Today's Rail Summit: More misery in store for train users?

This afternoon I joined MPs from across South Eastern England at a meeting with the Rail Minister, Clare Perry, and officials for the Department for Transport. Like any regular train user in Brighton I am sick and tired of hearing half-baked excuses from the Government and train companies for the abysmal service on offer.

I went to the meeting hoping for answers but, unfortunately, it looks likely that more misery is in store for those of us who travel by train.

Indeed only this morning there were terrible delays on the Brighton mainline - and they were well documented by the many angry Twitters users stuck on their way to work:

In today's meeting the Department of Transport acknowledged the deep problems afflicting this franchise. Yet passengers' experiences are currently getting worse, not better. The time for excuses is over - if radical improvements are not made in 6 months, the Minister should take back the franchise from GTR and run it as a directly operated railway, as they successfully did with the East Coast Mainline.

The promise of new trains - which officials said in today's meeting would happen this year- will offer cold comfort to rail users who lose hours of their time through multiple failures caused by a variety of problems beyond the old rolling stock on the line.

With Southern handing out dividends of £25m in 2014 - I urged rail bosses to rule out handing over any more cash to shareholders until the service drastically improves. Furthermore I pressed the Minister on the Tory manifesto commitment to giving refunds to passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more (not just 30 minutes as it is at the moment), and she pledged to bring that forward "shortly".

If the situation is not resolved by July then I simply cannot see any justification whatsoever for the Government failing to step in. The East Coast mainline was run extremely effectively by wholly Government-owned Directly Operated Railways (DOR) – which is exactly what should happen to this franchise unless its service improves dramatically in the coming weeks. Both the Government and the train operators need to buck up their ideas and fix up their act.

Rail users are sick and tired of being treated with contempt - I'll be fighting their corner every step of the way.

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