Don’t hand rail back to a Fat Controller

The Great British Railways quango will be outsized, powerful, intrusive and deter choice. Better to put it on a diet

Post-pandemic, lots of us are back using trains for leisure travel, and rail freight has kept going too. But business journeys are still a fraction of their pre-Covid levels, and few will shed a tear if we don’t have to commute so much in future either.

Which is why the Government’s plans for rail reform look out of date, because they were forged before the pandemic sparked off these changes. Some of its proposals are still valid, such as using contactless payment to touch in and out for the cheapest available fare on most routes, but others have been left behind.

The oddest anomaly is a return to government central planning, with a huge new Fat Controller Quango called Great British Railways deciding everything from timetables and ticketing, right down to the colour of the trains. There’s a good argument for a slimline system operator to provide a “controlling mind” to make sure the day-to-day network runs safely, minimises delays and uses capacity as efficiently as possible. But the quangocrats at Great British Railways will be far more powerful and intrusive than that.

The central planning doesn’t stop there either, because most of the timetable will be made up of politically commissioned services on contracts from central, devolved or local government. The services will be local monopolies set by political barons and bureaucrats, driven by short-term electoral pressures and constrained by limited public sector investment funds, with little or no opportunity for creative or entrepreneurial firms to offer customers the choice of different prices, quality or styles of service which they expect in every other walk of life.

And these new monopolies will be brittle, because if a timetable melts down, or a train breaks down, or there’s a strike, there won’t be an alternative train firm’s service which passengers can board in a few minutes instead.

We should put the Fat Controller on a diet, turning Great British Railways into a slimline system operator rather than a central planner. And then, for most passenger and freight services, we should let lots of different rail firms compete every day to win passengers with a variety of prices, quality and styles of service, because they know customers can switch to a rival at any time if it is better.

All it would need is simple, transparent route auctions, so rival firms can easily start new services if they think they can attract enough passengers. And if enough of us want to go back to commuting, local mayors and councils would still be able to commission extra services to get traffic off the roads too.

Giving customers more choices would be less bureaucratic and more nimble, because the Fat Controller would be a lot thinner. It would change with the times as our travel habits keep adjusting to a post-Covid world. It would cost taxpayers miles less, because we wouldn’t be subsidising empty trains and entrepreneurial firms could attract more passengers back onto rail. It would be more resilient when things go wrong. It would be greener, because competitive, customerfocused trains will persuade passengers to swap short-haul flights for cheaper, lower-carbon trains between cities such as London and Edinburgh, Glasgow or Leeds.

And last but by no means least, it would be far, far more Conservative than a central planning bureaucracy that was conceived for a pre-Covid world that doesn’t exist anymore.

If a timetable melts down, or a train breaks down, or there’s a strike, there won’t be an alternative firm’s service which passengers can board in a few minutes instead