Article for MyNews Magazine

Life in Westminster has been particularly busy of late. There have been a couple of ministerial visits to Scotland and more TV and radio interviews in the last few weeks than in the previous few months. I even experienced my first Jeremy Paxman interview on Newsnight! (Off-screen he is surprisingly genial.)

But I want to focus on one particular and local issue in this column – the Metropolitan Line. At this point, I should declare an interest. Like thousands of residents of South West Hertfordshire, I regularly travel on the Met Line. Like other commuters, the quality of the service has a direct impact on the quality of my life. And that is why I share the concerns of many commuters about the quality of service in recent weeks and the future changes to the Met Line timetable.

This is not a new issue. I was first involved in this matter in 2006. At that point, the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone was in the process of changing the design of trains for the Met Line. The new design, however, was going to involve trains with fewer seats. The reason for this was that the existing Met Line trains were not well-designed for passengers getting on and off in the stretch of the line from Baker Street to Aldgate when stops are short. For this part of line, a design with plenty of standing room and easy access to the exits was what was considered appropriate.

The problem with that was for the ‘country’ part of the journey, what is needed is seating capacity. Unfortunately, the then Mayor’s interests were not the commuters of Hertfordshire – or even the suburbs of London – but those solely using the inner London part of the line.

I had numerous meetings with Transport for London, London Underground and even the Tube contractors. I corresponded with the Mayor’s office but, I confess, to no avail.

My concerns were simple – Hertfordshire commuters would be left standing for journeys of up to an hour. If you are so inclined, a bit of googling will enable you to find an article I wrote on the subject five years ago.

Now the new trains are coming in, I am afraid that my concerns were justified, although slightly different problems have emerged.

Yes, the new trains have fewer seats and the risk of getting on at, say, Rickmansworth and not getting a seat has increased. But the problem, at least in the eyes of London Underground, is further down the line for those intermediate stations between Moor Park and Harrow-on-the-Hill and then from Harrow-on-the-Hill to Finchley Road.

The consequence has been, as far as I can see, more unscheduled occasions when ‘fast’ trains have become ‘slow’ trains.

The new timetable, due from December 2011, embeds this change. The good news is that there are two new Amersham trains per hour at peak times. So at least commuters will be getting a seat. The bad news is that these additional trains will be stopping at all stations. As for non-peak times, all trains will stop at all stations, adding 7 ½ minutes to the journey time from Moor Park to Baker Street.

The consultation process has not been great (to put it mildly) and it is not clear to me, taken as a whole, that the overall service will be better than it was using the old rolling stock. I am seeking a meeting to see if something could be done to improve the position of Hertfordshire’s commuters. But the big problem was the decision taken over five years ago to redesign the trains without any consideration for the interests of those of us living on the outlying parts of the Metropolitan Line.

I am sure that this will be an issue to which I will return.