Letting the nation’s train set fall into private hands was supposed to lead to a rail renaissance. But Randeep Ramesh, Transport Correspondent, explains why more people might prefer to let a plane take the strain

The war for rail passengers has taken to the skies. Airlines are targeting domestic routes which have been considered the preserve of the railways – forcing down fares on both.
British Midland recently announced it would start flying from Heathrow to Manchester next year in competition with Virgin Trains “indifferent” rail service.EasyJet, the low-cost, no-frills carrier, sparked a price war with Great North Eastern Railways (GNER) – the operator of the east coast service – which saw a single rail ticket from London to Edinburgh drop to just pounds 19.Experts say that a three-hour rail journey can compete with an hour’s flying time.”With airports you need to drive, park and then spend half-an-hour checking in, and then spend time getting from the airport into the city at the other end” says Alex McWhirter, technical editor of Business Travel. But that too was overbooked and the problem worsened when the same scene was replayed yesterday with more travellers joining the list of the stranded.One woman failed to get to her daughter’s wedding today despite trying to board a flight with her scheduled ticket for three successive days. Others had their plans badly disrupted as onward connecting flights were missed.An Air India official said the stranded passengers would be put on a flight today: “We do have problems at Christmas, but this was an unfortunate situation .. We have apologised to the passengers”.. The airline blamed a “glitch in the system” for too many tickets being sold for the flights, and 62 passengers having to stay at a hotel.
The problem began on Friday when travellers arrived at Heathrow with confirmed tickets for the flight to Bombay to discover there were not enough seats on the plane.Ticketholders stayed at a hotel with the promise of flight on Saturday. The Conservatives have not decided exactly what line to take on the issue, but a number of them will certainly oppose any proposals for reform..

Passengers travelling to India were stranded at London’s Heathrow airport for 48 hours because their Air India flights were heavily overbooked. The Liberal Democrats have 66, of which 23 are hereditary, and there are 325 cross-benchers, 205 of whom are hereditary. Some MPs would oppose the idea of an elected chamber, seeing it as a potential rival to the Commons.Mr Blair’s most likely course of action will be to delay the second part of the reform, putting forward proposals now but postponing their implementation until later.At present, there are 499 Tory peers, 326 of whom are hereditary, and 158 Labour peers, 15 hereditary. Elected members would sit for a fixed term, on a cycle designed not to clash with general elections.Mr Blair’s new cabinet committee will be chaired by Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, and will include Lord Richard, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary and Peter Mandelson, minister without portfolio.A Bill to remove hereditary peers’ voting rights will be introduced in November next year, but there are moves to introduce fuller reforms at the same time. Although the Prime Minister is said to be keeping an open mind on how best to achieve his reforms, both the leader of the House of Lords, Lord Richard, and the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, are said to be in favour of the radical option.
They want to go for full-scale reform straight away, rather than taking the more cautious approach of removing voting rights in the next session of Parliament and then proposing an elected chamber after the next election.Lord Richard has proposed that two thirds of the second chamber’s members should be directly elected, while the rest should be appointed in the same way as life peers. The move would take the Government far further than its manifesto pledge to remove voting rights from hereditary peers. it’s not that we don’t have vigorous debate or that we don’t present to each other what we think, it’s that we don’t do it in writing,” Mr Blunkett said.Yesterday a sceptic said leaking the memo might not do Mr Blunkett any harm politically.

Despite his alliance with Tony Blair and high-profile agenda on raising schools standards, he has maintained some support from the old left in his party. The revelation that he has protested against the suggestion that disability benefits should be cut across the board will strengthen those links.. Tony Blair has set up a special Cabinet committee to look at replacing the House of Lords with an elected second chamber, it emerged yesterday. The memo was written a fortnight ago, on the eve of a Commons vote on plans to curtail lone parents’ benefits, and if Mr Blunkett had chosen to leak it he might have been expected to have done it sooner. Copies were sent to the Prime Minister, Harriet Harman, John Prescott, Alistair Darling, Donald Dewar, Ron Davies and Mo Mowlam, so there could be any number of suspects. The number with access to Mr Blunkett’s memo were certainly in double if not treble figures.
“I am extremely uncomfortable with a system which results in my private memoranda to cabinet colleagues being leaked to the papers If there’s a lesson … They were joined by rock musician Brian Eno, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, a patron of War Child, and globe-trotting humanitarian, Bianca Jagger.Mostar was a major tourist and cultural centre before the war, and the biggest multi-ethnic city in former Yugoslavia.

Mr Blunkett said the Chief Whip, Nick Brown, would have to make a judgement on whether such a move could be pushed through the Commons, and on whether it would be worth risking another major backbench rebellion to do so.. David Blunkett went on the offensive yesterday to deny any involvement in the leaking of his memo to Gordon Brown. While he supported moves to make employers insure themselves against injuries, “no-fault” schemes could lead to sloppiness over health and safety.However, abolishing industrial injuries benefits for existing claimants would be “unacceptable politically”. Mr Blunkett himself is entitled to DLA because of his blindness, despite his ministerial salary. In his letter he said about 12 per cent of the pounds 4.4bn annual cost of the allowance, which has quadrupled since 1993, was “misapplied”.The proposal that provoked the strongest rejection from Mr Blunkett, though, was a suggestion that the DLA should be handed over to local authorities.

The disabled were a “weak political constituency” and would lose their benefits to schools and hospitals, he said.Capping of local authorities would make the problem worse, and any moves to tighten the caps would mean inadequate support for the disabled.”Disabled people will be victims of the lottery of local authority discretion,” Mr Blunkett wrote.He was also unhappy about some of the plans to reform Industrial Injuries Benefit. This would create disincentives to people to work and save money, he argued.The other major area of reform tackled in the letter was the allowance, which is paid according to level of disability rather than income. In particular, an existing test in which people had to show they were incapable of any work encouraged those who might be able to do part-time or voluntary jobs to pretend they were more disabled than they really were.Even if extra flexibility cost money – that is to say, if it meant even more partially-disabled people going on to IB – that should be seen as an investment in welfare to work.New Deal cash for the long-term sick and disabled, totalling pounds 195m, would be used by the DSS and DfEE to experiment with different schemes.However, plans to tax or means-test Disability Living Allowance would be inappropriate, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment wrote. One million people drew the benefit in 1979, compared with two million today.Mr Blunkett recognised this in his letter, suggesting that more generous payments to people on IB were an incentive to fraud. Under the Conservatives, Labour figures have argued, many people went on to Incapacity Benefit when they should really have been on unemployment benefits. A leaked memo from David Blunkett to Gordon Brown raised the political temperature yesterday in a growing row over benefit reforms. Fran Abrams, Political Correspondent, examined the details.
The cost of disability benefits rose from pounds 4.1bn in 1982 to pounds 23.5bn last year, and everyone in the Government agrees that reforms are necessary.With the benefits rising at six per cent a year, the Department of Social Security “faces questions that have to be addressed radically,” Mr Blunkett said in the memo.He would welcome “humane and sensitively-judged reforms to support disabled people to work,” he said, but added that some of the interim findings of Harriet Harman’s part of the comprehensive spending review disturbed him.Deep cuts in disability benefits across the board “would make a mockery of our professions on social exclusion and the construction of a more just society,” he wrote.