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Chris Grayling admits he was wrong to believe rail bosses over timetable shake-up but 'won't resign'

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has said he will not resign: Getty Images
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has said he will not resign: Getty Images

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has admitted he was wrong to accept assurances from rail industry bosses about the timetable shake-up that caused a meltdown in train services.

But he said he would not resign despite a damning report blaming lack of industry leadership for the chaos that engulfed much of the railways in May , and insisted: “My job is to get this sorted.”

In a round of media interviews, Mr Grayling conceded he did not do enough to scrutinise promises given by rail chiefs that the botched programme of timetable reform was on track.

“The whole situation was entirely unacceptable. We were clearly wrong to take on trust what the industry said to us, that it was going to be ready for the changes due in May,” he told Sky News.

“My conclusion is that we’ve got an industry today where decision-making is too fragmented, we need a more joined up industry, we need an industry that moves on from the model set up at the time of privatisation.”

It follows the release today of the re-port by regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR). It said track owner Network Rail; train operators Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and Northern; the Department for Transport and the ORR itself all made mistakes that contributed to the timetable disaster.

The programme, which involved changes to 46 per cent of train times, brought misery to tens of thousands of passengers. Over several weeks, GTR and Northern cancelled up to 470 and 310 scheduled trains respectively each weekday. The report concludes “nobody took charge”, even when it became clear the programme was in trouble months before it was due to come into effect.

In the wake of the report Mr Grayling announced a “root and branch” review of the structure of the railways.

He said the priority was to “make sure this can never happen again” rather than to “point fingers”. The review will be led by former British Airways chief executive Keith Williams and will report next year, with recommendations starting to be implemented in 2020.

But Mr Grayling ruled out the “simple panacea” of renationalisation, a quarter of a century after British Rail was split up and privatised by John Major’s government. The Transport Secretary said: “It’s not about who owns the railways, it’s about how it works.”

TUC General Secretary Frances O’ Grady said: “There’s a clear problem of where responsibility lies when you have a patchwork of private companies running a national rail network. It would make it easier to avoid the chaos passengers have suffered if the railways were brought back into public ownership as a properly integrated network.”