A few years ago, when I first put myself forward for selection as the Lib Dem PPC for Hitchin & Harpenden, a Labour Councillor asked me “why do you want to do this!?” 

I thought it was a fair question and I will endeavour to answer that now. I’m afraid it is a rather long story but do please bear with me and also I am answering the question from both a national and local perspective.

In June 2016 something happened which not only changed my life, it changed Great Britain, in the former case for the better in the latter case, for the worse. For me Brexit was the final straw, I could no longer sit on the sidelines, sending grumpy tweets to @NHDCLibDems, shouting at the TV when question time was on and setting the world to rights in the pub was no longer enough.

I had to stand up and do something about it, so I did the only logical thing – I joined the Liberal Democrats!

I have voted Lib Dem since the mock elections my secondary school held in the 1990’s (we didn’t win) and just over a decade ago I almost joined the party over a local issue, but never did. Indeed my grandmother was a keen supporter of the Lib Dems since it transitioned into being from the SDP-Liberal Alliance. I grew up with a Lib Dem diamond in the window of my parents house!

While I have long liked and argued for the policies of the party, I felt that in 2015 it had let its head drop. The exciting, logical and forward looking party of 2010 seemed to have got lost after the election of 2015. I felt that nationally the party had sort of given up, in many areas it was simply going through the motions. I was vocal about it, I hated it, I felt I had been abandoned by the only party which represented my values. 

Then came the referendum.

The prospect of leaving the EU was too much to bear, I could not sit on the sidelines any more, I had to step up and do something. I felt that perhaps I could offer something to the party, after all the last time the Hitchin & Harpenden Lib Dems have fielded a candidate who lived in the constituency was in 2005, since then our candidates have come from Welwyn, Hackney and er, Belgium. I felt that my background in both the media and oddly the motor racing industry could be useful, and indeed both have proven to be so.

But why do I want to stand for election? Why do I want to be the next MP for the constituency where I live? I have felt for a very long time that we are extremely poorly served by our elected representative in Westminster. I have said before that I feel he tends to put his own career interests and his party interests ahead of constituents and the constituency. 

I know that I will do a lot better. I actually care about this area and that is something I feel has been lacking for a long time in the elected Conservatives right across the constituency. 

I had hoped to change that in 2019, but despite a record breaking election result, we just missed out on unseating the Conservatives and causing a major electoral upset. This result though has made Hitchin & Harpenden a target seat. People come up to me every single day to tell me how they wish that I was the MP already, they send me their concerns and casework as they have been ignored by the MP. 
Sam is constantly stopped by people in the street wanting to chat with him (which he is always happy to do), many tell them that they want him to be the Hitchin & Harpenden MP.

Talking to these people, in the street, on the doorstep, in the pub or at the train stations, I know what it is that they are concerned about, what the issues that they care about are. They want a candidate, and ultimately a Member of Parliament willing to fight constantly on local issues, one who listens to constituents and acts on their concerns.

It is something this constituency has never had. I want to change that. 

This is not just a set of empty words. I am already putting them into practice as a District Councillor serving Hitchin Highbury ward, and as the PPC in 2019 and Parliamentary Spokesperson since then. I have challenged the Tory MP, I have worked for the community, our community, on fighting Luton Airport expansion, protecting our environment, helping our local businesses recover and so much more.  

Ever since I joined the Lib Dems, my intention has been to fight, and win, elections, and I will not stop until we win them all! Fighting these elections has taught me that not only can we beat the Tories, but that we can combine our traditional campaigning methods and techniques with skilful and innovative use of social media.

My background in the motor racing industry has given me the understanding that hard work, innovation, and a willingness to learn from those with experience can deliver unexpected successes. I want to continue to bring that attitude to the whole parliamentary constituency. If I am selected as the Parliamentary candidate for this constituency, I will be working at grassroots level to build up our activist base and to ensure that all members feel really engaged with the party and what we are doing. I will ensure that none of our communities gets overlooked. 

I will fight to represent the views of local people at national level and be the powerful voice for change that is needed.

For me being selected as the Parliamentary Candidate, and becoming the MP is not a step on a political career path, I am not hunting around for a winnable seat simply because I want to be a Member of Parliament, I want to represent and work for the area and community I live in.  I also want to be the most accessible, most responsive MP possible.

