London commuters are expected to demonstrate in Victoria station during Monday evening rush-hour in protest at persistent delays and cancellations on the troubled Southern rail franchise.
Frustration with the service, which is ranked the country’s worst for customer satisfaction, has triggered protests and direct action among passengers from the Surrey and Sussex commuter belt.
The protests are set to escalate this week as Southern’s operator, Govia Thameslink Railway, introduces a month-long emergency timetable axing 341 trains a day.
Alex Prosser-Snelling, an HR director from Horsham and one of the organisers of the Victoria protest, said some people planned to dress as devils and hand out leaflets welcoming travellers to hell. “We have got two or three counties’ worth of very, very angry people,” he said.
He said he was not a habitual protester but had been driven to it by the impact on his family life of persistent delays. His breaking point was when his wife had to wake his children, aged six and nine, and put them in the car in their pyjamas to collect him after his service was disrupted. “I thought, this can’t go on,” he said.
On Saturday, he attended, along with about 150 other commuters, a public meeting in Horsham organised by the Conservative MP Jeremy Quin. Prosser-Snelling said members of the crowd asked Southern representatives to stand up, since crowded conditions on the railways meant commuters could rarely expect a seat.
The Southern franchise was taken over by Govia Thameslink last year, and rail performance statistics show the service has declined steeply. The company has blamed the delays on industrial action by members of the RMT union. The union in turn blamed the disruption on poor management. Last week, representatives of both were questioned on the chaos by MPs on the transport select committee.
In the Sussex coastal town of Seaford, passengers are planning a “protestival” – a mix of protest and festival – on Tuesday evening over the cancellation under the emergency timetable of all but “a very small handful” of trains between the town and Brighton, the organisers say. Many services have been replaced with buses.
The Sunday Times reported that a London-based commuter, CJ Johnson, is organising a 48-hour boycott of the service next month, encouraging travellers to use alternative means of transport, while other passengers told the paper they were considering a fare strike similar to that staged by passengers on First Great Western in 2008.
Other passengers have been travelling in first-class carriages without the right tickets, the paper reported.
Last month, dozens of commuters protested at Brighton station, and last week the Reigate, Redhill and District Rail Users’ Association, a long-established consumer pressure group, placed an advert in the Times modelled on the famous Conservative election poster with the slogan: “Southern Rail isn’t working.”
The advert said: “We, your passengers, have had enough … All of us are suffering uncertainty and stress on a daily basis, and some of us have even lost our jobs because of your imploding ‘service’.”
Sara Pont, a press officer and a spokesperson for the association, said the advertisement was a “last-ditch hope”. The group had discussed staging fare strikes, she added. “The problem is most people have season tickets, so you’re stuck with the service they are offering. But that’s about the only direct action we have got left.”
The Green MP Caroline Lucas held a meeting for commuters in her Brighton constituency last week, which was attended by an estimated 120 people. “Ironically, quite a lot of people had to email me in advance to say they couldn’t get back because of delayed trains,” she said.
“People are at their wits’ end. The levels of anger are off the scale. People feel their jobs are at risk because they don’t get to work on time. People feel their family life is suffering.”
Lucas added: “We had a meeting with the rail minister over a year ago in which she said the service was ‘flashing red’.” But she said little had been done by the government to address the problems. “I do think we shouldn’t let the government off the hook,” she said.
Lucas is calling for Govia Thameslink to be stripped of the franchise and for it to be returned to state control.
A spokesman for Govia Thameslink said: “We understand the strength of feeling among passengers, and their frustration at the poor service and increase in random cancellations since the dispute with the RMT began. That is why we are introducing the amended timetable from Monday to restore greater consistency in the short-term so that passengers can plan around it.
“We are very sorry for the effect on our passengers and we are determined to provide the level of service they rightly demand. We will continue to do everything we can to bring this unnecessary industrial action, which is affecting the service so badly, to a close.”
