I’ve been moaning a lot on Twitter these past few weeks about (and to) the company that run the rail franchise that I have to use to get to and from work. So much so, I’m now boring myself! The failures of Govia, which includes Southern Rail and Thameslink are well documented, and seemingly never-ending. The company appear to have carte blanche to cancel hundreds of services daily and in fact, are now approved to do so by the Government.
I’m sure the reasons for the appalling service are complex and multiple – I’ve read both sides of the published story: The unions who feel their members are being treated unfairly and the company who blame the unions and their staff for the problems, while penalising them through removal of train passes and, allegedly, overtime. But by far the biggest cost is to the passengers.
I leave home at 7am every day and I return at 7.45pm if I leave work bang on time, without working any extra hours or staying late to go out. It’s not a big deal, lots of people work long hours and I choose to live outside London so I can live in something larger than a shoe box. But my ability to do so is completely and utterly reliant on a functioning public transport system, where delays and cancellations are the exception, not the norm.
On any one day in the past few weeks, over 500 services have been cancelled on the Brighton to London line PER DAY, and today new timetables have been announced that cull 2 services an hour – 341 trains a day. Basically they are cancelling trains to avoid having to cancel trains and yet, with these cuts come no reduction in fares. Yep, the £4,600 or so I pay every year will now buy me 15-25% less service. Regardless of whose fault it is, it is quite astonishing that customers are picking up the brunt, both financially and emotionally, of this catastrophic mis-management.
I say emotionally, because I believe it is true that this disruption on people’s daily lives – on their ability to get to work, to hospital appointments, to job interviews and to go on days out has a tangible affect on stress levels, mental wellbeing and overall happiness. Not being able to get home to your partner, to pick your kids up or arrive home safely after a night out with friends is atrocious. You can’t guarantee getting to work on time – if you work for yourself that has a direct cost – and you can’t guarantee being able to get home on time. So all social arrangements are out of the window. Personally it causes me anxiety and frustration and increases my stress levels. I know they record punctuality and service performance, but I bet no one is recording impact on individuals and their stress levels during this disruption.
An Office of National statistics report published in 2014 looked at the relationship between commuting and personal wellbeing and the results probably weren’t that surprising, though I’m not sure the research asked questions around reliability of service as a factor to influence stress or unhappiness. It said that commuters who spend 60-90 minutes travelling to work each morning suffer the most, and are the most miserable of all of those surveyed. ‘The effects of commuting on personal wellbeing were greatest for anxiety and happiness, suggesting that commuting affects day-to-day emotions’, the report states.
So, how would they now measure the effects of harder/longer journeys to work, regular disruption, longer days – all brought about by the inability of Govia to run their business properly? I did a straw poll on Twitter (where else!) and the response was overwhelmingly that the situation is causing anxiety and frustration, and in two cases, caused people to actually change jobs. Overcrowding is also a huge issue for people, inducing claustrophobia and panic attacks.
But I bet no one is really surveying customers or thinking about customer experience right now. And I wonder how many current passengers would choose to use the company if they had any other option at all? Very few I would imagine. I also wonder if customer experience or brand reputation matters when you run a service that is effectively a monopoly over one of the busiest London-bound commuter routes and the Government gives you a billion pound to do so? And I also wonder how much you really care when your customers don’t receive full refunds while your CEO pockets £2.1m in bonuses?
At least I’ve got lots of free time, waiting for cancelled trains, to ponder it.