The decision to cut short Abellio’s contract for the ScotRail franchise has been greeted as ‘an early Christmas present for hard-pressed commuters’ by MSP Jackie Baillie.
The Scottish Government yesterday announced that the franchise would end in March 2022.
And the Dumbarton constituency MSP told the Scottish Parliament that she had campaigned for the move for two years because of ‘myriad problems’.
Afterwards she added: “I am glad that the SNP has listened to my campaign, and the concerns of local passengers who travel daily between Dumbarton, Helensburgh and Balloch, to end this failing franchise.
“Passengers have had to put up with delays, cancellations, stop skipping, short formed trains and are crammed into carriages like sardines.
“And the problems continue today.
“The Cabinet Secretary must also ensure that the service is improved between now and the end of the franchise in March 2022.
“This news is a step in the right direction, but what is needed now is for the Scottish Government to make a serious public sector bid for the control of ScotRail, not flog it off once more to a foreign-based private company, focused only on profit.”
At Holyrood Transport Secretary Michael Matheson conceded that there had been ‘particular issues’ on the line through Dumbarton.
He said: “We need to make sure that Network Rail is doing everything that it can to minimise that type of recurring problem on the route to Dumbarton, and in any other part of the Scottish network.
“All the provisions that are in the franchise agreement at the moment continue to be there; they will continue to be enforced, and we will continue to work with Abellio ScotRail to make sure that it is held to account on those matters.”
But the contract isn’t being cut short, the SG aren’t exercising the option to extend beyond the originally defined break point.
Until it is accepted that the current infrastructure cannot support the amount of services they are trying to run then it doesn’t matter who operates the network it will not perform to a satisfactory level, especially when something goes wrong. It’s not just about the number of available seats across the network, resilience to disruption has to feature as well. Of course the implications of this are politically unacceptable and will just result in an upping of the blame game.