Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Travel Disruption, HC 661
Wednesday 12 October 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 October 2022.
Members present: Huw Merriman (Chair); Mr Ben Bradshaw; Ruth Cadbury; Robert Largan; Karl McCartney; Grahame Morris; Gavin Newlands; Greg Smith; Christian Wakeford.
Questions 1–7
Witnesses
I: Simon Calder, Travel journalist and broadcaster.
Witness: Simon Calder.
Q1 Chair: This is the Transport Select Committee’s evidence session on the travel disruption that we have experienced over the last few months. Today we have a number of panels. On rail, we have Network Rail and Avanti West Coast; on ports, we have the Port of Dover and the Port of Felixstowe; from the trade unions we have the RMT and Unite; and on aviation, we have Gatwick, easyJet and British Airways.
There is a lot for us to get through. I am delighted that we have somebody who can help us for the first 15 minutes to do just that. I will ask our witness to introduce himself for our records, please.
Simon Calder: Good morning, Chair, and hon. Members. My name is Simon Calder. I am the travel correspondent of The Independent.
Q2 Chair: Simon, thank you very much for being with us. I believe you are with us from Morocco. I am going to ask the first question just to open up, so that you can help us all. What has been going on?
Simon Calder: This summer—I am going to carbon date that back to about Easter—millions of us have very successfully travelled on holidays which we absolutely deserved after two years of the awful covid pandemic. We have been going to see loved ones and even some business trips such—
Chair: Simon, we have lost you. I think you have a back-up.
Simon Calder: Yes, I have.
Chair: Perhaps start again. You were saying that people have even been trying to get away on business trips, and then we lost you for a bit.
Simon Calder: Yes. An awful lot of people have travelled very successfully, but hundreds of thousands of people have had an absolutely miserable—[Inaudible.]
Chair: I am looking at our sound engineer to see what he recommends. Bear with us all a second. Simon, we are having technical problems with you. I am going to ask our engineer to speak to us. We now have two screens. Let’s persevere a little more, Simon, if we can.
Simon Calder: Millions of people very happily travelled this summer, but hundreds of thousands have had miserable experiences, whether that was on planes, trains or ships.
If we can spin through where the key problems were, on the railways it has been the worst summer since the 1980s: extraordinary times with, effectively, people having to play railway roulette, just at the time when passengers needed a really good, reliable way to get to their destinations and just as the railways needed to attract more people who do not normally travel by train. Suddenly we have the rail unions—four of them—all with their own agendas and all absolutely doing the best they possibly can for their members. Last week, for example, we had disruption on almost every single day. Of course, you have the RMT, who are the biggest union, causing significant issues in terms of Network Rail signallers in particular. On top of that, you have the train drivers’ dispute.
I guess Avanti West Coast is the unfortunate poster child for this service, which should absolutely be the flagship line, having had billions of pounds spent on it. Instead, it is a shadow of its former self. There are lots of calls for it to be brought back into public control or for FirstGroup and Trenitalia to be stripped of their franchise. I am not sure that would do much good.
Turning to ships—in particular, the ferry links across the channel from Dover—in 2016, the British people gave the Government an instruction to leave the European Union. The way that was interpreted by the Government was, effectively, to create a hard EU external border in south-east Kent. As a result of that, of course, you have the situation where, unfortunately, the infrastructure simply could not cope. So on the first weekend, for all sorts of reasons—but the significant issue was the introduction of passport stamping as requested by the UK and which the EU must carry out—we saw massive congestion.
The aircraft, airlines and airports have seen absolutely the worst consumer detriment. The problems began pretty early on with long security queues at some airports. Those have been largely sorted out, in my experience. We then had the ground handling saga, particularly at Manchester early on, with TUI—the biggest holiday company—imposing a cap on itself.
On top of that, we then saw mass cancellations. I am going to single out two of the airlines that you will speak to later. British Airways has cancelled by far the highest number of flights, running into tens of thousands and taking millions of seats out of the market. The way I see it, BA, like other airlines, was in intensive care and it came out and said, “We are going to run a marathon.” It could not be done. Now, we have this absurd situation where they have cancelled so much that fares have soared. If you look, for instance, at Aberdeen to Heathrow—a very important domestic link giving connectivity to north-east Scotland and around the world—there is one seat at 10.20 today. It is £603. There are no flights tomorrow and one flight on Friday with a seat at £457.
That has been repeated right across the board. British Airways has not caused as much very obvious harm to travellers because almost all the cancellations have been carried out well in advance, but it has certainly taken so many seats out of the market that it is pushing up fares and reducing choice.
Then there is easyJet. Again, easyJet did not just come out of intensive care saying, “We’re going to run a marathon.” They said, “We’re going to do 2019 at Gatwick, only bigger.” Of course, that failed pretty much at the first hurdle.
At the start of the main summer holidays in England and Wales, in July, the Competition and Markets Authority as well as the Civil Aviation Authority wrote to the airlines and said, “Okay, you know what the passenger care rules are. You know what happens when you cancel a flight. You’ve got to find an alternative flight and pay for it. You’ve got to put people up in hotels and pay for their meals. You’ve got to tell them what their rights are.” Those have been absolutely ignored by easyJet, British Airways and other airlines as well. I have seen exactly no sanctions applied to the airlines for doing that.
