First thing I heard on the radio this morning was that the East Coast Mainline (train service from Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Peterborough, London) is to be taken into public ownership.

Can NAMES NOW BE NAMED.

Who exactly is responsible for this ongoing debacle on the railways? Which particular senior civil servants, which politicians (John Major was an instigator), which consultancy firms. Well, hopefully I for one are about to find out as I’ve sent off a Freedom of Information request.

I have a particular interest because for the past six years I’ve used the service on a regular basis. It is slow, unreliable, and increasingly more and more expensive. When the service was run by GNER, it was possible to get a ticket to London for around £11.00.  Under ‘National Express’ that ticket increased to £12.50 and then to £15.00. Then a few weeks ago, without any announcement or explanation, the cheapest tickets could no longer be brought before mid-day, or after 2.30pm coming out of London. The cheapest ticket to leave London after 4pm have more or less now gone up to around £96.00. The reality is that althought I buy cheap tickets, I also quite often buy more expensive tickets as well. There is a quid pro quo here. My averaage journey cost isn’t £15.00 – it’s much higher because I also use the railway on an unscheduled basis. I can make it affordable by buying cheap and not so cheap tickets. What I can’t afford is to pay high fares for every single journey I make.

There were two serious flaws with the award of the contract to National Express. Firstly, the contract management was done within the *minimum* EU rules for procurement, and it was done over a Christmas holiday period. Rail experts, and other companies that were considering a bid, complained about the way the contract was managed AT THE TIME.

Secondly, the amount that National Express said they could pay back was ludicrious. Again, experts pointed  this out at the time. But no – the clever, clever civil service know much more than the industry experts. So they swalled National Express daft claims and now, yet again, the whole franchise is in turmoil.

How much exactly has this cost the taxpayer? I can’t help thinking that if the whole process had been MANAGED PROPERLY then perhaps the cheap tickets could have been maintained. Perhaps all the money spent changing the signs of the stations, and painting logos on trains could have been saved. Perhaps all the money spent on lawyers and advisers could have been spent on ensuring that at least the basic things of the railway – crucial things like ’signals’ actually work – day after day after day.

So why do we blog? Because trying to get the voice of reason heard within government feels like a waste of time. Hoping the government will make the right decisions is a futile optimism. So at one level blogging helps us let off steam; it becomes the new democracy, because out there in cyberspace someone might be listening, unlike in the corridors of Whitehall or the chamber of the House of Commons.