While winning in Hitchin & Harpenden may once have looked like an impossible dream, in 2019 we proved that it was not. I believe that together, with a lot of hard work we can achieve what we want, and get the Tories out and remove another brick from the ‘blue wall.’

So please if you have the opportunity please vote for me to be the next Lib Dem candidate for Hitchin & Harpenden. Together we can finish what we started

#VoteSam

My response to Rishi Sunak’s 2021 budget. First published on Hitchin Nub News.


Ever since I have been involved in politics, one thing has been abundantly clear, the Conservative party seem to be at war with our children and young people. In North Hertfordshire, when they were in administration, the Tories even attempted to close playgrounds in order to fund an increase in their allowances as Councillors. This was soon stopped and now, under entirely different management the Council is investing in playgrounds and taking children and young people seriously. 

However the recent Budget speech by Rishi Sunak made it clear where his priorities lay, indeed the Chancellor mentioned the word “wine” twice as many times as he did either “education” or “children”. 

Our children have been let down by this Government time and again throughout the pandemic. The Chancellor’s announcement on catch-up funding is still only a third of what Govt’s own adviser recommended. Failing pupils and parents yet again. 

There were clear calls for the Government to to pledge the £15 billion their own catch-up tsar proposed, to tackle the up to £46,000 our children will lose out on. Instead they’re offering just £1 per school day.

Under this Chancellor, we have the highest tax burden since the Second World War, but the lowest school spending per pupil in a generation. In fact the Chancellor gave more money to his banker mates, and spent more money on cutting the price of sparkling wine than he gave to our children and schools in catch-up funding. Every teacher and headteacher I speak to tells me the same thing, the underfunding in our schools is drastic, and urgent action is needed. Which is why I fully support the Liberal Democrats demand for an additional emergency Children’s Budget, with £15 billion for schools catch-up funding as recommended by the government’s own adviser. 

I’m focussing on schools and young people as you simply cannot build a strong economy without investing in younger generations and allowing them to fulfil their potential. Parents and children who have sacrificed so much during the pandemic deserve a fair deal. Instead this Budget looks set to treat education and our children’s future as an afterthought.

That could do great economic harm to our nation. At a time where the nation, our high streets, and business in general is reeling from the impact of both Brexit and the ongoing pandemic the government is hitting local small businesses with a tax bombshell. 

Small and medium-sized businesses, from tech start-ups to hairdressers and cafes, in Hitchin & Harpenden will pay an extra £4.1m a year due to the rise in national insurance, research commissioned by the Liberal Democrats has found. 

Boris Johnson broke his 2019 manifesto promise by raising employer National Insurance Contributions by 1.25%, impacting small businesses in our area and across the country. House of Commons Library research has detailed the impact of the tax rises, and it is estimated that the average micro-business employing up to nine people will pay more than £1,000 extra a year as a result of the tax hike. 

We need a tax cut for local entrepreneurs and business owners, especially those who were excluded from COVID support schemes, to help them create jobs and drive our economic recovery. The Liberal Democrats locally and nationally would have quadrupled the Employment Allowance from £4,000 to £16,000 for at least two years, meaning taxes on small businesses would be slashed by £5.5 billion across the country next year. 

However the Chancellor and the Conservatives have instead opted to hit local small business with damaging tax increases, which is the last thing businesses in our area need deal with right now. 

Making this an even more bitter pill to swallow is the fact that the Chancellor is cutting taxes on the banks, reducing the banking surcharge will cost the Treasury over £3.8 billion over the next four years, but boosting small business instead could have actually benefitted the treasury over the same period. 

Tax increases will hit many others in the pocket too, deepening the growing cost of living crisis in Britain. While we live in a relatively affluent area not everyone is likely to care about the cuts in the cost of Prosecco. A typical worker on £30,000 will see their take home income cut by £255 next year as a result of tax increases, something the Conservatives promised not to do at the 2019 General Election.  

People who work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules needed support. Instead, the Chancellor could only offer tax hikes, benefit cuts and no answer to energy bills skyrocketing by the day. The Chancellor is clearly short-changing the public and taking them for granted. The government wasted £2 billion of taxpayers’ money on PPE that was of such poor quality it couldn’t be used, and there are many questions about the test and trace system at the moment which cost many billions more. 

Something that seemed to be entirely lacking from the budget was the third great crisis facing our nation at the moment, the environment and the climate crisis. At a time when raw sewage is being pumped into our seas and rivers and climate change is the biggest threat in our futures, you might expect some action from the Chancellor. 

