He wrote that he and senior colleagues “have spoken to and corresponded with many customers as well as meeting with a high proportion of MPs along the route.”

And guess what, they have decided to improve the compensation package for season ticket holders (annual season ticket holders will now get a 7 percent discount and weekly ticket holders a further two free tickets).  He also announced investment in trains and also in better communications technology for staff when future problems happen.

Anyone would think there was an election in the offing.

Perhaps they are finally smelling the coffee.  But it has come so late that it will do little to quell the fury of travellers.

I am knocking on doors across the constituency and the feedback is the same everywhere.  Only last evening I met a voter in London Colney who told me that she had lost a promotion at work because of her problems getting into work on time over so many months – and this is just one voter among many.

This announcement still provides for less than one month’s free travel for annual ticket holders.  It still does absolutely nothing for regular off-peak travellers for whom it does not make sense to buy season tickets because they work from home some days a week or their work demands that they travel outside peak hours.

The Delay Repay scheme so trumpeted by FCC is despised by everyone for its complexity and meannesss.

As for the announcements on train and station investment, this is what they should be doing as franchisee.  It is welcome to have the confirmation that improvements are finally underway, but for many it will feel like bolting the stable door.

The picture taken by Gary Shore of Gaslight shows Norman and myself telling the audience at the end of the meeting that we were off to The Goat, where Norman had performed in a gig back in 1978, long before he got into Parliament and achieved his current reputation as a tireless campaigner and Liberal Democrat spokesman on transport.

But first of all there was the serious stuff.   Chris White, leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition on Herts County Council, opened the meeting and set the context.  I then covered all FCC’s multiple failings which have been well rehearsed previously in this blog – just type First Capital Connect into the search box on the right hand side.  I pointed out that statutory mechanisms exist for franchises to be taken back temporarily into public sector management as has happened with East Coast Mainlines currently and previously happened with the terrible Connex.

The audience was then invited to share their own experiences,  and we had a stream of interesting comments and questions, including whether it is now possible for FCC to lose their franchise.

Norman listened hard to all the points and interjections, and then gave a thoughtful and detailed response, showing a considerable grasp of First Group and FCC’s history and performance both on Thameslink and elsewhere.  He reeled off the statistics on FCC’s relative performance not just over this last winter but for the previous few years and showed how they had consistently under-performed the rest of the rail industry.

He agreed with members of the audience that FCC’s business choice not to employ a sufficient number of drivers and rely disproportionately on rest day working barely justified the argument that all the consequential train cancellations were the result of force majeure when the drivers quite legally refused to play ball.  Since this was the basis of the Department for Transport deciding FCC were not in breach of their franchise obligations, it does indicate an unhealthily close relationship between ministers, officials and franchisees.

The core of his argument was that current franchise arrangements are far too Treasury-focused when they should be passenger-focused.  So the franchises were taken away from Sea Containers and National Express on East Coast Mainlines when they failed to pay the Treasury, while no similar action was taken against FCC when they failed their passengers.  We have a railway run for the Treasury and not for the public.

He was adamant that FCC should not have any franchise extension after the end of the current term in 2012 and that they had to be on  notice for any further failure to deliver their promises to passengers.

Norman ended by painting a vision of longer franchises with passenger-focused targets rather that Treasury ones.  He highlighted the investment being made by Chiltern Railways (which has a 22 year term) in a brand new stretch of track which will create a new route from Oxford to London.  More money could be pumped into the system by making Network Rail match international benchmarks for efficiency and so lower the industry’s costs, by cutting expenditure on new motorways, and by channelling funds through the new National Infrastructure Bank envisioned by Vince Cable.

And on a final note, he alerted us to announcements to be made later this week by the Liberal Democrats on a new vision for fares and better ways of compensating passengers for poor performance.  Watch this space.

The mechanism exists for rail franchises to be handed back if franchisees fail to deliver the promised service.  FCC seems to have had a charmed life in hanging on to its lucrative monopoly, it is time that passengers had their say.

