Off the rails
“It has been a terrible year for the railways,” said Graeme Paton in The Times. January heralded the highest increase in fares since 2013, prompting a “huge backlash”. In May, the east coast main line had to be renationalised after its operator, Virgin Trains East Coast, ran out of money. In the same month, the botched introduction of a new timetable led to the cancellation of almost 800 services a day, and the worst delays in a decade. Last week, the Office of Rail and Road published a damning report into the debacle. It shared the blame between Network Rail, which runs the track; the individual train operators; and the Department for Transport. “Nobody took charge,” it concluded. Is that any wonder, asked Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph, when the minister nominally in charge was Chris Grayling? The transport minister wouldn’t even take responsibility for this mess, saying that it was “tough for any politician to overrule the advice of the professionals”. This is Grayling’s “third major policy brief and his third failure”: he has left a “trail of destruction” behind him, first as employment minister, then as justice secretary – where savage cuts left the justice and prison systems in crisis. He is the “kiss of death” to any departmental brief.
At times like this, people “crave a resignation, like some medieval purging of sin”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. But, as the report concludes, this was “the product of a systems failure”, not the fault of an individual minister. This “shambles” goes straight back to 1993, when John Major privatised the railways, and separated the responsibility for the trains from responsibility for the track and the stations. “With almost comic frequency”, ministers blame failures on the lack of integration between train and track – and then they “do nothing about it”. The argument is “no longer what needs doing, but who has the guts to do it”. The obvious solution is to break up Network Rail and distribute its geographical divisions to the franchises that run the trains. Many will object, and the franchises will have to be carefully regulated. But it’s the only sensible course.
The public doesn’t agree, said Will Hutton in The Observer. Having been on the receiving end of this free market “experiment” for several decades, a large majority now agrees with Labour that the railways should be renationalised. In response to last week’s report, Grayling announced “a full-scale review of the rail system”. As a “market ideologist”, he wanted to restrict the review to a few potential “tweaks to the franchise system”, but was forced to concede that it ought to consider public ownership. It is, though, unlikely to recommend that, said The Economist. Chaired by the former boss of British Airways, Keith Williams, it is expected to focus on ways to bring the track and train management closer together – perhaps by joining them in regional public-private partnerships. The public, however, “will probably continue to favour the one option it is unlikely to recommend”.