Surrey councillors want backing to halt SWR service cuts
Some stations are facing significant cuts from December 2022.
Surrey councillors share residents’ alarm at the prospect of overcrowded trains and want backing to halt South Western Rail’s plan to cut services.
South Western Rail (SWR) has estimated only 60 per cent at most of pre-pandemic commuters will return, and while much of their Surrey network will maintain May 2019 service levels, some stations in Mole Valley and Epsom and Ewell are facing significant cuts from December 2022.
Surrey’s communities, environment and highways select committee today (September 16) agreed to ask the county council to support a petition asking these cuts to be abandoned, saying SWR’s plans “run counter to” the council’s climate change strategy.
Councillor John O’Reilly (Con, Hersham) said: “It will potentially have quite a serious knock-on effect.
“Everything implicit in our Local Transport Plan is to get our residents as much as we can without nagging them out of their car into public transport. And here SWR are – at peak times for heaven’s sake – as well as at leisure times, proposing to reduce services.”
They challenged the train operator’s 60 per cent prediction, and Cllr O’Reilly asked how quickly SWR would be able to respond if their estimate proved to be pessimistic.
He said he did not want a response of: “Oh we see the problem now, well we’ll change it in 18 months time when we do the next timetable. That is simply not good enough”.
Councillor Matt Furniss, cabinet member for transport and infrastructure, said he had relayed their concerns to SWR over “the accuracy of their forecasting”, in a meeting also attended by the MPs Chris Grayling and Sir Paul Beresford.
He said: “They were reluctant, as I fully appreciate, as you don’t want empty trains just sitting waiting for an eventual use, just to have them on standby. But we were really pushing so they had to have a very flexible approach if their forecasting turns out to be incorrect.”
He said they admitted the proposed cuts were due to their budget from the Treasury.
He said: “Considering the government’s Bus back better programme is for us to get people to train stations on buses, actually not having the requisite number of trains needed doesn’t exactly fit in with that.”
Bookham will be the only station across the network to be served by just one off-peak train an hour.
Mole Valley district councillor Paul Kennedy (LD, Fetcham West) has pointed out that SWR’s webpage identifies its services from Epsom and Mole Valley to Wimbledon and London Waterloo – those which it proposes to cut – as its busiest.
He said: “These proposals undermine all our efforts to restore jobs and local communities after the pandemic, promote active travel, secure adequate infrastructure for new housing and reduce traffic congestion and pollution.”
SWR said Epsom and Dorking are also served by Southern services, but the worry is that Southern may follow suit.
David Ligertwood, who works in Surrey County Council’s transport department, said: “What we have to be mindful of is that SWR may just be the first train operating company having this strategic review, and it puts us in a much more difficult place when a Southern review comes along.”
To help compensate for the changes, 90 new Arterio trains designed to improve reliability will be introduced.