Friday 20 July 2012

"Look, how about about we forget for now about money you might owe us and were hoping to duck paying by abandoning the franchise..."

Another one from Bob E (who has more or less been writing my blog posts for me this week while I was on holiday), spotted in The Guardian (funny how the G hardly complained about this sort of thing when their favourite party was in government*, but hey):

"... and let's possibly return to it later, much later, when you have made enough money from being given it back."

Isn't it just amazing how these sort of tales appear just as the HoC has risen for its summer break and, guided by a quote in the article I think henceforth the Grand Alliance can only be referred to as "the Great Ambivalence".

FirstGroup may be handed an extension to its Great Western rail franchise, underwritten by a multimillion-pound taxpayer subsidy – despite having served notice on the contract to avoid a payout of more than £800m to the government...

In the meantime, trains will be operated by FirstGroup, even though it decided to relinquish the last three years of its original contract to avoid paying premiums to the government. It is likely to receive subsidies during the extension period.


* Equally tattyfilarious is that the Labour MP who chairs the Public Accounts Committee (who is actually starting to look like a caricature of herself) is now laying into the current government for all the costs and deficits now being run up on the basis of contracts and policies put in place by her own party when it was in government, e.g. NHS PFI stuff, Olympics-G4S; Work Programme-A4E; low carbon electricity crapola; HS2.

Somehow this was all much more credible when the former chairman of the PAC, Conservative MP Edward Leigh, was saying it about the 1997 - 2010 Labour government. Their policies and programmes were in many respects different to those of the Conservative government which preceded them, so he was entitled to complain, but the current Lib-Con government is merely a continuation of what Labour were doing so for a former Labour minister to start whining now is rank hypocrisy.

3 comments:

Physiocrat said...

Getting out of the GW franchise was a smart move by First Group. With a total rebuild at Reading and the electrification works, operating the line will be a nightmare until at least 2020. Then there is the nightmare of commissioning a new fleet of trains which could be the Hitachi wonder train which is both diesel and electric. These will be so astronomically expensive that seats will have to be crammed in to make them pay their way. That will give rise to two generations of chronically dissatisfied passengers, sorry that should have been "customers". Then there is the integration of the misguided Cross rail scheme.

The whole thing is a disaster happening courtesy of the DfT and their predecessor the non-Strategic Rail Authority. Any franchisee in their right mind would walk away from the responsibility if they had half a chance.

Anonymous said...

Whatis even more amazing is that despite giving up the franchise, they are on the shortlist to bid for the next one!

Bayard said...

Phys - they'd be better off sticking with the old HSTs - a masterpiece of British design.

AC - It appears that they didn't give up the franchise, just the option to extend it for three years, so it's hardly surprising that they will be included in the bidders for the new franchise. The extension is entirely due to incompetence by the DfT and First are, quite understandably, milking the Gov't for all they can get under their contract. I'm not worried about the cost to the taxpayer: the extra money the DfT have to pay to First will only be not wasted somewhere else. It was never going to be handed back in tax cuts, was it?