting to portray their failings as being down to the EU. But, enough, as I shouldn't go too deep into politics on this forum.

 

Which is, of course, quite true. Shortage of skills in the construction industry is a long-standing problem, greatly exacerbated by the mass casualisation of the 1980s and 1990s. Blair COULD have controlled the entry of the Eastern European workforce, the EU provided the means, and chose not to. 

 

The British construction workforce knew about Europe. Oz, Dennis and the rest were fictional, but their misadventures in 1980s Germany were familiar to those who had been there. Hence the exodus from British civil engineering, into the “Dash For Gas” and the offshore oil construction boom of the later 90s and 2000s. Hence the continuing popularity of Australia and the USA as a destination for emigration. 

 

The fundamental problem with managerialism as a management tool, is that it doesn’t seem to work. Why don’t WE own half the European rail network, and control THEIR power generation? Why do we keep reading about the “productivity crisis”, if we are so efficient? 

 

[APOLLO]

2 hours ago, royaloak said:

So no answers as normal.

 

What ever answers I give will be torn to shreds. 

 

I'm not (and never have been) employed in the Rail industry therefore I admit I am not qualified to give answers, you are royaloak, so what are YOUR answers ?

 

The problems are widely known.

 

Brit15

 

 

[Adamski94]

There are no easy answers, thats the problem. All solutions involve all parties singing from the same hymn sheet and being integrated and co-operative, the opposite to the idea of privatisation!

[rockershovel]

9 minutes ago, Adamski94 said:

There are no easy answers, thats the problem. All solutions involve all parties singing from the same hymn sheet and being integrated and co-operative, the opposite to the idea of privatisation!

 

... which I think, is the way things will develop. The late James Callaghan referred to “a sea change in politics.. every thirty years or so” and we seem to be just about due for such a change, as the stresses and contradictions in our system realign themselves, discarding or forcing out a lot of people and ideas which have no present intention of going.