On Monday I was travelling by rail on the Lowestoft line – eg using a public service ‘divested’ into the efficient entrepreneurial private sector twenty-five years ago.

Standing in the freezing rain and howling winds of Darsham station, it was disconcerting to discover that the 15.38 had been cancelled. This left the ten or so passengers who expected to travel to Ipswich no option but to wait 2 hours in the cold on an unmanned station for the next train.

Luckily there is an intercom at Darsham (although installed on a windblown outer wall making conversation tricky) so I pressed the button and asked National Express East Anglia what plans they had to remedy their failure of service. At which point I discovered that this intercom went straight through to a call centre so far away from Suffolk (and, almost certainly from the UK) that the call-centre worker at the other end didn’t even know where ‘Darsham’, ‘the Lowestoft line’ or ‘Ipswich’ actually were. This limited his capacity to answer my questions or indeed explain what National Express East Anglia planned to do to reduce the four hour hole in their service provision.

Cynically, this seems to me to be an extraordinarily efficient and entrepreneurial solution to taking responsibility for manifest failures in a public service.

I was travelling from Darsham because I had been delivering party leaflets warning Suffolk residents about the likely consequences of Suffolk County Council’s divestment plans. As I sat, shivering, in the rain, I wondered whether a divested Council would turn out to be as singularly unresponsive, uncaring and absent as NEXEA’s service was on that day!

This was also published as a letter in EADT 11 November 2010