Rail passengers face biggest shake-up since BR broken up
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling certainly hasn’t wasted any time trying to get to grips with Britain’s notorious rail problems. Just five months into the job and he’s proposing the biggest shake-up of the system since the Tories, under John Major, broke up British Rail in 1993 and separated the running of the tracks and infrastructure from the train operators, which were franchised out to private operators.
In a nutshell the private companies did what private companies do. They invested, added more services and offered all sorts of attractive ticketing options. More and more people took to the railways but the network couldn’t expand and upgrade fast enough to cope with the burgeoning demand. Cue millions of angry commuters furious with overrun engineering works, delays and cancellations. Ask anyone travelling on Southern trains how that feels.
But who do they blame? The train operators themselves or Network Rail, the quasi-public company responsible for the tracks and the smooth running of the service. That’s certainly who the train operators blame but Network Rail in turn points the finger at the operators. And everyone screams at the Government for not doing more to solve the problem.
That’s exactly what Chris Grayling says he’s trying to do today, with the obvious irony it means undoing much of what was put in place by the Conservative Government back in the 90s.
Mr Grayling now believes that system does not work. “We need to change the relationship between the tracks and the trains on the railway,” he says. “In my experience passengers don’t understand the division between the two. They just want someone to be in charge. They want their train to work. I agree with them.”
Yet it’s not clear how his new plans will deliver that result. The idea is to carve out bits of Network Rail and marry them with the specific train operator on each route so that passengers only have one “team” to deal with as opposed to two. The problem is, will it actually reduce the blame game if the team is still really two separate companies underneath, each looking for a scapegoat when things go wrong?
The devil will be in the detail. If the teams are fully integrated and jointly incentivised to take responsibility for both the tracks and the trains, perhaps it will work. But that integration would need to be very deep indeed. Subsidies from the Government that currently go to Network Rail would need explicitly to go to the “team” as would penalties for engineering over-runs and service disruptions in general.
And how would the length of contracts work? Currently Network Rail is the incumbent track operator with no timescale attached to its ownership of the network. But train operators “win” franchise agreements to provide passenger services that typically last for seven to 10 years. Under that structure there is clearly no incentive for a train operator to invest piles of cash on its line if that line could be run by another operator in several years’ time. So does Chris Grayling plan to tear up the old system and franchise out both the route and the associated tracks as one package? Again, that’s not clear.
Mr Grayling says there is no plan to change the public sector status of Network Rail but the way he’s decided to develop the brand new East-West Rail line is telling.
Rather than use Network Rail to build out the new tracks, he’s instead going to outsource the entire lot – tracks and trains – to a private third party. Much the same way the Government has chosen to do with Crossrail. He insists that’s just because Network Rail “has got a lot on” but perhaps understandably unions feel it could be the slippery slope toward privatisation of the tracks themselves. Lots of mini, private Network Rails.
We tried that one before. The company was called Railtrack and it was an unmitigated disaster. It eventually went bust.
No one would condemn the Transport Secretary’s desire to deliver a better rail service for passengers and give the economy a much-needed boost. But there are many who would question the way he’s hoping to achieve it.
While he says he’s not in favour of “throwing everything up in the air and doing a massive reorganisation”, alarm bells start ringing when in the next breath he’s hailing a “new golden era for rail”.
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