So we are calling a public meeting for next Tuesday 16 March to discuss whether FCC should now lose their franchise.  The main speaker will be my friend Norman Baker MP, Liberal Democrat Transport Spokesman in the House of Commons.  The meeting will take place at Marlborough Road Methodist Church in the centre of the city (see directions here) and starts at 7.00 pm with doors opening at 6.30 pm – so do put the date in your diary!

When I successfully proposed my motion on rail franchises at last autumn’s Liberal Democrat conference, Norman summed up the debate.  The Daily Mail has described him as having ‘consistently been a thorn in the Government’s side’. In 2001 he was named “Inquisitor of the Year” in the Zurich/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards and, in February 2002, he won the Channel 4 Opposition MP of the Year Award.

It’s going to be a lively meeting, I hope to see you there.

The arrival and departure boards at St Albans City gleamed with on-time trains tonight. How different from recent months.  And what a coincidence that the FCC top management were doing their Meet the Managers (or “Face the Music”) session, not to mention more radio and television crews as well as local media than you could shake a stick at.

It’s nice to know an on-time service can be delivered.  More please.

FCC certainly has “transformed” travel but not perhaps in the way that the marketing copywriters had intended.

Ms Grant was there with Neal Lawson, the new MD of FCC, to meet Norman Baker MP, the LibDem shadow transport secretary, and fellow LibDem MPs Tom Brake and Paul Burstow, both of whom represent constituencies “served” by FCC.  Also present was Bill Bradshaw, former Director of Strategy for British Rail and now LibDem transport spokesman in the House of Lords.  Norman had kindly asked me to join them, together with Nigel Quinton, my counterpart in Hitchin & Harpenden.

At least there were no New Labour crocodile tears.  But no tears at all really.  Some routine expressions of regret – “how we inconvenienced passengers was unacceptable” – but I had no sense that they truly understood just how horrible the last few months have been for local commuters.  As a met police detective said to me last night, “Ive never had such an awful time.”  We heard a lot of excuses and “force majeure” was dusted down rather a lot.

There was some explanation of what went wrong.  The new 377 class trains delivered late by Bombardier so that driver training had to be compressed, taking a lot of drivers away from their daily duties.  Lack of new trains meant the old trains had to stay in service and miss key modifications.  As a result more need to rely on goodwill from the remaining drivers in terms of rest day working.  Mix in an unpopular pay proposal.  Have the inevitable teething problems with new trains, add snow, stir well and wait for chaos.

I listed just some of the litany of complaints I have received, particularly the niggardliness and complexity of the compensation packages, and I compared it with the much more generous terms offered to travellers in Berlin who experienced a similar collapse in service.  I particularly criticised the Delay Repay scheme, echoing many comments made to me by St Albans travellers.

Ms Grant told us that they had already processed 73,000 delay repay schemes, with many more coming in.  When pressed, she conceded that they were being as flexible as possible.  Firstly the 30 minute delay is being measured against the original timetable and not the emergency one.  I am not sure this has been clearly communicated so I am communicating it now.  Secondly they are waiving all time limits for claims.  Thirdly they will not demand tickets or receipts as long as there is some evidence of travel, for example a credit card bill.  I report all this because it may allow people to bump up their own personal compensation, albeit through a tediously bureaucratic process.

I suspect it won’t help the occasional traveller even when they are regular users – I have had numbers of comments from people who travel into London off peak or no more than three times a week.  In both cases there is no need for them to have season tickets and they slip through the net.

I told her about inaudible announcements at West Hampstead, rude and offensive staff at St Pancras, and flakey text alerts.  I told her that FCC was deep in the mire and would have a long journey to recover any respect from its customers.  “God is in the detail” I said – they will have to be perfect in every aspect – clean toilets, clean stations and rolling stock, excellent timekeeping, good real time communication, full length trains, staff there when you want them.  It will be a long haul back, I’m not sure FCC gets it, in which case steps should be taken to remove the franchise.

PS I hope any reader using St Albans City Station comes along to Meet The Managers this coming Friday between 4.30 and 7 pm.  Mary Grant won’t be there, but Neal Lawson will – and so will Three Counties Radio.  It will be worth making your voice heard.

