Northern runs buses instead of trains at Christmas as it agrees to use faxes

A major rail operator in the North of England is using fax machines to schedule staff and will have to ask bus operators to bring back their services by next Christmas, it has emerged.

Bosses at Northern – which run 2,500 services a day across major cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle – were pulled into an emergency meeting of the Transport for the North (TfN) committee on Wednesday over of its appalling performance.

i revealed last month how the operator was canceling many trains more than four years after they were put into public hands.

Northern is being operated by Operator of Last Resort (OLR), an arms-length business owned by the Department for Transport (DfT), as of 2020.

The OLR is to take all railway companies under its control as part of Labour’s plans to nationalize the railways.

But four years after Northern Railways was appointed, chief executive Tricia Williams and chief operating officer Matt Rice admitted it still needed the Government’s approval to resolve the staffing problems causing the clear up to 7,000 per month.

Northern needs “direction” from the DfT and the Treasury to accept Holiday Working agreements with drivers and Sunday working with conductors, a conference heard on Wednesday.

Henri Murison, chief executive of the advocacy group Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said Northern’s improvements could have been made much faster under the OLR.

He said: “We are many years into this arrangement and there is still a lot to be done. i.

“I am concerned that, as the Government continues to privatise, the current way of running the railway companies is not working.

“Great British Railways will need to prioritize accountability by northern leaders who would have had greater power to address these shortcomings.

“The previous Secretaries of State have failed the North by giving the state without an effective structure to improve the shortcomings of the former private sector workers.”

OLR and the Department of Transport have been contacted for comment.

Ms Williams said the rail company had suffered from “a lot of under-investment”, and that she had recently met Transport Secretary Louise Haigh to discuss improvements.

Earlier this summer, Northern was served with an “infringement notice” because the operator’s cancellation rate exceeded 7 percent.

However, northern transport leaders, including Greater Manchester mayor and TfN committee chair Andy Burnham, say Northern’s reform plan is “not enough”.

Mr Rice admitted the operator would have to look at increasing “bus bookings” to replace the services it could not provide before Christmas.

“We are a bit reluctant to bring buses… but our job is actually to transport people, and if we can’t transport them by train, we will increase our efforts in November and prepare for December , by bus. arrangement,” he said.

Mr Rice also admitted that it was “surprising” North was still using fax machines to communicate with staff.

“People will say ‘how did we get thirty years of privacy, when money was being poured in trains and you’re talking about fax machines in 2024?'” asked Mr Burnham.

“I think that’s a very fair question, our job is to eliminate them,” Mr Rice replied.

The TfN committee said it would urgently write to Chancellor Rachel Reeves to ask the Government to resolve Northern’s contract issues as soon as possible.

Critics said Labor was taking a “big risk” by asking OLR to take control of other rail companies as part of its plans to nationalize rail.

Andy Bagnall, chief executive of Rail Partners, which represents the private sector, called the move “political and not a practical solution”.

He said i: “Public and private operators face very similar issues of industrial relations, reliability and infrastructure constraints.

Simply changing who runs the trains will not solve these problems, in fact, it can be very costly in the long run.