Rail Summit Announced (Only Joking)

It’s been so long that we’d forgotten Boris’s manifesto promise to hold an Emergency Rail Summit to hold the Train Operating Companies to account.

Sweeping plans to get all overground railway stations in London to accept pre-pay Oyster cards were unveiled by Boris Johnson today.

The Mayor announced he was meeting private train operators for a crucial summit in the next few weeks in a bid to achieve a transport breakthrough Ken Livingstone had failed to deliver.

Mind you, it was nearly two years ago, so as emergencies go this was presumably quite a mild one, and as it turned out you didn’t need a ‘crucial summit’ to get Oyster rolled out, you needed a fat wad of public money (£40m) and the willingness to overlook the fact that the solution was substantially underwhelming for many travellers.  But back to the summit.  A quick refresher – in September 2008 after a few months of not very much Caroline Pidgeon asked Boris when this might happen:

Question No: 1755 / 2008
Caroline Pidgeon
You announced your intention of holding an Emergency Rail Summit with the train operating companies back in June. How long is the emergency, and when will this summit be held?

Back came the answer:

My Transport Advisor has met with the Chair of ATOC to discuss the summit and it is still my intention to convene a meeting later in the year.

That year being 2008, it’s perhaps rather surprising that the summit is still, apparently, on the cards and due to happen at some point, although I’ve seen none of the normal publicity.  The Mayor did let slip that as far as he is concerned the PR is the important bit, as Adam has discovered from another answer to Caroline, this time in May 2009:

The reason I have not met with them, as you will appreciate, is because we are trying to do the deal before we have the summit. Like most summits the summit is basically intended to be totally pre-cooked by the Sherpas of the summit and nobody particularly wants – least of all me – all the TOCs to arrive at a summit where we have a row and a walk out. I want to have a glorious summit in which we walk out having done the deal.

As ever with Boris it’s hard to know whether he’s joking, patronising, trying to wriggle out from an embarrassing situation or genuinely thinks that the whole point of the summit is to produce pictures of him shaking hands with men in suits. Whatever’s the case, the whole history of the ‘Emergency Rail Summit’ doesn’t paint a particularly glowing picture of a hands-on Mayor getting on with the job.  Dilettante with a camera fetish, more like.

However, Adam’s main point here is that Boris is apparently only inviting Assembly Members along to observe rather than take part (part of a trend of trying to shut the Assembly up, it appears – who knows what chaos might happen if democratically elected representatives were allowed to question subsidised private companies, eh?).  It would be interesting, therefore, to know who *is* being asked to take part, which I’ve suggested to Adam that he fire one of his FoI howitzers at TfL/GLA for.