Pitched against the transport department and the train and bus companies, public transport users can get a raw deal. Stuart Watson meets the Passenger Focus chief, who stands up for travellers in departments and boardrooms
This is a crucial time for Britain’s railways. Over the coming year, seven out of ten rail franchises will be coming up for renewal. And, as in every other contract negotiation at the present time, the government will want its suppliers – in this case the rail operators – to do more for less. It will be Anthony Smith’s job to articulate the voice of passengers, ensuring that as costs are squeezed their interests are not ignored.
Smith is the chief executive of Passenger Focus, a public body set up by the Department for Transport to represent rail, bus and tram passengers. DfT provides its £4.7m annual funding, most of which pays for research into passengers’ attitudes about the services that they use. That research is then disseminated to inform government and train operators’ decision-making. “It’s a crushingly simple model,” says Smith. “We talk to passengers and use that to drive change.”
Passenger Focus also looks into around 3,000 complaints a year, mediating in cases where a dispute between a passenger and a rail or bus operator has become deadlocked. In addition it acts as a pressure group, lobbying government and transport sector companies on behalf of passengers. It represents passengers on all British mainline rail services, plus bus, coach and tram services in England and Wales. In London, however, tube and bus passengers have their own devolved representative body: London TravelWatch, which is funded by the Greater London Authority.
But why is a publicly-funded body needed to test and influence DfT’s policies from a passenger point of view? The ‘bonfire of the quangos’ consumed 192 agencies, but Passenger Focus survived – just. “From May to October 2010 we were on the bonfire, and the assumption was that we would go,” recalls Smith. Instead, the organisation lost 45 per cent of its budget and 28 staff: Passenger Focus now employs 39 people, largely within its London-based research unit and a Manchester back office team.
Smith believes that Passenger Focus was retained chiefly because of its complaints-handling role: the agency’s only executive function. “Could the government do it? Not really, because as specifier and regulator of a large part of the system, they would be judging complaints against themselves. It would be seen as too incestuous,” he argues.
He adds that the particular mix of public and private interests involved in running the railways makes a taxpayer-funded, arm’s-length consumer body appropriate. “The government is putting huge sums of public money into the railways, specifying services which are supplied on a monopoly basis by the private sector. Normally, you would rely on competition to drive consumer protection. There is no body like this in the telecommunications sector because there is competition. The ongoing presence of the government and the taxpayer legitimates having a body in the middle that has no affiliation to any of the other parties,” he explains.
The coalition’s Big Society initiative seeks to give those outside government a bigger role in shaping policy, but Smith denies that Passenger Focus’s work drowns out the voices of passenger-led pressure groups. He argues that smaller local groups often take advantage of Passenger Focus research to back up their own arguments. It also provides a national, evidence-based voice, he adds, where the alternative would be a myriad of potentially competing local voices.
Smith claims that the agency’s research-based approach has met with success in improving the lot of passengers. Its twice-yearly national surveys of rail and bus passenger opinion are taken seriously by operators, he argues, because none of them want to be bottom of the tables; indeed, in some cases chief executives’ remuneration is partly based upon the results. Some providers even commission tracker surveys, so that they are not surprised by the results when they appear. Smith’s background includes a stint working for the Consumers’ Association, which publishes Which? magazine, and he says other areas of policy – such as health and education – could also benefit from a “consumerist” approach.
In 2007, then-transport secretary Ruth Kelly announced that government subsidy for the railways would be reduced gradually, with a greater proportion of the cost being transferred to fare-payers through above-inflation price increases. The policy has led to price rises of 10 per cent or more on some routes, at a time of economic hardship. However, in May 2011 Sir Roy McNulty’s report for the coalition government delivered a damning verdict on the efficiency of the railways, raising questions over whether hard-pressed passengers should be asked to pay more until the DfT and rail operators put their own houses in order. While current transport secretary Justine Greening plainly wants passengers to help pay for rail investments, she has called in a rail command paper for the industry to cut annual running costs by £3.5bn.
“I think this government has realised, following the McNulty review, that the industry is chronically inefficient and you can’t keep dumping the cost on passengers,” says Smith. “For the first time ever, people are starting to talk about transport poverty, where people are spending more than ten per cent of their income on rail fares.” He applauds Greening’s decision to restrict rail ticket price rises last year to one per cent above the rate of inflation. This year, fares are set to rise steeply again, by inflation plus three per cent: Smith calls on the transport secretary to cut price growth once more next year, keeping the heat off hard-pressed passengers.
When rail franchises come up for review over the course of the next 12 months, bidders will be able to secure contracts of 15 years rather than the five- to eight-year franchises of the past. Smith says that makes it more important than ever that the terms specified by government should be based upon the improvements that passengers want to see, and that targets for passenger satisfaction should be built into contracts.
“Passengers consistently want the same things: punctuality; frequency of service; getting a seat; good information during disruption; and shorter ticket queues,” says Smith. “They want franchisees who can deliver on the basics, and the government will want operators to save money without affecting the consumer experience. That will be a big challenge.”