Please find below a letter from Mark Hopwood (Managing Director of SWR) and John Halsall (Managing Director, Southern Region, Network Rail)
Dear Mr Lord
We wanted to thank you for arranging to be represented at this week’s South Western All Party Parliamentary Group. We are well aware that current performance on our network is not good enough and that this is a key topic of correspondence for your constituents. We are grateful for the opportunity to outline the work we are jointly doing to improve performance and deliver a better service for customers.
As we said at the meeting there is no silver bullet to putting performance back where it should be, but we hope that we were able to give your representative confidence that we have identified the areas that will yield the biggest results in terms of improved performance: infrastructure reliability, external factors such as trespass and fatalities, network management and the resilience of the timetable and stock and crew diagrams; and that we are focussing our efforts in these key areas.
Clearly seeing will be believing, and we fully understand that only when you start to see tangible results will we begin to restore your, and your constituents’, trust in us.
We welcome the new APPG, and look forward to developing an open and honest dialogue in the months ahead as we keep you updated on how our improvement work is progressing. We share the group’s mission to champion the needs of constituents and passengers who travel on the railway and we look forward to working with you to deliver them a better service.
Yours sincerely
Mark Hopwood
Managing Director
South Western Railway
John Halsall
Managing Director, Southern Region
Network Rail
