Transport secretary Heidi Alexander announces plans for a major overhaul of Britain’s railways, including the creation of Great British Railways. Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00So we're setting up Great British Railways, which is a brand new public sector organisation,
00:05to bring together the management of the track and the train so that we can deliver a more
00:10reliable train service for people and better value for money for taxpayers.
00:14Alongside that, we're announcing a tough new passenger watchdog so that we can put the
00:19passenger at the heart of everything that the railways do.
00:23So I'm impatient for change on the railways, I know that the public are, and we've got
00:28a programme to improve reliability as of today, because I can't accept that passengers turn
00:35up at a platform and a train never arrives, or that they sit on a train that is hugely
00:40delayed.
00:41One of the changes that Great British Railways will make is stripping out some of the duplication
00:47that we see at the moment.
00:49We've got hundreds of people employed by train operating companies whose job it is to determine
00:55who to blame for delays.
00:56If you're sat on a delayed train, you're not interested in who to blame, you're interested
01:01in that problem being prevented from happening, but train operating companies are doing that
01:06because they then claim compensation from Network Rail, it's this ludicrous financial
01:10merry-go-round.
01:11We've got to sweep away all of that fragmentation and inefficiency.
01:17That will come with Great British Railways, but in the meantime, we're focused on getting
01:21a seven-day railway where those trains are as likely to turn up on a Sunday as they are
01:27on a Monday morning, and we're focused on getting the basics right.
01:30So LNER, for example, a publicly-owned train operating company, has reduced to almost zero
01:36the number of cancellations that are linked to the unavailability of staff.
01:40Southeastern Trains is now in the top five for punctuality, and so I know that passengers
01:48have had to put up with a broken railway for far too long.
01:51We've got to deliver more reliable services, but we've also got to deliver better value
01:55for money for the taxpayer.