Southeastern have announced today that the Department for Transport have awarded them a further contract to run services until June 2018.

Our initial analysis shows that there is little new for rail travellers from the Sevenoaks area.

There is a promise of £4.8m of station improvements and a “deep clean” of all stations by September 2015, so it will be interesting to see whether anything is done to improve Bat & Ball about which we wrote recently.

The Sevenoaks Rail Travellers Association has pressed for improvements in passenger information, especially during the disruption caused by London Bridge rebuilding.  There is a promise of “170 more customer service staff at key stations throughout each major timetable change to help passengers with information and provide advice on alternative travel options” – perhaps an acknowledgement of how serious the problems are going to be.  However this does not address the fundamental problem of getting accurate information to the staff at the station.  One report says that they will be issued tablets – but they have already been issued Blackberrys and this has not made much difference.  It also reveals an old-fashioned view of how many passengers would prefer to receive information – these days many people prefer to get information through the web and social media.  There’s no mention of any measures to ensure accurate and up-to-date information is on Southeastern website and social media – or even investment to make sure that the website works at times of severe disruption when people most want to use it.

There is a commitment to “work with” TfL to extend the Oystercard area to Dartford and Swanley, but no commitment to do so for the Sevenoaks area.  Oyster would of course have been a feature of the London Mayor’s proposals to extend the Overground to Sevenoaks.

There is also no mention of introducing smartcard ticketing or automatic refunds for season ticket holders which was a feature of the recent c2c franchise renewal.

There’s a puff about Southeastern’s “record of achievement” since 2006 – curiously missing the “achievement” of having the lowest level of customer satisfaction in the National Rail Passenger Survey and the second least trusted Train Operating Company in passenger ratings for Trust in the recent report from Passenger Focus.

Southeastern boast that passenger numbers have grown by 32% since 2006.  However, with the costs of the railway largely fixed – the trains run nomatter how many people are in them – and with fares rising by more than inflation, that means that profits should have increased substantially.  That’s one of the reasons why SRTA thinks we should have a fare cut, not a fare rise, this year.

In her open letter to Southeastern Rail Passengers Rail Minister Claire Perry pledges that there will be “a very clear, frequent and transparent level of reporting on how much progress is being made”.   We have asked the Minister how this squares with DfT’s agreement to Southeastern’s request to scrap the regular “Stakeholder Forum” which was an important mechanism for local groups to hold Southeastern to account.

DfT also mention “tough performance targets [for] passenger satisfaction and train punctuality across [the] network”, but there are no details of what these targets are and whether they are really tough.

All in all, it is hard to see what the DfT negotiators have managed to gain for passengers in return for giving Southeastern another four years’ contract without competition.  The Rail Minister Claire Perry says “today marks a fresh start for the South Eastern franchise”. To many passengers from the Sevenoaks area it may seem like more of the same.