Grayling rules out public ownership

Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling has ruled out public ownership of the East Coast Partnership franchise.

Speaking at the Transport Select Committee on July 24, he told MPs: “The issue isn’t about ownership, it’s about capacity. Another point about private involvement - and I have no particular weddedness to a particular form of private participation - is that if you have a business that is categorised entirely within the public sector, you lose the ability to bring in private investment.

“If we had a purely public railway, the chances are that new trains would have to go on the public balance sheet. One of the reasons BR struggled to get new rolling stock was that every year it was constantly competing with the demands of health and education and the rest.

“In terms of what the future looks like for East Coast, I rather like a public-private partnership model. What I’m not planning to do is to return a franchise to the private sector in the way that’s happened in the past. It will be different.

“I do worry genuinely about the concept of taking the railways back into the public sector, given that the Office of National Statistics has required investment to be put on the public balance sheet and therefore the railways come up all the time against the competition that used to exist for capital each year from the Treasury.

“We’re not planning to sell off this railway lock stock and barrel.”