We did get action but in the wrong direction, astonishingly in the days leading up to the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, the Chancellor cut passenger duty for domestic flights in the UK. This does not impact the Scottish Highlands and Islands and instead seems to simply encourage people to fly around the UK rather than take the train. 

This could result in significantly increased demand for flights out of Luton Airport, which will have a really detrimental impact on our area, not in terms of CO2 emissions from the flights but also vehicle emissions from people travelling to the airport and the noise issues faced by many in our area.

Overall this budget was lacking in real ideas, and it also showed what the Government, and the Chancellor’s real priorities are. There were 7,752 words in Rishi Sunak’s speech, but zero mentions of the climate crisis or the environment, there was hardly any help for children or families and there there was a tax hike for small business. However there were tax breaks for banks and airlines, while sparkling wine has got a bit cheaper. 

This budget, like the Conservative party, has failed the nation and our area once again. Rishi Sunak is out of touch with the British people, he missed the chance to avoid a cost of living crisis which will cause sleepless nights for families up and down the country, and he had no answer to energy bills skyrocketing by the day. 

For me though the biggest betrayal of this budget is the woeful lack of action to help our children recover from the pandemic. All the Chancellor could scrape together was a miserable pound a day for our children to catch-up after months of being locked out of classrooms. I repeat the fact that the Chancellor spent more today on cutting the price of a prosecco than saving our children’s futures. This tells you everything you need to know about the Government’s priorities.

A lot of people ask me why I want to be a Member of Parliament, and frustratingly I often find myself giving the cliched answer of “to make a positive difference.” While a cliche it is also true, but it can be hard to express exactly what that difference is.

However the other day my friend Layla Moran, the Member of Parliament for Oxford West & Abingdon, highlighted what it is truly all about, and how and why an MP who is engaged with the job and the constituency they represent can make a really important and positive difference.

Layla’s story is reproduced here in full – please do read it as it is very important, and for me it is very inspirational:

Every so often something happens in this job and you realise how much good you can do.

About a month ago on a BBC Radio Oxford call in, a radiographer dialled in anonymously and spoke about how they were concerned for them and their partner who both work for the NHS. They told me that if anything happened to them, especially given the lack of PPE and by being exposed to Coronavirus, and they passed away, that they would be worried for their nine-year-old daughter. They don’t have close family. They wanted reassurance she’d be taken care of financially. He sounded pretty emotional.

Immediately I agreed and said I would take this up. As a direct result of that call, I started calling for a coronavirus compensation scheme to match the Armed Forces compensation scheme for when servicemen lose their lives in service. This would include a lump sum on death, but also a monthly payment to the family and help with funeral costs. That was 25th March.

I told my team I wanted this to be our top campaigning priority. Coronavirus is such a horrible thing. i personally felt a little helpless. This was the first couple of weeks of lockdown. I wanted us to campaign for something positive to give us focus and aim for. at this stage while I knew this was the right thing to campaign for, I didn’t know of it would get any traction.

So we organised a letter. 49 other MPs cross party signed it along side me and we sent this to Boris Johnson on 30 March.

I thought we may be onto something when influential Conservative MPs were saying they’d back it or push for it behind the scenes. But I was not at all sure it would take off. That week we had some media interest but needed to keep pushing.

We started a petition on Change.org and spent the next few weeks working on it, getting people to sign, trying to publicise the idea. I didn’t want it Party branded because I felt given the sensitive nature of the subject it might stand a better chance of getting taken up if I took all political heat out of it.

Then last week we had the incredible news that Brexit loving Daily Express was going to take up this campaign! Perhaps speaking to the way this virus is breaking down political boundaries, but also that if you pick the right issues you can resonate with all sorts of people you may not have expected. I did an interview with them it was on their front page for most of last week.

Then this morning we saw that the Times were on board we could feel the momentum building. We were hopeful that something would be done

And then. Drumrolls please.

Today at 5pm, just over one month on from my call with that radiographer, Matt Hancock the Health Secretary announced that they are introducing a scheme for those families of NHS and social care workers who have tragically died. These families will get £60,000. Now, that’s not quite the same as what we’ve been calling for. I asked for all frontline key workers, for payments until retirement, payment for children and also help with funeral costs, but let’s not let the best be the enemy of the good. This is a win.

