Government to take over SouthEastern

[Beeyar Wunby]

This strikes a chord with me. I started my driving career with ConnexSouthEastern in 1999. For personal reasons I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I seem to remember that afterwards they had the franchise taken away.

And it appears that this may be happening again (except that Go-Ahead is the franchise holder this time)...

The government is taking over the running of the railway operator Southeastern, owned by Go-Ahead, from mid-October after discovering a “serious” breach of the franchise agreement.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said an investigation by the Department for Transport found that since October 2014 Southeastern had not declared more than £25m of historic taxpayer funding that should have been returned, and described this as a serious breach of the franchise agreement’s “good faith” obligation.

Link..
Government-to-take-over-southeastern-after-serious-breach-of-franchise

Mind you, I may be an old cynic, but since this government is taking back franchises into public ownership, whilst swearing blind that it is NOT renationalising the railway (yea, right) - this could be seen as verrrrry fortuitous.

The franchise will be run by the government’s in-house operator of last resort – railway managers who already oversee London North Eastern Railway and Northern.

Yup, that's how it's done....

[TRP]

I'd seen the news on BBC this morning & I'm interested to see what happens, particularly as this is one of the local TOCs operating here in Hastings.
From the outside looking in, the Government running of LNER seems to be working well, so maybe this is the way forward? Certainly, all the Unions quoted in this article think that nationalisation is the way to go (although I think this has always been the case).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-58716625

Tony

[Beeyar Wunby]

Yup, I don't particularly follow the unions' tack on this one.

It was clear to most intelligent people in 1996 that splitting up the railway into little pieces, and divorcing S&T (Railtrack) from the operations departments was just plain stupid. The fundamental flaw is that railways run on Communication & Cooperation. Competition just shuts the whole thing down.

I don't personally care who OWNS the railway, so long as it is INTEGRATED, and run as a public service (ie, put the passengers needs FIRST) rather than a get-rich scheme for speculators.

As we've touched on before here, I personally think what's happening is merely political window dressing. But at least they're beginning to accept that Franchising is poop.

IMHO, a really good start would be putting it back to Chris Green's Network South East model. That bloke knew how to RUN a railway, bless him.

/rantmode

Cheers, John.

[TRP]

This will be the third franchise which is currently back under Government control - LNER & Northern are both already run by DfT operators. A fourth operator is due to come under DfT control in Spring 2022 when Abelio hand back the Scotrail franchise.

It is also interesting to note that Govia, part of the parent company of Southeastern, is potentially facing a fraud probe over the 'missing' £25m but they continue to operate the Southern & Thameslink franchises - I know they are run as separate entities, but I wonder if there will be concerns over Govia in general, affecting these other franchises.

Tony