Is this information all manually typed though? You may be right, but it could also be since the number of carriages the service is supposed to have was revised, the system isn't displaying what that number should otherwise be.
As much as I agree that deception is bad, putting it in the franchise agreement is meaningless because franchise agreements aren't enforced in any way. GA have completed almost none of their franchise obligations and seemingly have no intention of fulfilling some of them from what I've read - why would this be any different? In my opinion a separate requirement for all TOCs should be set, not just GA, to specify minimum target levels of punctuality, facility availability (particularly PRM facilities) and capacity (i.e. target maximum number of short forms). If/when TOCs fail to meet those, on any given day they should be hit with similar penalties to delay minutes but also should have to make the statistics for such public to discourage it from being allowed to happen in the first place.
If it's manually typed or not really doesn't bother me, it's just the fact that we all know that the reporting section of the Greater Anglia website cannot be trusted and grossly under reports short forms, they've reduced allocations so the short forms previously reported on services for weeks/months no longer show (which seemed to happen just as there was an increase of people complaining at high numbers of short formed serviced on JourneyCheck) and now when short forms happen they're not even showing how short they are. All this stinks of a self serving attitude and a company that is more interested in protecting it's own image rather than being transparent about the issues and delays.
For all of the spin, taking credit for work of others, defensiveness, crafty ways of changing less favourable statistics, blaming of everyone other than themselves, Greater Anglia haven't even uttered a single coherent word of apology over the last number of months to their customers or to explain the current situation and the obvious delays in the roll-out of the new stock and the resulting ropey service. They just carry on in their own little bubble like everything is rosy, since to borrow and tweak a Jeremy Corbyn phrase, it feels like the senior management believe that the company is 'run for me, not for you' and image is the most important thing.
You are right though that there are breaches of franchise all over the place and Greater Anglia are far from the only operator to be doing it. Many of the things about fleet availability, punctuality and short forms are actually reported on and there are franchise targets for these things. However the way things are reported is clearly insufficient or operators have found a way around them, because Greater Anglia claim they are only short forming 1 service a day on their network in October which is hilarious and tells you all you need to know about the inadequacies of the way these figures are reported if GA are able to get away with reporting figures such as that, which clearly have no basis on reality to what is happening in reality as we have all seen on JourneyCheck.
Generally I'm not one of those big critics at privatisation like many on this forum, but when you see such a dysfunctional DFT where they award people franchises with over-ambitious bids over and over again, who time and time again cannot deliver the goods, with the DFT then sitting back and basically letting them get away with it, it's pretty hard to defend the current industry. This whole practice then just encourages the realistic bidders to be more unrealistic in the future to create a vicious circle in the knowledge they don't need to deliver half what they promised and the passengers lose out because they don't see the improvements they deserve. Simply it isn't working at the moment and I hope the forthcoming changes really fix a lot of these issues but I don't hold my breath.
