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The latest Public Performance Measures for Southeastern – to 13 September – show yet another drop in performance in vital rail services to Kent and South-East London. The “moving average” for the last year has fallen for nine months in a row, and it is now down to levels not seen since the big snowfall of December 2010.
We have previously asked whether the new contract would be just “More of the Same”. It’s looking as though it could be even worse.
As in 2010-11 Southeastern had a “bad winter” in 2013-14, with the St Jude storm and the heavy rain from December to March.
However the decline in performance since the winter is really because Southeastern’s performance over the summer (no snow, no leaves, etc) has been about 2-3% lower than in the previous 3 summers. That’s harder to explain – or to blame on the weather.
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Comparing the performance of the Mainline services (largely Kent) and the Metro services (largely South-East London) shows that the performance of both service groups has declined steadily this year. If the under-performance had been largely due to the Hastings Line problems one would expect this to be in the Mainline figures alone.
So it’s not clear what is going on.
It may be due to additional disruption as the London Bridge rebuilding progresses: that would affect both Metro and Mainline services. But some of the latest disruptions are not in these figures. If so, we can expect services to be even worse as the rebuilding project starts to directly affect the Southeastern lines at Platforms 1-6.
In the past we have also seen falls in Southeastern performance due to cost saving measures going wrong – such as “optimising” train crewing so that delays cascade across seemingly unrelated trains.
However it may also be that once the Department for Transport decided to award a further four years’ contract without competition Southeastern had no incentive to try harder.
Rail Minister Claire Perry has said that “We have also totally changed the contract terms to make sure [Southeastern] deliver on their promises” and the DFT have said that “Tough performance targets to ensure rail passengers see real improvements to their journeys have been agreed”. However, and despite many requests to the Rail Minister, so far neither the contract terms nor the “tough targets” have been published by DFT or Southeastern.
When the new contract was awarded, we asked “Fresh Start or More of the Same?“. This year’s figures are showing that long-suffering passengers are not even getting “More of the Same”.