Another gem from the minister for rail!
Given as a written answer on the 4th November...
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon, Conservative)
It was never the intention to use the historic performance of directly operated railways as a comparator for future franchise bids. The nature of rail operations means that their circumstances change over time with infrastructure and rolling stock investment as well as changes in track access charges and the performance of the wider economy, which makes comparing any franchise to another or even to historical data on itself imprudent.
However, as with all franchise competitions, the Department has developed a comparator model to assess franchise bids against that is informed by base data from the current operator.
What's that sound? It's the sound of DfT taking a chainsaw to the only believable benchmark of a new operators' performance!
Grimsby and Back
3 years ago
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