State control of our awful railways is not the answer
FOR the country that invented railways it’s just not good enough. One in seven trains running late hits a 12-yearlow for Britain’s railway companies but Labour’s answer of nationalising them is not the answer either, taking us back to an age when belligerent trade unions ran the country.
Whenever I catch a train into London for a meeting I always factor in at least half an hour for any delay. Coming back from my last trip one train was cancelled and the following one took longer than usual, adding over an hour to my return journey. No apologies – just get on with it – and yet every year the cost of train travel goes up.
Now the Office of Rail and Road records an especially agonising year for rail commuters with 14 per cent of trains failing to arrive on time.
No one could have prevented the disruption caused by the Beast from the East snow storms but the new timetable shambles that paralysed trains in the North and South-east of England this year was manmade. As a result timetable changes planned for December have been thankfully scrapped.
With such a regular bad experience of train travel it’s no surprise that one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most popular policies is the renationalisation of rail, somehow taking us back to a golden age of state ownership. Well those of us old enough to remember British Rail will beg to disagree.
Trains are now faster, more frequent and more comfortable than ever before. Handing power back to rail unions would not be a good idea either, allowing the paralysing national strikes of the 1970s. Recent network battles with the RMT over so-called safety concerns have been bad enough, reminding us how vulnerable the transport service is to politically motivated strike action.
Militancy justifies the unions’ continued existence and Corbyn’s hard-Left party depends on their money and political support. Like every other aspect of the Labour movement it has been hijacked by extremist activists. That’s why Corbyn is so keen to promote renationalisation because it would strengthen his hand but not necessarily deliver a better service for passengers.
Also don’t forget that a big part of the railway system is in fact owned by the state. Network Rail, in charge of the whole infrastructure, is linked to the Department for Transport. It is its programme of publicly funded rail line upgrades that is frequently the cause of so many delays.
Huge public investment in Crossrail and other major rail projects comes at a cost in public money and disruption. Some of this is in response to a predicted growth in passenger numbers resulting from an increased population driven by immigration. As with so many other public services, mass migration puts an increased burden on our infrastructure.
The attraction for private companies to run train services comes from a guaranteed rise in train fares based on inflation. If we all want to see less costly fares then that has to be subsidised by the taxpayer. Those who rarely use trains, preferring to drive everywhere, might well think that an unfair use of their money.
Where the finger can be fairly pointed at the private rail companies is poor management. Sometimes this results from complicated ownership. Southern Railway, which has had a succession of headlinegrabbing issues such as overcrowding, poor punctuality and strikes, is part of Govia which is a joint venture between the British Go-ahead Group and the French Keolis company.
KEOLIS is 70 per cent owned by SNCF, the French National Railways Corporation, and thus part of the French state. It is suggested that these layers of management, ending up with the French government itself, mean that vital decision-making is neither swift nor efficient.
Indeed such has been the fury over Southern’s latest timetable mishaps that the Government may temporarily renationalise the service as it did for the collapse of the Virgin Trains contract for the East Coast Mainline.
Regional franchises are in fact monopolies with little competition to bring down prices or improve services. Great Western Railway cannot exactly offer better value in the north of England.
All this sits on the desk of Transport Secretary Chris Grayling as he reviews the future of our railway system. John Lewis boss Keith Williams has been hired to lead the 12-month inquiry. Some people hope that he will use his company’s shared-ownership model to incentivise rail workers to run a better service if they have a personal stake in the train companies.
Hopefully he will be able to bring the best practices of the private sector to head off any calls by Corbyn for a costly re-nationalisation of the network. You certainly don’t want to throw away any of the gains of privatisation by a knee-jerk reaction to its failures.
Managers who fail should be called out and not rewarded with taxpayer-subsidised bonuses. A new pride needs to be restored to our railways. It was the British after all who invented and exported trains across the world to make a modern age of international travel possible.
It was only because Phileas Fogg had access to steam train and ship timetables that he could dare to bet half his fortune on travelling around the world in 80 days. Let’s hope that this Government’s review of our railways will make them once again a byword for dependability.
In the meantime I’ll still factor in a half-hour delay on my trips into Paddington.
‘One in seven trains is running late’