FIRST Capital Connect knows its recent service has been way below the standard expected and deserved by commuters.

In fact, the service has been so poor the line above is a gross understatement.

Promising to clean up its act and give us all “a service we deserve”, the company heralded the arrival of managing director Neal Lawson as a new beginning.

I can therefore only assume that FCC does not think a lot of us if it believes we deserve what we got last week.

The company held a question and answer session at St Pancras on Thursday evening.

It obviously believed that a face-to-face chat with Mr Lawson would be enough to pacify angry commuters, understandably fed up with months of delays, cancellations and excuses.

Out came the emails asking the press to publicise the event, which we dutifully did. Everything, it seemed, was going to plan for FCC.

That was until the Review stuck its nose where it was not wanted, something which we are always more than happy to do.

We sent two reporters armed with a video camera to capture this dawn of a new era for FCC. We hoped they could witness the improved service while travelling down to St Pancras.

They might also find time to see first hand FCC’s PR machine in action.

If the company is indeed getting itself on track, surely its PR team is going to be primed and ready for action, willing to tackle the issues that go to the very heart of the problems facing commuters every day.

Looking for solutions, not problems, they would want to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of the issues raised by allowing the press to report on this very public meeting which it advertised for free through the column inches of nearly every local paper on its Bedford to Brighton line. We all seemed to assume that its aim was to put the poor service behind it as it searched for this renaissance of good feeling between company and commuter. Wrong.

You can imagine my surprise when one of our reporters phoned me to explain that they were not allowed into the public meeting, the emphasis being on the word “public”.

Unofficially our reporters were told that FCC did not want us to report on commuters vilifying the company’s new MD. It believed it might not be good PR. Yeah. And?

It also only expected commuters to attend. Yeah. And?

Finally it only wanted management to be interrogated by passengers. Yeah… I am sure you can see a pattern emerging.

We persisted and were eventually allowed in. I guess FCC made the decision to protect itself from more public ridicule rather than thinking of the commuters who could not attend the meeting. How silly of us to assume that FCC would be happy for these people to read about it in their local paper.

In an interview with our reporters, Mr Lawson said: “We’re going to keep people informed about how we’re going. We are definitely going to improve how we communicate and we have got to do what we say we are going to do, and be honest.”

Let us hope he is true to his word. Not trying to prevent journalists from reporting on public meetings, the outcome of which affects tens of thousands of people, would be a good start though.

WELL done to Sandringham School’s headteacher Alan Gray. Already the county’s secondary school headteacher of the year, he has now been hand-picked to help schools struggling nationally.

The Review has worked closely with Sandringham on its forward-thinking Question Time event and the Sandringham Scoop student newspaper which involved pupils working on the Review’s news desk.

On both occasions the pupils were a credit to their school and their headteacher.

They are obviously following Mr Gray’s good example.