Being an MP there’s lots that you can influence, there’s lots that you can raise, and lots that you can do. I love this job but it’s not very often that you can say start to finish that you were responsible for a specific change. Which is what makes this so special. There are going to be grieving families out there today, sad to have lost a loved one, but who are going to get a very welcome lump sum of money because of the campaign that I started off the back of a local radiographer calling in anonymously asking for help and reassurance.

If anyone reading this works at the JR and knows who this person is, Or can get a message to that team, please can you let them know what they did? Or even to get in touch? I’d love to speak to them.

Today has been a GOOD DAY in the office.

Layla Moran MP
Oxford West and Abingdon
For more from Layla – visit: http://www.laylamoran.com/

 

When you decide to stand for election you have a lot of ‘what if I’m elected’ thoughts, you think about the commitment on your time, the impact the work will have on your life, both professional and personal, but for me the biggest thing was lots of thoughts about what can I do to make a positive difference for Hitchin, the wider constituency and indeed the whole of North Hertfordshire.

Those thoughts and ideas were manifold and it is not possible to list them all here. However I would like to detail a couple of ones about the environment, because these are ideas which have now become reality (and there will be many more!). This blog post I hope will give a little insight into how things are done at Council level.

Part 2 – Electric cars!
Here is a problem. You live in a house without off street parking, how do you charge an electric car?

Trailing cables across the pavement is not an option, so essentially if your home only has on street parking then you are essentially prevented from running an electric car. This is an issue that I set out to solve as soon as I got elected.

In the first part of this blog I posted about the conventional process of getting things done at North Herts District Council, namely by tabling a motion on single use plastics and debating it through amendments until it passes. You can read that here: https://northhertssam.com/2019/03/07/getting-single-use-plastics-banned-at-nhdc/

But that is not the only way to get stuff done, there are other approaches and a good example of this was how I managed to get NHDC to instigate a major new Electric Car charging infrastructure project.

Electric cars, and indeed all ‘alternative-fuels’ have been a passion for me for many years. It is no secret that my background is in the motorsport industry, and I believe it plays a key role in developing greener propulsion technologies for production car use. To this end I have been active in promoting and endorsing the use of non fossil fuel vehicles in motor racing.

Sam at the wheel – Giving the Nissan Leaf its worldwide racing debut

One of the first things I did after being elected to the District Council was to start pushing for the roll out of a much better electric car charging network in Hitchin. I quickly discovered that there was over £100,000 set aside for ‘sustainable transport’ in Hitchin. These funds have been accrued under the ‘Section 106’ scheme – essentially money paid by property developers to mitigate the impact of their developments. The use of the funds is restricted to certain things, in this case an undefined thing called ‘sustainable transport.’

Around the same time a Lib Dem member in Hitchin got in touch with me, he wanted to buy an electric car, but could not do so as it was impossible for him to charge it at home. He like quite a few people in the area (including me) did not have off street parking. So there was no way to plug in his car without trailing cables across the pavement (assuming he could even park directly outside his own house).

However he highlighted a government scheme which would fund up to 75% of the cost of installing charging infrastructure, to solve this exact issue. So for example if all £100,000 of Hitchin’s S106 money was spent on charging this fund would top up that amount to £400,000.

Things however were not that simple. Spending the S106 money is far from straight forward, and indeed would likely need a motion to pass in Council. While I asked officers to look into that I raised the issue with Councillors from other parties, notably Cllr Mantle (Labour) and (Cllr Levett) Conservative. The latter over a couple of pints one evening.

Additionally I looked into what other Lib Dem Councillors around the UK had been doing, and also looked at solutions employed across Europe and in Japan.

Eventually the NHDC officers arranged a meeting to try to move things forward formally (I think to some extent to get me off their case!). They called on Liberal Democrat controlled Watford Borough Council to advise on progress they had made in installing on street charging points, and there had indeed been some progress.

But I think North Herts can do better, specifically in Hitchin. Watford, like most Councils, has relied on conventional charging posts. These are expensive, take up space on the pavement, and quite frankly I think that they are rather ugly. Also the focus of these posts is usually fast or rapid charging, in other words getting 100% charge in most EV’s in less than three hours.

While these units have their place but they alone are not sufficient for the future needs of Hitchin. They are also quite complex to get installed requiring planning permission and dedicated wiring, involving digging up streets and pavements. Expensive and time consuming.

