The rail network has become a national disgrace
SPEAKING on New Year’s Day, the embattled Transport Secretary Chris Grayling tried to deliver an optimistic message about the rail network: “I want passenger journeys to be as good as they can be, punctual, reliable and fairly priced.” But his words will have been greeted with a sarcastic laugh by train users.
For at the very moment that Grayling extolled his vision of a brave new world of travel, brutal rises in fares came into effect, bringing more misery for passengers after months of chaos on the system.
The fare increases average 3.1 per cent, far above the annual rise in earnings for most Britons. Although the hike is the highest since 2013, it is just the latest instalment in a long pattern of fleecing the public. According to a study by the Labour Party, average fares have gone up by three times the level of pay packets since the start of this decade.
In a desperate attempt to distract attention from this ripoff, the Government announced this week the introduction of two new discount railcards for young people, one for teenagers and the other for those aged 26 to 30. But these cannot disguise the increasing financial burden faced by hard-working commuters, who form a central part of our economy. Some passengers could now have to fork out more than 30 per cent of their salaries on their season tickets. In some of the more shocking examples, the annual price of a commute from Birmingham to London has gone up by £2,872 to £10,900, while that from Brighton to the capital has soared by £1,804 to £5,864. No wonder British commuters spend five times as much on their season tickets as their counterparts in Europe.
WHAT compounds this outrage is that our network offers such a dismal, unreliable service. Passengers hand over a fortune only to suffer endless inconvenience and be treated with contempt. Britain pioneered the railways in the early 19th century, but today they are plagued by poor performance, epitomised by both the disastrous timetable chaos and the endless strikes that gripped the system last year.
One recent report showed that train punctuality has fallen to its lowest level since 2005, aggravated by poor management, trade union intransigence and overrun engineering works. On the Greater Anglia network nine per cent of trains last year were either cancelled or significantly delayed.
Another severe problem is the gross overcrowding, with carriages on the busiest routes filled well beyond their capacity. During the summer, it was revealed that on the train between Uckfield in Sussex and London Victoria, 267 passengers typically have to cram themselves into just two carriages designed for only 107 people. Even the most basic facilities, like heating and toilets, regularly fail to function. “The situation is beyond a joke,” said one commuter in fury at how the six toilets on the Hastings to London route were frequently all out of order last year, even though the journey takes over two hours.
It is not meant to be like this. Rail privatisation, imposed by John Major’s Tory Government in the 1990s, was supposed to herald a new era of efficiency by promoting enterprise and taming the unions. But more than 20 years later, it is clear that the process was badly botched. In place of real competition, there is now a tangle of quasi-commercial monopolies, overseen by a creaking, ineffectual state bureaucracy. Instead of a genuine business culture, there is a complex web of regulators, operators and contractors, where responsibility is dissipated and accountability removed.
We now have the worst of all worlds in the modern railways: corporate excess and cynical exploitation of passengers combined with ever-greater taxpayer-funding and trade union muscle. While fares have rocketed since privatisation, up a quarter in real terms, so have the lavish handouts from the Government to the rail industry, with the total amount in subsidies increasing from £900million in 1995 to £4.2billion today. The companies like to blather about how this extra cash is devoted to investment, but the reality is that money is also used to fund a lavish gravy train for the top brass, headed by the chief executive of Network Rail, Andrew Haines, who is on £588,000-a-year. But no part of the industry exemplifies this climate of greed more graphically than the increasingly despised HS2 project, where one quarter of the staff earn over £100,000-a-year.
J‘Worst of all worlds on the modern railways’
UST as disturbing is the failure to curb the malignant influence of the trade unions, who revel in their power to hold the public to ransom in pursuit of their exorbitant pay claims and in defence of their outdated privileges. Their addiction to unjustified strikes belongs to the grim world of the 1970s, but they have been allowed to act with impunity by supine management and an enfeebled government. But for all their militant rhetoric about the working-class struggle, they are just as keen as the rail executives to clamber aboard the gravy train. As the fallout from last year’s strikes revealed, many drivers are on £75,000-a-year, far more than most passengers, while Mike Cash, the appropriately named head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, has an annual package worth £153,614.
The expensive dysfunction of the railways should not be tolerated. The Government must put the interests of users first. After all, they are the ones who pay for the system.