Only a matter of time before a water firm suffers the same fate as TransPennine Express - David Behrens

TransPennine’s boss, Matthew Golton, fell on his sword, saying it was time for someone else to take over. You’re telling me.

He also said he believed his company had done “all it could’’, which was an insult to those stuck on the platform who must have hoped it could run to a proper apology.

But the sacking of one failing firm doesn’t mean the problems are over. Services will still be cancelled, crowded, chaotic and costly. The issues are too entrenched to be brushed away by the appearance of a few new faces around the boardroom table.

Successive ministers haven’t helped. Not one has faced down either profiteering companies who don’t care whether they’re transporting commuters or cattle, or union leaders clinging to working practices that should have disappeared with bus conductors.

We are back to where we were 30 years ago because of the cosy working arrangements on both sides of the industrial divide that mitigate against change. That’s why even modest proposals such as the recent plan to end the current system of franchising have foundered in a sea of political discord.

The TransPennine debacle was a particular missed opportunity to shake things up. The franchise was held by First Group, which also runs Avanti West Coast, South Western and Great Western Railways, London Trams and Hull Trains. A Transport Minister with a backbone could have threatened to take them all away unless they cleaned up their act in the Pennines, pronto. Faced with the decimation of their entire business, the head office might suddenly have taken notice.

As it is, the group can simply write off one franchise – and the passengers it has treated so appallingly – as collateral damage.

This reluctance by ministers to pick a fight with their contractors – presumably for fear of legal recriminations – extends far beyond the railway network; the water industry is another notable sector in which the tail is allowed to wag the dog.

Last week’s coordinated but hollow apology by regional water firms for their repeated dumping of sewage in our streams and rivers was a case in point. They did their best not to mention that they were passing on the cost to the rest of us.

They also failed to acknowledge that they collectively paid £1.4bn in dividends last year, almost three times more than the year before. So they’re prioritising their institutionalised backers and then charging us again for work we thought we’d paid for in the first place.

Ofwat’s complicity in this marks it out as a timid poodle instead of the watchdog it’s supposed to be.

Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary, has professed herself only to be “pretty fed up” with this. That’s hardly likely to have the shareholders quaking in their boots, is it?

She is not the only one to feel let down. Trust in Yorkshire Water is at “rock bottom”, according to a survey carried out for the pressure group, Surfers Against Sewage. That’s significant given that only three decades ago it presided over the worst water crisis in modern history when it asked for a drought order that would have cut off Huddersfield and Halifax for 24 hours in every 48. Fleets of tankers had to be brought in from other areas and the resulting public inquiry made us the laughing stock of the nation. Channel 4 famously filmed the comedian Mark Thomas taking a tanker of water to Yorkshire as a gift from the people of Ethiopia. Yet not even that was as bad as the situation today, if you believe Surfers Against Sewage. Fewer than one in five of its respondents thought Yorkshire Water was using its money to improve services and hardly anyone believed Ofwat was doing enough to make them improve. Well, why would it? There is a cosy hand-in-glove relationship within the sector that sees nearly all the big water companies employing former Ofwat regulators. It’s in neither side’s interest to change that.

It is, however, very much in the interest of everyone else to manage things differently – and it must surely be only a matter of time before at least one water firm is washed away on the same tide of outrage that sank TransPennine Express.