Record £12.5m fine for SWT

SouthWest Trains was today fined a record £12.5 million for late, cancelled and overcrowded services.

Four London commuter companies, SWT, South Central, Thameslink and Silverlink, are condemned in an official report for severe levels of overcrowding. Each regularly carried more standing passengers than permitted under the regulations.

Some improvement, but could do much better, is the damning conclusion of the report from the governing Strategic Rail Authority (SRA). It reveals that, nationwide, one in five train services ran late for the year ending in March. There is much improvement over the year - but with passengers paying the highest fares in Europe, conditions remain far short of what they demand.

Wendy Toms, the rail watchdog, said: "Clearly there has been a big increase in performance but there is still a long way to go."

In the first three months of this year 23 out of the 25 passenger train companies did improve their timekeeping - but overall punctuality at 80.9 per cent was only marginally better than the 79 per cent achieved during July to September.

The SWT fine is the largest to be levied on the UK's passenger train operators for poor service, according to the SRA report. It presents Alistair Darling, the new Transport Secretary, with grim reading over the continuing poor state of the industry.

The eight principal commuter companiesserving the capital are fined more than £41 million for bad service - though the size of the fine is down substantially on the previous 12 months because of the improvements. Only SWT, which carries 350,000 passengers a day and operates local and long distance services into mainline Waterloo station, had its fine increased compared with 12 months ago.

Stephen Byers, in one of his last acts as Transport Secretary before he resigned, warned SWT that unless performance improved it would lose the proposed 15-year franchise extension. The Stagecoach-owned company will put much of the blame on union strike action which cancelled trains and ruined the timetables of those which did run.

South Central, which includes the Brighton line, is fined £5.5 million for late and cancelled trains and for running services with not enough carriages. The fine, however, is also down dramatically from the £9.2 million imposed last year. Connex is fined £4.7 million, down from £12.6 million.

In total the UK's passenger train companies were fined £84 million for poor service compared with £102 million 12 months ago.

Mrs Toms, chairman of the Rail Passengers Council for Southern England, said the fines were "bad news" because they showed the high level of continuing poor service. Overcrowding, she added, continues to be a "very real" problem on London commuter routes. The number of standing passengers will increase, said Mrs Toms, because new trains have fewer seats than the old ones they are replacing.