The latest proposals are unnecessarily complex and frankly niggardly.  People who had a break in season tickets – for example when the previous one expired around Christmas and there was no point renewing before going back to work – look to be losing out.

As for people who have already claimed under the Delay Repay Scheme, the way this has been handled beggars belief.  I am told by local commuters that rather than one single set of tickets for a combined claim, passengers are receiving a separate envelope and letter with rail travel voucher for each journey leg where delays were more than 30 minutes.  One local commuter told me she came home to 13 separate letters, each with 36p postage.  One of her fellow passengers had his letter box inundated with 24 identical envelopes, again each carrying 36p postage.  This will have been repeated for thousands of commuters.  A huge amount of money swallowed up in postage and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Presumably if you are a season ticket holder, you have to put these vouchers behind the proverbial clock on the mantelpiece and wait till your season ticket runs out, then use the vouchers (which won’t cover any underground element) and then renew the season ticket.

I have previously noted the basic unfairness of the one-size-fits-all national Delay Repay scheme with its cut-off point of 30 minutes, so St Albans commuters have to be delayed by more than 100 perent of their journey time to qualify.  It would have been far better if FCC had devised a simple and appropriately generous season ticket extension scheme from the beginning.  My son lives in Berlin.  They had a major problem lasting weeks with the surface railway S-Bahn – operated by a private company.  Annual season ticket holders got a month’s free travel, monthly season holders got an extra week.  Simple and uncomplicated.

The 14 December temporary timetable still shows a reduction of 30% in the advertised train service – hardly an improvement on the previous timetable which was a reduction of 38%.

Apparently drivers at two of the three depots on the Thameslink route have returned to normal working.  But if you read some of the comments posted on the self-styled “First Crapital Connect” website (mordantly funny but with a powerful string of passenger comment), even when drivers are making themselves available to work on rest days thay are not always being found things to do.

Nor does it look particularly optimistic on the compensation front apart from the almost meaningless industry standard “delay repay” for 30 minutes or over.

They seem to have ruled out ticket extensions because of the impact on other operators.  And if cash refunds are offered, it seems that we the taxpayer will be paying most of the money rather than FirstGroup because of the hideously complicated revenue support arrangements under the franchise.

I cannot do better (or worse) than quote the APTU newsletter:

The issue in this case is “Revenue Support” – often known as “Cap and Collar”.  This is a feature of franchise contracts where the operator receives monies from the Government if revenue is short of expectation (as defined in the contract) – and conversely, pays an additional fee if revenues exceed those expected.  The exact rules and precise amounts at which it kicks in are shrouded in mystery (“commercially confidential” is usually claimed), but it is clear that FCC are now receiving the maximum amounts payable, so for every £1 reduction in revenue, 80p is paid by the Department for Transport (or, to be more accurate, the tax payer).  If we are to be reimbursed, 80p in every £1 will therefore, in effect, come from the government.

The whole thing is simply surreal.  We have to keep pushing for proper compensation but First Group will have to do a lot to persuade me that they should ever be granted a rail franchise again – and any future franchises must have much tougher sanctions to protect passenger interests.

It was not an act of god.  It was a simple failure of First Capital Connect to deliver the service they had promised to the travellers who purchase tickets at such expense.   There should now be no ducking or diving by FCC about compensating passengers for a breakdown in the advertised train service caused by internal industrial relations failings.

It is certainly not good enough for FCC to lean on the ‘one-size-fits-all’ rail industry norm of paying compensation if journeys are delayed by 30 minutes or more.  30 minutes delay in a 20 minute journey from St Albans to London is entirely different in magnitude from the same delay in an intercity journey from Edinburgh or Cardiff.

I have just come back from visiting my son in Berlin.  There the newly privatised operation of the suburban railways also more or less broke down due to engineering faults earlier this year, causing cancellations, short trains and huge delays.  Sounds familiar or what?  The Berlin company is now offering December travel for free annual season ticket holders giving them a month extra before they have to renew, an extra week for holders of monthly tickets, and other weekend discounts for all occasional travellers.

