The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) have at long last acknowledged that TransPennine Express are misusing 'p-coding' to withdraw train services the evening before they're due to run. I'm actually fairly surprised at how far they've been willing to go on the record:
www.theguardian.com
They also stress the need for what they call "full public transparency" - heavily implying that TPE are deliberately not being as transparent as they could. It's good to see at last an official acknowledgement that TPE were never permitted to use p-coding in this manner in the first place, and they have been getting away with it for over a year. The rationale is sensibly put by ORR:
UK rail firms ordered to stop abusing train cancellations loophole
Cancellations far higher than official data suggests, says ORR, driven by use of unrecorded ‘pre-cancellations’
They are also taking steps order to prevent further untruths from being published, they will start counting any p-coding done for resource unavailability separately in order to publish more transparent performance statistics, by considering PPM cancellations or failures alongside any services p-coded due to unavailable resources. They're also asking Network Rail coordinate and reassess the way performance statistics are produced. I wonder if ORR would have been spurred into this if Guardian and other journalists hadn't been hot on it for months now? And how have the Department allowed such a serious failure of senior management overseeing this at one of their contractors?
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