More competition is needed on our railways
Industry Insider ( RAIL 844) makes two essential claims: that competition on rail increases benefits for passengers; and that a nationalised network would necessarily be defunded as it would have to compete with the NHS and other public services for monies.
Firstly, on-rail competition exists in a very small number of areas. If you wish to travel from London to Brighton, Edinburgh to Glasgow, or Leeds to Manchester, there is a single operator running a service that is convenient.
The only area I can think of where two franchised operators have comparable frequency, journey time and price is London-Birmingham, between Virgin and Chiltern. Open access operators exist on only one route and could still exist under a nationalised system - as they do in Italy, where Italo competes with Trenitalia between Rome and Milan.
Secondly, the existing privatised system competes for government funding against other public services in exactly the same way as a nationalised operator would have to.
Network Rail’s £48 billion Control Period 6 settlement came largely from the public purse. The Government has guaranteed the use of Intercity Express Programme trains being deployed by Great Western Railway and Virgin Trains East Coast for the next 27 years, so these are a public liability for that time. The DfT agrees to subsidise franchises such as Arriva Trains Wales, Northern, TransPennine Express, ScotRail and Caledonian Sleeper for societal purposes.
All of these are private businesses reliant on the largesse of the public sector. Should the attitude of the Government towards Network Rail or certain areas of operation change, the same cuts would have to be made by the privatised system as were made 40 years ago by the nationalised one.
The idea that private money would fill the gap is nonsensical, when one considers that a private business which ends up as a net contributor to UK Rail plc will not be a going concern for very long!
The change in government attitude towards the railways that has been sustained since 1997 is very welcome, and everything must be done to sustain it. Many of the regulatory systems that have been applied to the privatised system, such as control periods and the ability to set long-term budgets, are also welcome. But these would have been good ideas whenever they were introduced, under any system. They are not particular to privatisation.
Adovcates against nationalisation owe it to all of us to explain why a government that prefers a nationalised operation will immediately scrap the current regulatory settlement model and reverse an attitude towards the railways that has been an area of cross-party consensus for two decades.
If proponents of privatisation have these arguments available to them, they should make them. Until they do they will rightly be seen as scaremongering in defence of a broken system, failing to understand the political, social and economic context in which the UK’s railways reside. James Wood, London