Ministers turning clock back to bad old days of British Rail

Times

6 days ago

Bit by bit, Britain's rail network is falling back into public ownership. As the contracts of train operating companies expire, their operations are coming under the control of an interim Department for Transport (DfT) entity that will make way for Great British Railways some time in late 2026. All passenger operator contracts are expected to have been rolled into GBR from October 2027. From then on Britain will be served by a nationalised railway not dissimilar to British Rail, that specialist in shabby, second-class service that so epitomised shabby, postwar Britain. Only private freight operations will survive this return to locomotive socialism, together with rolling stock leasing firms and nimble 'open-access' private passenger companies operating on only a few routes with no subsidy in the gaps between GBR services.
Everyone outside the Labour government can see what is coming down the line: a gigantic state monopoly run by civil servants (hundreds of DfT officials are being transferred to help run it) and those well-known champions of innovation and customer choice, the RMT and Aslef. As a report warns, the 'ghost of British Rail' is risen.
Tony Lodge, a specialist in the rail industry at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, is not alone in believing that it doesn't have to be this way. In his report, 'Rail's Last Chance', Mr Lodge describes GBR as a solution in search of a problem. He is right: while the privatisation of national infrastructure in the Thatcher-Major era produced winners (telecoms) and, ultimately, losers (water), the experience of the rail industry was more mixed. Before the pandemic rail privatisation was largely a success. Between 1998 and 2015 the number of passenger journeys more than doubled, outstripping state railways in France and Germany. New trains and services were introduced; passenger satisfaction was the highest in Europe. True, fares increased, and private operators sometimes overreached themselves with excessive franchise bids. But that record in no way makes the case for raising British Rail from the grave.
It was not privatisation that resulted in the recent drop in rail income but Covid. The pandemic permanently altered the rail landscape. Working from home meant many fewer commutes and lucrative peak-time season tickets. Raw ­passenger numbers are almost at pre-pandemic levels but the tickets being bought are cheaper, off-peak ones: receipts are down £1.4 billion. Shipping fresh air around the country, as Rishi Sunak described operations during lockdown, killed the franchise model. Faced with rescuing insolvent passenger companies, the Tories chose consolidation under GBR, but with private firms running services on fixed contracts to foster innovation.
In his report Mr Lodge pleads with the government not to throw the good out with the bad. The network is costing the taxpayer £12 billion a year while delivering only 2 per cent of passenger journeys. If this huge burden on the public finances is to be reduced ministers must, he says, prioritise customer and income growth. That means allowing more and more open-access operators to compete on price and service, making ticketing more user friendly with apps and points systems, monetising the network's vast land bank and making the Office of Rail and Road into a muscular regulator. His is a hybrid system marrying a unified network with competition. Everyone knows it's the best way forward. Except the unions and government.