The North of England‘s biggest train operator is still using fax machines to organise staff and will have to ask bus operators to replace its services in the run-up Christmas, it has emerged.
Bosses at Northern – which runs 2,500 services a day across major cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle – were hauled into an emergency meeting of the Transport for the North (TfN) committee on Wednesday due to its appalling performance.
i revealed last month how the operator is cancelling more trains than ever four years after being brought into public ownership.
Northern has been run by the Operator of Last Resort (OLR), an arms-length business owned by the Department for Transport (DfT), since 2020.
The OLR is due to take all train companies under its control as part of Labour’s plans to nationalise the railways.
But four years after Northern Railways was nationalised, managing director Tricia Williams and chief operating officer Matt Rice admitted it still needs Government approval to sort out staffing issues which are causing up to 7,000 cancellations per month.
Northern requires a “mandate” from both the DfT and the Treasury to approve Rest Day Working agreements with drivers and Sunday working with conductors, the meeting heard on Wednesday.
Ms Williams said the train company has suffered from “significant underinvestment”, and that she had recently met with Transport Secretary Louise Haigh discuss improvements.
Earlier this summer, Northern was issued with a “breach notice” because the level of cancellations which fall on the operator went above 7 per cent.
However, northern transport leaders, including Greater Manchester mayor and chair of the TfN committee Andy Burnham, said Northern’s remediation plan is “not good enough”.
Mr Rice admitted that the operator will have to look at increasing “bus provision” to replace the services it is unable to provide in the run-up to Christmas.
“We’re kind of reluctant to bring buses to bear… but fundamentally our job is moving people and if we can’t move them by train, we’re going to amplify our efforts in November and then getting ready for December, with bus provision,” he said.
Mr Rice also acknowledged that “amazingly” Northern is still using fax machines to communicate with staff.
“People will say ‘how come we had three decades of privatisation, when money was being poured into the railway and you are still communicating by fax machines in 2024?’” asked Mr Burnham.
“I think it’s a very fair question, our job is to get rid of them,” Mr Rice replied.
The TfN committee said it would be writing to Chancellor Rachel Reeves as a matter of urgency to ask that the Government resolve Northern’s contract issues as soon as possible.
Critics have said Labour is taking a “huge risk” by asking the OLR to take on the management of further train companies as part of its plans for rail nationalisation.
Andy Bagnall, chief executive of Rail Partners which represents private operators, has called the move a “political rather than a practical solution”.
He told i: “Public and private operators face exactly the same issues of industrial relations, reliability and infrastructure constraints.
“Simply changing who runs the trains isn’t going to solve these problems, in fact, it’s likely to be more costly over time.”