‘Horses for courses’

In RAIL 843, Toby Lodge ( Open Access) and Dr Ian Taylor give their respective perspectives for rail’s future.

Certainly, the current franchising model increasingly seems flawed and approaching crisis. We have a series of state-directed private monopolies which do not fulfil the original privatisation aims of enterprising, innovative long-term development and investment, while accountability is only via the very indirect, remote and long-winded mechanism of central government.

Perhaps an answer is to recognise the diversity of passenger services, using a more ‘horses for courses’ approach. Captive market, natural monopoly operations (most commuter ones, for example) could gain accountability through a local co-operative model with directly elected supremos (similar to police and crime commissioners), with power to appoint local managements, franchisees or concessionaires.

Inter-city and longer-distance services, where effective competition is feasible, could be provided on a full open access basis, with competition in (not for) the market giving public accountability, as per Option 4 in the recent Competition and Markets Authority report.

Incentivising subsidies and charges could be applied to represent ‘hidden’ costs and benefits in the marketplace, rather than as a result of franchise bidding. Vertical integration sounds seductive, but outside of full nationalisation it seems unachievable. The Beeching era effectively eradicated duplicatory infrastructure under the rationalisation programme, leaving very little opportunity for vertically integrated, geographically defined companies to compete (quite apart from problems of cross-company boundary operations).

An approach might be to look to Sweden, where infrastructure is ‘horizontally integrated’ with road, rail and waterways under an integrated manager. David Cooper, Bletchley