It’s simple, it’s understandable, it’s fair.  This is the kind of customer care that FCC should now be showing to its passengers after a miserable few months.

Equally the drivers should be ashamed of wreaking disruption on a scale which far outweighs any strength of grievance they csan have – they run the risk of a tightening in union legislation particularly where it is a monopoly public service being delivered – see the wise words of Lord Tom McNally lower down this blog entry.

I have been e-mailed again this morning by travellers crammed into overcrowded, over hot and horribly delayed trains.

Here is a selection of what people have sent to me over recent days, the first one live by blackberry from the battlefront of Mill Hill Broadway:

On mill hill broadway.  Train was so packed – could not get on.  Someone actually fell out of the train as the doors opened

And a long and detailed description by two other St Albans residents of the complete collapse of any semblance of the advertised service:

Hello again,

M & J

And here is what St Albans resident and regular commuter Lord (Tom) McNally said to the Secretary of State Lord Adonis in the House of Lords:

My Lords, I declare an interest in that just after 7 am this morning I was on St Albans station waiting to catch a train into London, as I do regularly, with several hundred other commuters who have either found those trains cancelled or found themselves packed like cattle into such trains as did arrive. I experienced the same earlier in the week trying to catch a train home.

I remind the Minister that these are people who have paid £3,280 for a season ticket for that right to travel. If I may use a phrase that may be familiar on the Benches opposite, these are not City fat cats; these are workers by hand and by brain, trying to get to work and get home from work. I hope that what I say conveys some of the anger and frustration of those commuters at the treatment that has been meted out to them.

As the Minister may know, I can show him a few scars from another period of industrial irresponsibility. My then mentor, Jim Callaghan, said in 1978, “This is not trade unionism as I knew it”. It certainly was not, but we did think that capricious and spiteful trade unionism which hurt the many out of all proportion to any dispute was a thing of the past. Such actions hurt fellow workers, the vulnerable, working mothers and children trying to get home from school. Certain trade unions seem to have learnt nothing from the experience of the 1970s. They have forgotten that their industrial militancy brought in a Conservative Government who trebled unemployment and brought in legislation that curbed trade union powers—some victory. As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, indicated, does this clever way of seeming to cause damage without offending the Trade Union Act need to be looked at? Is there a need to tighten that Act as regards action taken by workers that is not proportionate in terms of the damage they do either to other workers or to the running of life in general?

I have to put it on record that there is in St Albans and elsewhere a lack of confidence in First Capital Connect. Is the Minister aware that we are now saying goodbye to the third managing director of First Capital Connect on this line in the past year? We have said goodbye to Elaine Holt and Karen Boswell, and Mr Jim Morgan will, apparently, leave his post on Friday. Does that indicate management continuity and a management steady hand? Does it explain why things have got so out of control?

I put to the Minister an old hobby-horse of mine: why do a Labour Government not end first-class travel on commuter trains until standard-class passengers are guaranteed a reasonable journey?

Back in the topsy turvy world of the First Capital Connect franchise serving St Albans City and the route from Bedford, drivers at the Bedford depot are refusing to work on their rest days.  This is causing real problems and it’s just been announced that today’s northbound trains out of  St Pancras are likely to be replaced by buses after 11 pm – on what is a major night out for many London commuters.

It’s not just a much longer and less pleasant journey, there must be real questions as to whether they can physically move all the passengers likely to affected.

And from reading the stream of comments from drivers on the RailUK Thameslink web forum, it seems as though drivers from the Brighton and Blackfriars FCC depots will be refusing to work on their rest days next week, so that it looks like more days of misery for St Albans commuters.

Clearly there is a dispute over pay, and the drivers are leveraging the fact that FCC don’t employ enough of them and so depend on their working on their rest days – which of course is voluntary.

But it’s the poor bloody infantry of the St Albans rail commuter who is left picking up the pieces.  It’s just not good enough. Both sides must settle their differences as soon as possible.