£17m paid to Avanti West Coast is ‘reward for failure’, says Labour

theguardian.com:

The under-fire rail operator Avanti West Coast has been “rewarded for failure”, Labour said, after the company was paid more than £17m in taxpayers’ money by ministers for performance and management fees in just two years, despite being the worst-performing operator on the rail network.

The figures from 2019-20 and 2020-21 include almost £4m in bonuses to Avanti for “operational performance”, “customer experience” and “acting as a good and efficient operator”.

At the same time, the firm raised prices, with an open return from Manchester to London – barely a two-hour journey – costing £369.40.

The performance-related fees, signed off by transport ministers, came despite Avanti being the worst-performing operator in the country with almost half of its services arriving late. In the last two years alone the firm received more than 50,000 complaints, the most of any operator and almost double that of the parallel east coast mainline operator, LNER.

Avanti, co-owned by the Italian national railways, has come under renewed criticism for slashing services between major cities by up to two-thirds on the west coast mainline, and earlier this week passengers were forced to climb a fence at Oxenholme station in Cumbria after being locked in as their train arrived 100 minutes late.

Avanti West Coast, whose contract is due for renewal in October, already has the lowest passenger satisfaction rating possible, a figure the transport minister Charlotte Vere said last month was “terrible”. Despite this, the Department for Transport (DfT) confirmed it would continue to hand over millions of pounds in management fees, after ruling out fining the operator for the failing service.

The shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has warned her