The government has this morning announced that National Express East Anglia (NXEA) will be losing their franchise in March 2011. Although this is actually the original end date of the franchise the company had been looking forward to a three year extension to 2014 having met the prerequisite performance targets. However, the recent failure of the East Coast franchise has meant that National Express (NX) were likely to lose the NXEA business too. There were rumours that the Department for Transport (DfT) wanted to strip NX of the NXEA and C2C franchises with immediate effect but they have since decided against this. (The C2C business is up for renewal in May 2011)
The DfT have stated that the process for securing a new operator would start immediately so that a new franchise could begin in April 2011.
An interesting footnote to the timing of the end of the franchise is how close it is to the 2012 Olympics which some may see as inconvenient to say the least.
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