In a surprising turn of events, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR), the UK’s rail regulator, has acknowledged that it “did not have all the facts” when it initially decided to prohibit passengers from travelling on a peak-time train service between Manchester and London.
The ORR’s chief executive, John Larkinson, has admitted that his organisation was unaware of critical details about the service, including the fact that it would be “fully crewed” and depart from Manchester Piccadilly rather than a depot, as well as the requirement for the train to reach Euston in time to become the 09:30 GMT service to Glasgow.
“The information that later became available to us meant that our assumption turned out to be incorrect,” Larkinson said in a letter to the chair of Parliament’s Transport Committee, Ruth Cadbury.
The ORR’s decision, which would have turned the service into a ‘ghost train’ running daily for months, faced significant backlash, including from Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander. The regulator had initially justified the move by claiming the service had to run empty to provide a “firebreak” – a planned gap in the timetable in case of delays.
However, Larkinson acknowledged that the facts that later emerged meant the slot could no longer be considered an effective firebreak. He admitted that the ORR team assessing the application did not ask Avanti, the train operating company, for further information, which would have clarified the situation.
“If the ORR team had contacted Avanti, our decision may have been different, but they were stretched and trying to close out multiple interacting decisions,” Larkinson said.
The ORR was dealing with 82 “complex and competing” applications for track access at the time, and even when Avanti complained in early November, the points they made were not “escalated appropriately,” according to Larkinson’s letter.
Describing the incident as “an unusual case,” Larkinson took full responsibility and stated that the ORR is “strengthening our processes to reflect the lessons we have learned.”
Cadbury, the Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth, responded by saying the public was “understandably baffled” by the ORR’s initial decision, which seemed “strange” given that the train was popular and profitable. She welcomed the regulator’s detailed explanation and acknowledgment of responsibility, and said the Transport Committee will look for ways to avoid similar instances in the future as the government establishes Great British Railways.