A detailed anonymous letter received by the Keep Metro Public campaign says that Nexus has chosen to contract out its responsibility for the safe operation of the railway – against government advice and without safety validation or risk assessment.

This, the letter says “will fragment the Metro system even more than it needs to be to test value for money of the train service provision and will introduce unacceptable safety risk the like of what we have seen on Network Rail”.

It adds that NR had recognised “the poor safety that resulted from contracting out some of its infrastructure management responsibilities, which led to disasters costing many lives” and had reversed it, and asks: “why can’t Nexus see the dangers?”

The letter adds that tender documents are due to be issued on April 1, “but as yet there are no signs of the business being ready.”

“There is not going to be a sufficient period of shadow running of the proposed concession to enable any constructive evaluation of the bids”, it says, pointing out that a full year would be normal.

“It is wholly irresponsible not to do this with an operation of this size, with the significant safety impactions on the travelling public and with the use of public money.”

And it adds that this is “yet another totally irresponsible approach to the market test and probably a deliberate attempt to undermine the in-house option” – and calls for the project’s management to be investigated.

In a hastily prepared response, Nexus director general Bernard Garner admitted to Metro staff that the letter “is very likely to be from – or at a minimum heavily influenced by – a member of Nexus staff”.

“We said from the start that splitting up Britain’s best performing railway and hiving off its operations would undermine safety and syphon huge sums of public money into private pockets,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

“This letter underlines our case, and the people who rely on the Metro have the right to expect detailed answers to the searching questions it asks.

“The worst of it is that this whole process is completely unnecessary, and it is time to call a halt before irreversible damage is done,” Bob Crow said.

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Notes to editors: A pdf (3mb) of the letter is attached here: http://www.rmt.org.uk/files/120186/FileName/MetroAnonymousLetter.pdf

The government has agreed to provide £300 million for the ‘re-invigoration’ of the Tyne and Wear Metro, all of which will come from the public purse. However, Nexus, which itself had put the case to keep Metro as an integrated railway, has invited private-sector bids to operate passenger services and maintain infrastructure.

The list of ‘approved bidders’ includes Serco-Ned, a consortium of the engineering company and the Netherlands’ state-owned railway; Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway, and the Hong Kong-based MTR Corporation, as well as an in-house bid from Nexus, the Tyne and Wear passenger transport executive.

An opinion poll conducted by ICM Omnibus for Keep Metro Public asked a representative sample of 549 people in Tyne and Wear, Cleveland County Durham and Northumberland between September 1 and September 11 the question:

“You may have seen that the Government is proposing to provide extra funds to improve the Tyne and Wear Metro service. Do you think the Tyne & Wear Metro should be run by a publicly owned organisation or should it be run by a private company?"

The responses were:
Publicly owned organisation: 60 per cent
Private company: 22 per cent
Doesn’t matter: 10 per cent
Don’t know 7 per cent

The full details of the survey are available by email from the RMT office.

Tyne and Wear Metro was the best performing rail operator in the UK last year, according to Office of Rail Regulation figures, running 95.57 per cent of trains on time in 2007/08, ahead of all privately operated franchises.

Nexus says that its figures so far this year are even better, with 96.72 per cent of trains run on time. The network also carried more than 40 million passengers for the first time in 16 years.