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As an act of contrition, it certainly looked and sounded convincing enough. Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin sat side-by-side with his chief mandarin at the Department for Transport, trying to explain the calamitous circumstances of the West Coast main line franchise fiasco to a hostile House of Commons select committee.
“A damaging, serious incident,” said McLoughlin, from which the lessons learned would form “part of civil service training for many years to come”. Philip Rutnam, permanent secretary at the Department for Transport (DfT), nodded in agreement, admitting that “serious errors had been made”.
In fairness, McLoughlin was not in charge last summer when the DfT decided to award a new 13-year West Coast franchise not to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains but to the rival FirstGroup. That decision was rescinded after serious technical flaws in the franchise process were discovered.
McLoughlin said that a subsequent review of the chain of emails leading up to the decision showed that civil servants had acted in good faith and had not deliberately misled ministers. But the franchise process had not been carried out with “the proper workmanship that one would expect of the civil service”.
Rutnam admitted that civil servants had focused too much on getting the franchise process to a close, with not enough emphasis on risk. Staff had not escalated concerns about the process upwards in the manner that they should have done. “While people are acting with best intentions, they can get things catastrophically wrong,” he mused.
So what is being done to ensure that the West Coast main line franchise fiasco doesn’t happen again? Well, a new civil servant has been brought in at the top of the DfT, with Clare Moriarty joining as a new director general for rail. There is a lot of pressure on the department as it copes with the East Coast main line franchise and the implications of other big procurement projects such as Thameslink trains. So other in-house appointments will be made and there will be additional use of new technical consultants “depending on where we can best access the expertise that we need,” said Rutnam.
There will also be a renewed emphasis on accountability within the DfT. An overly complex structure within the department had led to gaps in responsibility. And Rutnam insisted to MPs that he would be “acting vigorously” to address any specific failings unearthed by an ongoing investigation into the scandal.
For his part, McLoughlin said that he wanted civil servants to be more questioning if they had doubts about any aspects of the franchise process and that they should not be shy of “referring upwards” when concerns did arise.
McLoughlin admitted that the West Coast franchise fiasco had been a costly cock-up, both in terms of reputation and financial waste. In total the bill for the halted franchise process had come to £45 million. That meant money “not available to spend on projects,” he admitted. But he said that no projects planned or announced would be stopped as a result of the West Coast shambles.