24 November 2022
How Avanti may profit from misleading the public about the chaos on their lines Introduction It is three years since Avanti took over the West Coast franchise, on December 8th 2019. Since that date West Coast services have descended into chaos. Avanti’s Executives have recently launched a PR offensive which seeks to paint this as an unprecedented result of the actions of their drivers. Initially, they referred to it as ‘unofficial industrial action’ in claims repeated by then Secretary of State Grant Shapps. This has been subsequently toned down but the company still claim that this is the result of an ‘unprecedented’ cessation of rest day working by their drivers. As this briefing shows, Avanti is making deeply misleading claims in public and this is likely to stem from its application to the DfT to have its cancellations ascribed to ‘force majeure’. This would entail the DfT agreeing that what is happening on Avanti is essentially industrial action which was beyond the company’s control and removing these cancellations from any calculation of their performance. This would in turn enable FirstGroup and Trenitalia to access their maximum possible fee and pass it on to the owning group as a dividend. RMT is writing to the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee to protest against this. In this briefing, we expose the realities of Avanti’s mismanagement that lie beneath its PR spin and show how the system is rigged to enable continued profiteering in the context of farcical public service failure.
“We had no problem at all before July” At the Transport Select Committee on 12th October, Richard Scott, Director of Corporate Affairs, West Coast Partnership made two questionable claims. Firstly, he claimed that Avanti had no problems before July 2022: