UK: Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh has written to the two Interim Managing Directors of CrossCountry expressing ‘serious concern’ about the train operator’s performance.
She expects the operator to agree a Remedial Plan, saying ‘I will not hesitate to take further action under the contract’ if the plan is not met. On August 9 Haigh wrote that ’your passengers have been suffering from a substandard service for too long and I am determined to address this’.
The operator had been expecting to breach its contractual targets for cancellations in the coming months. On July 29 it announced a temporary reduction in services from August 10 until November 9 in an effort to reduce on-the-day cancellations and provide passengers with more certainty about which trains would actually run.
Haigh said she had ‘little choice’ but to approve this request, but she has mandated the production of a Remedial Plan that puts the improvements on a contractual basis and ensures neither the operator nor its owning group Arriva benefits financially from the reduction.
A CrossCountry spokesperson told Rail Business UK ‘we acknowledge that our service has fallen below the standards our passengers should expect from us’ and ’we believe that our robust plan is the quickest way to improve our performance and provide a more resilient service’.
The operator added that ‘97% of our normal daily number of seats will still operate while the temporary timetable is in operation’, and catching up on a post-pandemic backlog of driver training would enable it provide a more reliable service for customers with fewer cancellations.
