YORK Central MP Hugh Bayley has hit out after the Government announced the start of a bidding competition for the East Coast mainline franchise.

The York-based service, which has been run under the control of the Department for Transport since November 2009 after National Express pulled out, is expected to be back in private hands in less than two years.

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin announced the new franchising process yesterday, saying the new operator was expected to take over in February 2015. He said the announcement was a major step in delivering tangible improvements to services, providing long-term certainty to the market and supporting a huge programme of rail investment.

He said: “Above all, in future franchise competitions we are placing passengers in the driving seat by ensuring that their views and satisfaction levels are taken into account when deciding which companies run our railway services.”

But he refused calls by Mr Bayley to guarantee the franchise’s HQ would be based in York, safeguarding scores of jobs, saying such a matter would be down to the successful franchisee.

He also dismissed the MP’s demand for East Coast to be able to continue running the service for the next 15 years, to enable a comparison to be made between its performance and that of the private service on the West Coast Line.

York council leader James Alexander said he was disappointed the line was to be privatised again, but said he was confident local authorities along the line would continue to work with the Government to ensure lessons were learned from the West Coast franchise process and use knowledge gained to maintain influence for the benefit of residents.

Rail unions reacted with dismay to the news, saying the private sector had twice given up the franchise, with GNER pulling out some years ago.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: “Despite wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on the franchising circus, and instead of learning the lessons of the privatisation disasters on the East and West Coast main lines and across the rest of the network, the Government has given the green light to a whole new wave of profiteering that will have the train companies laughing all the way to the bank.”

Manuel Cortes, leader of the TSSA rail union, said the £50 million West Coast line “fiasco” had revealed that private franchises were a shambles, and yet the Government was now privatising the only successful publicly-owned franchise.