Northern’s rail woes expose challenge of reform — and a stuck nation

Good morning from Manchester. At face value, the saga of Northern Rail might just appear to be about a single, perennially struggling local train operator. 

But it also tells a wider story. Northern’s woes amply encapsulate the frustrations of a British electorate who, only a few months ago, voted for stuff to work again. 

And in parallel, they underline how hard it may be for the Labour government to swiftly make that stuff work. 

For fax sake

If you’re reading this in the north of England, you won’t need me to describe the Northern Rail experience.

If you’re not, let me summarise. Northern runs 2,500 daily services (or is supposed to) across the north. Its performance has been sufficiently notorious over the past decade or so for it to be routinely dubbed Northern Fail.

Ten years ago, chancellor George Osborne promised “not just better services, and more seats at peak times, but also better journeys” under a new franchise.

By 2020, regional leaders infuriated by its failures, lobbied Tory ministers to renationalise the operation. They did. Things stabilised for a bit. And then, earlier this year, performance again nosedived, when Northern once more began cancelling hundreds of services at short notice. 

Since April, it has breached its contract three times due to poor performance and has frequently issued blanket “do not travel” warnings on Sundays. 

You get the picture. Exactly the sort of thing that underpinned the “broken Britain” sentiment that dominated July’s election. 

Yet sometimes it takes one thing to crystallise a deeper sentiment. And in the case of Northern, that thing was fax machines. 

Last week, at yet another emergency meeting of northern leaders about its problems — a show I’d seen many, many times before, starring different northern operators at different times — it transpired that Northern still uses fax to communicate with its drivers. There was, it turned out, no trade union agreement in place for drivers to switch to email. 

Inside the rail industry, this raised worryingly few eyebrows. But for travelling northerners, it perfectly encapsulated their day-to-day experience.  

Faxes represented an instant shorthand for the north’s shared rail reality: the many and varied failures of operators Northern, TransPennine Express and Avanti West Coast over the past decade, plus a string of stalled or cancelled infrastructure upgrades.

Fax machines also had full-decibel echoes of ancient, draughty 1980s Pacer trains, which only retired from Northern’s network in 2020. So the entire episode spoke to a wider regional grievance. 

Meanwhile, for the country as a whole, it summed up a broader sense of being nationally stuck — if not sliding backwards. (In that context, news that the NHS also still uses fax came as little succour or surprise.)

As for the government, sweeping rail nationalisation is part of its plan to “fix the foundations” of Britain. 

Yet here was an already nationalised rail operator failing on performance, while still using technology dating back 30 years-plus to the last time rail services were nationalised. 

No quick fix

The faxes, in reality, are the tip of the iceberg.

Northern relies on voluntary overtime in order to run its services. This is not unique to Northern, for it is how the British railway is run in the 21st century. In the words of one of its managers last week, this is a “heavily volunteer railway”.

But Northern’s previous “rest day working” agreement with trade unions — which provided for a standard overtime payment — expired in 2023. And as a lossmaking service with no spare cash, now under public control, a mandate to strike a new deal was required from the Treasury. None was forthcoming. 

With sickness running 80 per cent higher than before Covid and large numbers of drivers off roster for training, a lack of backfill then led to a wave of cancellations.

Northern also has a range of other industrial relations issues, dating back to its original formation from three previous operators.

Guards in the east of its footprint have agreements to work Sundays. In the west, they don’t.   

So hundreds of services have also been cancelled every Sunday in the north west, for months, due to lack of cover. That’s thousands of services cancelled around Manchester during that period, when the national mission is growth.

One driver describes an additional legacy agreement that means those based in Northern’s east region, such as Leeds, “can’t go past Manchester Victoria”. Like the fax machines, on the outside, this looks like utter madness.

In the last few days a three-year rest day working agreement has finally been agreed with Aslef, which is major progress. But that will have cost money — and Sunday working remains unresolved. A slashed Christmas timetable may yet be announced in the coming weeks as a result.

And fax machines? Who knows. It is simply one of 2024’s remaining unmedicated headaches. 

Which takes us to nationalisation. Under Labour’s current plans, each privately run rail operation will be taken back in-house as its contract expires, several of them as soon as next year. 

Many around the sector, as well as the Tories and (privately) some local Labour politicians on the ground, have noted that no strings were attached to the new government’s swift September pay deal with the sector as a whole — a 15 per cent rise over three years, designed to end a seemingly endless wave of national industrial action. 

Transport secretary Louise Haigh has promised to subsequently tackle the “hard yards” of wider workplace reform. 

Hard as they may well be, change will have to happen if delivery is to be demonstrated.

Northern’s scale, historic under-investment and complexity does, in fairness, make it a particularly tough nut to crack. But it won’t be the only operator with stubborn problems: take the endless travails of Avanti West Coast.  

“If the government is going to bring in all the train operators,” said one local transport official, “there’s a significant challenge around reform, in terms of standardisation of terms and conditions across the industry.”

It is not clear how much money the government is attaching to such reform. Haigh has promised to “move fast and fix things”; there is a belief in her team that the requisite investment will be recouped many times over through rising ridership. But the Treasury is historically at least as hard a nut to crack as Aslef.

And last week’s meeting sent a note of caution.

“I would hasten to say, at this point,” said managing director Tricia Williams, “that there is no quick fix.”

Now try this

I very rarely binge watch anything in one night, but the exception to the rule is The Diplomat, Netflix’s pacy, charismatic political thriller. Last year I was genuinely furious at 2.30am, faced with a cliffhanger that left me waiting months until series two.

Now the second series has managed to pull off the same trick, leaving me wide-awake well past midnight raging at the inordinate hiatus until series three.

Please watch it, so I have more people to share in my frustration. 

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