Originally Posted by Chris

The hand-back of East Coast and the debacle over the West Coast franchise both had the same root cause: civil servants in the DoT who were utterly hopeless. In the case of East Coast they drafted a franchise agreement that put all the risk on the State - it simply begged over-optimistic franchise bids because the winning operator had the option to hand back the franchise and walk away if they later found they couldn't make it work. On the West Coast the civil service was simply inept and created a tick-box bid assessment process that wasn't able to weed out obvious accounting tricks that appeared to show First could generate a bigger return to the State than Virgin (despite Virgin Trains' 20-odd years' experience of actually running the line), except of course that the big returns were all way back at the very end of the franchise period, giving First the chance to make like National Express and simply hand it back, without the promised returns ever materialising.

DOR ran East Coast competently but registered consistently lower passenger satisfaction than Virgin West Coast and returned half as much money to the exchequer per passenger mile as South Western. It has been impossible up to now to say empirically how good the State really was at running the East Coast because there was no comparable private operator on the same route at the same time. However I confidently predict that Virgin will improve on DOR's performance over the lifetime of its new franchise on the East Coast.