Instead I looked to a solution I had seen used in Germany, and later found out is being trialled in London. Lamp post charging. What this does is utilise the pre-existing electricity infrastructure which for the majority of time is not used at all (street lights are switched off during the day, and in Hitchin after 0100hrs). No need to dig up the roads, no additional planning permission required, just a small adaptation to an existing structure.

The focus of these new chargers would be on slow charging, taking six or more hours to get 100% charge, meaning residents without off street parking could charge their cars over night, and at a very low cost.

During the meeting with the officers and other Councillors the initial feeling was that NHDC should wait and see how the project in Watford develops, get a report and then consider what to do in North Hertfordshire. It would cost around £10,000 to survey sites for new chargers, liaise with the County Council and UK Power Networks before we could get anything done.

This was not acceptable to me, waiting for Watford would be too slow, and we need to take action now. I also argued that while what Watford had achieved was great, we could be much more ambitious.

After some debate Cllr Levett agreed with me, and we jointly pushed to get £15,000 of funding into the 2019/20 NHDC Budget to start the project off. Once the initial ground work is done then more substantial work can be done to get charging points up and running. I hope this will happen by the end of 2019, and by the very latest have cars charging on the new points in 2020.

My vision is for every street where there are homes without off street parking to have lamp-posts with chargers installed meaning that we will be initially far over-served with chargers. But with the automotive industry forecasting that by 2030 80% of all new passenger vehicles will be either a plug in hybrid or a full EV, we need to be prepared for the future. We will also need to improve the reliability and number of fast and rapid chargers in the public car parks.

There are still questions which remain unanswered, can the energy network cope with the demand if all the chargers are in use, will parking bays be exclusively for EV use (if we are over-served with charging points then it should not be an issue), will it be free or chargeable, which exact system should we use? The work to answer these points has already begun and I hope in the coming months to update everyone on the details of the scheme.

But this was a very different way of getting Lib Dem policy enacted, rather than debates and motions in full Council, a few pints with a cabinet member and a cross party meeting got the scheme into the budget.

There will be a lot more news on this project in the coming days. Watch this space.

I’m quite pleased I managed to get the word ‘manifold’ into an article about electric cars!

When you decide to stand for election you have a lot of ‘what if I’m elected’ thoughts, you think about the commitment on your time, the impact the work will have on your life, both professional and personal, but for me the biggest thing was lots of thoughts about what can I do to make a positive difference for Hitchin, the wider constituency and indeed the whole of North Hertfordshire.

Those thoughts and ideas were manifold and it is not possible to list them all here. However I would like to detail a couple of ones about the environment, because these are ideas which have now become reality (and there will be many more!). This blog post I hope will give a little insight into how things are done at Council level.

Part 1 – Plastics!

I am deeply concerned by the damage our society is doing to our environment, we are too wasteful, too polluting, and so much of this is unnecessary. It is a global problem, but as a District Councillor I realised it was possible to make a small but significant change locally.

I was appalled when I attended my first Council meeting as a Councillor rather than as a member of the public. Almost everyone in attendance was drinking water or coffee from single use disposable cups, something which is not only wasteful but costs the tax payer more than normal mugs and glasses.

So I set out to get them banned, and after consulting with some local experts and some national experts as well as the North Herts Green Party and the Green Lib Dems I put together a motion to Council which if approved would see single use plastics banned in all NHDC facilities.

This would mean no single use plastics in the Council offices, NHDC owned community centres and leisure centres as well as any other facilities operated the authority, and typically I set an ambitious target!

The exact wording of that motion is as follows (it was seconded by Cllr Paul Clark):

“Council Instructs the Chief Executive to produce an action plan to:

a) Minimise the Council’s use of plastics and to eliminate the use of single use plastics by the end of 2019.

b) Require all of the council’s suppliers and contractors to remove single use plastics from their products and packaging as soon as possible, but within 5 years.

c) Work with local businesses and retailers to:
– eliminate the use of single use plastic within the local authority area
– reduce the use of plastic in packaging and work towards the removal of plastic from packaging
– encourage them to require their suppliers to remove plastic from their products and from packaging.

We also call on the Council to work with other public bodies and large employers to inform people of the environmental damage caused by plastics and promoting the reasons for using the alternatives.”

As I said it was quite ambitious, and the North Herts Conservative party did not much like it, indeed they tabled an amendment which would have essentially rendered the motion pointless.

