Chamber and committees

It is part of a programme of work that we have taken—

We have been working with the Scottish Futures Trust to look at levering in private sector investment. That engagement is on-going. That is where the total of £60 million comes from. It is public and private together, but £30 million comes from the public sector.

There is a continued failure of Network Rail to provide the necessary level of resilience that would allow operators to achieve a higher PPM performance. Let me give you an example—

We are going into a phase in which Covid support for bus operators is coming to an end. We have been engaging with the Confederation of Passenger Transport UK to identify the new bus support mechanism, which will replace the bus service operators grant, in order to deliver a model that is sustainable for the bus service operators and that also works for the taxpayer. That work is currently on-going; I do not think that it has been concluded, but I reassure you that we are engaging with the industry around how we shape that new scheme to manage the transition from the previous BSOG system to a new funding model.

Passenger numbers have increased, but they have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. I emphasise that the change to peak fares is a pilot project: the £15 million will be used to run a pilot on particular routes for six months in order to test out whether removing peak fares will have an impact on people’s travelling behaviour on the railway network. It will not remove peak fares across the network.

There is a combination of funding. There is an additional allocation for part of the forestry programme to help to secure delivery of that growth. It is a combination of the organisation’s existing budget and the additional allocation that we have made. Simon Fuller can say a wee bit more from a forestry point of view on how exactly we are going to do that.

I do not have that information in front of me. I would have to check and come back to the committee on that.

I think that you are confusing a number of different things. The public performance measure does not measure passenger satisfaction; it measures the punctuality of the train service. Through Transport Focus Scotland, ScotRail runs a passenger satisfaction survey every year—I would need to come back to you with the exact detail on that.

I recognise that a lot of passenger satisfaction will be linked to the punctuality of the train service, but there is a real danger in comparing the PPM performance for, say, January this year with the PPM performance for January 2022, because a whole range of different factors could have an impact on that. It is not about resourcing. Adverse weather could have had an impact, or there could have been industrial action taking place at the time—those are events that are largely outwith the control of the rail network. Therefore, making such a comparison is not meaningful.

If you look at the PPM performance over the course of a year, there will be months that are more challenging. Traditionally, the winter months are more challenging due to the impact of weather events on rail infrastructure, such as freezing points or slippage on the rail network, which cause problems for Network Rail and have an impact on trains. The vast majority of the impact on ScotRail’s PPM performance is due to infrastructure challenges rather than to a lack of rolling stock or crew, so—

No, it is not acceptable, but a large part of the reason for that is infrastructure failures on the part of Network Rail. That has the biggest impact on operating the rail network. There is no getting away from that; it is standard understanding—and it is recognised—in the industry. If you do an analysis of the factors that have an adverse impact on PPM performance, you will see that the majority are infrastructure matters.

Let me finish this point, because I have a very good example. You might remember when we had difficulty with the high-speed trains coming in because Wabtec, which was responsible for the refurbishment of the high-speed passenger trains, was way behind in the programme. That had an impact on the availability of seats on particular routes, which led to overcrowding challenges. That was a ScotRail problem, because it was about rolling stock and the ability to have seats available. However, when it comes to issues such as points and line challenges, it is about infrastructure. Most people in the industry know that.

Right now, ScotRail does not have a rolling stock challenge or a crewing challenge; it has an infrastructure challenge. That challenge lies with Network Rail; we have an unacceptable level of performance because Network Rail views Scotland as a region and so does not make the level of investment in Scotland that would reflect the fact that we are running a national railway. Network Rail’s investment programme treats Scotland as a region.