Passenger Voice July 2015: You and your train company
06 July 2015
A shortlist of three bidders has been announced for the East Anglia franchise competition. The bidders are:
- Abellio East Anglia Limited (a joint venture between Abellio and Stagecoach)
- First East Anglia Limited
- National Express East Anglia Trains Limited.
The Invitation to Tender is expected to be published later in the summer and will outline the requirements the Government expects the bidders to meet.
Northern and TransPennine Express
Last month we told you that we had been asked to contribute to the assessment of bidders’ delivery plans for the new TransPennine Express (TPE) and Northern franchises.
During June, a small team at Transport Focus have been busy reading the proposals put forwards by bidders for the customer experience element of the TPE franchise. We have now submitted a report to the Department for Transport (DfT) which will consider it alongside all the other elements of the bid evaluation process.
We will not be choosing the winning bid – this will be done by the DfT. Announcement of the awards for these franchises are expected to be made later this year.
In July we will be carrying out a similar piece of work to review the customer experience element of the bids for the new Northern franchise.
Transport Systems Catapult and innovation in franchising
Earlier in the year we supported Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) in running a series of innovation workshops across East Anglia. TSC has now published a report summarising the findings which is available here.
Transport Focus are also meeting with TSC to discuss ideas for promoting innovation in the next West Coast franchise which is due to start in April 2017.