This amendment changed part A of my motion to read as follows:
Minimise the Council’s use of plastics and to eliminate the use of single use plastics and replace with sustainable alternatives as soon as possible.

Now on the face of it this all seems fine but in reality ‘as soon as possible’ is a phrase open to interpretation, without a deadline it seemed clear to me that nothing would happen. I believe this was the intent, to water down the motion to the point where it could be ignored. However with the Conservative majority at NHDC the amendment was carried, and the whole motion would have been rendered pointless. So I decided (to many groans from the Conservative benches) to amend the amendment, I argued that there must be a deadline for this motion to serve any purpose. My amendment to the amendment read:

Minimise the Council’s use of plastics and to eliminate the use of single use plastics and replace with sustainable alternatives by 2022.

I plucked the year out of the air as I was on the spot, I prefer to give a lot more thought to these things but I was on the spot, it was this or the motion would fail. Fortunately this seemed to be enough to pacify the Conservatives and the following revised version was accepted.

But the Conservatives were not done yet. One of the most ambitious parts of this was now in the crosshairs of the Tories. They wanted the following line removed completely.

“Request all of the council’s suppliers and contractors to remove single use plastics from their products and packaging as soon as possible.”

They argued that we could not demand that suppliers do this, after all some of the Council’s suppliers were huge companies. I responded pointing out that the bigger the company the bigger the impact of this motion, which can only be a good thing, but it was clear that the Conservatives wanted to block it despite the fact that this would only require the Council to request the removal of single use plastics.

Ultimately the Service Director – Legal and Community (a lawyer) advised that the Council would not be able to pre-qualify contractors regarding their use of single use plastics, unless it was relevant to the performance of that contract. This also applied to the evaluation stage as this could only be used if it related to the performance of the contract.

After all of this the final motion was passed as follows:

RESOLVED:
That the Chief Executive be instructed to produce an action plan to:

a) Minimise the Council’s use of plastics and to eliminate the use of single use plastics and replace with sustainable alternatives by 2022.

b) Request all of the council’s suppliers and contractors to remove single use plastics from their products and packaging as soon as possible.

c) Work with local businesses and retailers to

1. eliminate the use of single use plastic within the local authority area
2. reduce the use of plastic in packaging and work towards the removal of plastic from packaging
3. encourage them to require their suppliers to remove plastic from their products and from packaging.

The Council will also work with other public bodies and large employers to inform people of the environmental damage caused by plastics and promoting the reasons for using the alternatives.”

While I am still waiting for the formal action plan, the Council officers have made some real steps in the right direction. The disposable plastic cups have been removed and replaced with some neat branded glasses, and the disposable coffee cups have been replaced with proper mugs. But there is still much more to do. When the action plan is produced I’ll post here about it in more detail.

On June 28th 2017, Great Northern – run by Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) – proudly announced that commuters from Hitchin were about to receive a boost from a new forthcoming train timetable. What has happened since has been a unmitigated disaster. We all know things are bad, but just how bad are they? New data reveals that the situation is exceptionally bad, to the point that Hitchin has the worst train service in Britain (almost).

Indeed only a handful of minor stations have been found to be worse than Hitchin, yet Hitchin is the 171st busiest station in the entire country, so its poor performance is especially disruptive.

Of the 2,608 railway stations in the United Kingdom, Hitchin is ranked as the 2,604th worst in terms of performance over the last 4 weeks. Prior to the introduction of the new timetable on 20th May, Hitchin’s services were very average (ranked at around 1,500).

Looking at neighbouring stations it is clear that the situation is not exactly great anywhere locally, but also that Hitchin has been disproportionally impacted. Notably this is the case in general with the new timetable (if it worked) – both Letchworth and oddly Ashwell & Morden seem to get a much better service in terms of fast trains at least. When I met with Govia management recently they urged me to get people to push the Hitchin & Harpenden MP to lobby hard. They pointed out that Oliver Heald MP (NE Herts) has been very active on this front.

There are a number of key times of day where the service at Hitchin is notably substandard, especially in the seven days prior to this blog being posted. The first of these is the very early morning service window, used by key workers such as those in the NHS, Police and, rather ironically, train drivers.


Looking at the above figures, sourced from like all the stats in this post from ontimetrains.co.uk it is clear that the 0507 & 0534 almost never run, and the 0526 has a 20% on time rate. This can mean a huge gaps in services for many. The coloured squares next to the service give details of the last seven days of running for a particular service, green means it ran on time, black means it did not run at all. Red is for severely delayed and grey means no data (probably didn’t run).