I can give you 10, 100 or 200 accounts of people who have contacted me saying, “My flight was cancelled in July. I wasn’t given any help. I had to spend thousands of pounds getting my family home, paying for hotels and so on, and I still haven’t got my money back.” That is repeated everywhere. It is in direct contradiction of what the law says and what the airlines were reminded of. I am afraid I am not seeing any improvement in the handling of passenger care. All we can say is that demand for aviation has fallen, and therefore the number of cancellations seems also to be falling.
Chair: Thank you very much, Simon. Your last point is probably one of the reasons why we continue to bang on about the Civil Aviation Authority having up-front powers to intervene. Let me bring in Ruth Cadbury. We have only five or so minutes left.
Q3 Ruth Cadbury: Thank you, Simon. You have summarised the problems well. It is a combination of staff shortages, service cutbacks—both planned and sudden—strikes and very angry consumers when they have not been able to travel as planned and not been compensated. How many of the issues do you think were foreseeable or preventable? Which of them do you expect to remain long term?
Simon Calder: Travel is the industry of human happiness. Everybody is tremendously optimistic. I am here at the ABTA travel convention in Marrakesh and there are hundreds of people, all of whom think that everything is going to be great for travellers. Most of the time it is. However, it is very easy to overpromise in travel and to take out all resilience.
Any journey is a chain of different elements that has to work—from the train to the airport, getting through the airport, and so on, all the way through to your hotel. If one element of that goes wrong, as it certainly did in the summer with aviation, it only takes one air traffic controller going sick overnight at Gatwick to see massive diversions and subsequent problems there.
If you have an airline which has simply assumed that everybody will be well at a time when there is still plenty of covid around, you are going to find that you are getting staff shortages and sudden cancellations. You are getting problems building up. Bear in mind that there are, of course, many flight cancellations every summer. Business as usual is the odd flight crew going out of hours and that kind of thing, but never on the scale that we have seen.
Should it have been foreseen? Clearly, if you look at Jet2 and Ryanair, they did foresee it. They kept their operations in pretty good shape during covid. They kept them flying and they have had odd cancellations here or there, which you are always going to get at some stages, particularly with French air traffic controllers and so on. Overall, they have kept people travelling. Clearly, they foresaw what the problems could be and built in pretty much enough resilience. They have had a successful summer.
Q4 Ruth Cadbury: From the perspective of consumers, particularly holidaymakers, what has been the biggest problem? Has it been communication from operators, issues around compensation, or something else?
Simon Calder: The most serious problem is on-the-day cancellations, and sometimes on-the-plane cancellations. The CMA and CAA both said, “You’ve got to have staff in place. You’ve got to have systems to find the passengers somewhere to stay and to get them rebooked on alternative flights.” You cannot just say to them, “Go to the easyJet app and sort yourself out another flight.” You have to communicate what the issues are. The airlines have not done that, but, in a sense, they have chosen not to do that because, clearly, if you are a stretched organisation coming out of the worst possible time, you are going to allocate your budget where you think you need to. If you do not think there is going to be much of a penalty, apart from some reputational damage from failing to deliver what you are supposed to, that is a choice that they seem to be making.
Q5 Ruth Cadbury: What do you think the Government should be doing on that in terms of consumer rights, and what should the Government be doing to ensure that travel is more reliable?
Chair: A very brief one because I want to bring Ben in, and we only have a minute.
Simon Calder: Very simply, as the Committee has previously reported, the Civil Aviation Authority needs to have more powers and it needs to use those powers. But it also has powers at the moment. The Government should be absolutely watching the aviation industry like a hawk to make sure that it is behaving as the law requires.
Q6 Mr Bradshaw: Simon, we have another looming problem facing passengers and the industry with the Indian Government’s decision to scrap e-visas. There are big volumes of travel between Britain and India. What is the reason for this? What is the solution? What is the volume of the problems that it is causing?
Simon Calder: It is causing many, many thousands of people who right now should be travelling out to Goa, to Kerala and to the great cities of India immense problems. It is losing them thousands of pounds and is causing travel companies—many of them specialists in India—to lose millions of pounds and threaten their very survival after two awful years.
The cause appears to be reciprocity, the idea that the UK makes it very tough for Indian people to get visas to come to the UK, and therefore, as happens in many cases, the Indian Government have decided not to make it easy for us to go to India either.
Q7 Mr Bradshaw: Have the British Government made it more difficult? This system has operated perfectly well for years. Is this to do with Suella Braverman’s comments on Indians overstaying their visas?
Simon Calder: I do not believe so. Effectively, of course, the e-visa was doing absolutely fine for the vast majority of British visitors until covid—then, the whole system was suspended. It came back to life, and if you are from Afghanistan, Belarus, Russia or Zimbabwe, very handily, you can use an e-visa. If you are from the UK, unfortunately you cannot. I can only hope that there will be, at the highest levels of Government, some solution to this because it is causing immense damage, not just to individual travellers here and to businesses, but, of course, to people in India who rely on British tourists.
Chair: Simon, time has defeated us. Thank you so much for setting the scene. There is plenty for us to ask our other witnesses during the course of the morning. We all wish you the best in Marrakesh.