Moving on to the commuter morning peak and the situation is frankly appalling. The 0633, 0711, 0730, 0734, 0834 all barely ever run at all. Almost every other service is regularly delayed. The 0741 and 0811, mostly run, but are never on time. All of this can lead to severe overcrowding, and while the situation has not got quite as bad as it was at Harpenden recently where things got dangerous, and St Albans where the station had to shut out commuters, it is probably only a matter of time.


Things are not much better on the way home either with a significant number of cancellations. Even the trains that run on time have major punctuality issues which can be very detrimental personally and financially for working parents who have to pick up children at 1800 in Hitchin. As for travelling from St Pancras? I wouldn’t bother trying.




Taking a look at the late night services there are some days where things are ok but on others there can be vast gaps in the service, leaving people stranded for hours. This is a major issue as at times where Hitchin has no trains Letchworth will be served by a number of direct fast services. I am pushing for GTR to add Hitchin as an additional stop to those late night fast services to Letchworth. This will not help those waiting at the less than lovely Finsbury Park unfortunately. St. Pancras – again, hardly seems worth trying to get the train from there late at night.

FINSBURY PARK
Many people travel to and from Finsbury Park in the morning and evening, due to its good links to the City. Performance from Hitchin to there is predictably bad.

WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED?
The reasons for this terrible performance have been dealt with extensively elsewhere, such as in the widely shared and excellent piece by Nigel Harris in Rail magazine recently. In short though the DfT (headed by Chris Grayling) pushed through a programme which would in theory improve service through the London core, which meant that many trains from Hitchin would have to pass through a new section of tunnels in London (The Canal Tunnels). The problem is the tunnels were delivered with insufficient time to train enough drivers to drive through them. But DfT and Govia Thameslink Railway decided to carry on regardless, and that has resulted in the issues we face today. A far more detailed explanation can be found here: Holy Grails and Thameslink Fails

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
Over a month has passed since this farce began and the lip service from Conservative MP’s in the commons benches is wearing rather thin. The recent vote of confidence in Chris Grayling really highlighted the contempt the likes of Bim Afolami and Anne Main have for their constituents. Things have not improved, and in some cases have actually got worse. What is needed is action, we need a train service that works and we need it now.

What can be done about it? Well if you are a Hitchin commuter join the Hitchin Commuters Group on Facebook: Hitchin Commuters Group Protesting at Hitchin station, or waving banners around is not going to get a better train service, if you want to be effective make you voice heard where it matters, DfT and Govia HQ. It is crucial to complain about every single issue. Small or large.

WHO DO I CONTACT TO COMPLAIN AND TRY TO GET THIS SORTED?
Here are some contact details – direct all complaints to:
Bim.afolami.mp@parliament.uk

NorthHertsSam@gmail.com

Don’t forget to log them with GTR too:
GTR Complaints & contact details
 
Claim delay repay:
Delay Repay

If you’re unhappy with the reply to your complaint ask transport focus to look into it: Transport Focus rail complaints

If there is a concern about overcrowding add these two people to the complaint:
Linda.mccord@transportfocus.org.uk 

ian.prosser@orr.gov.uk

Sharing this article and a link to the commuters Facebook group on Twitter to inform others. Use the @GNRailUK tag to include Great Northern in your tweet and @NHDCLibDems tag so we can promote your complaints further.

I will continue to fight for a better train service, so please keep me posted, and I will do likewise. Follow me on twitter @NorthHertsSam or get in touch with me directly northhertssam@gmail.com. I have already been very active on this issue, meeting with GTR management and getting them to agree to a public meeting in Hitchin, raising the issue with peers who have raised questions in the House of Lords. I will continue to work with GTR, Peers, Members of Parliament and commuter groups in Hitchin, Harpenden and other areas with common issues. I have tackled smaller issues like the information screens at St Pancras which do not currently show services to Hichin (I’m still pushing to get Hitchin added to the screens above the ticket gates). I have raised the issue of Carnet tickets and the disparity with those available on the Thameslink line, and there is much, much more to come! I want Hitchin to have a decent train service, not just because I love the town and want the best for it, but also because I use the trains all the time like everyone else (well those who don’t have an £1,800 taxpayer funded pad in London that is)!