Regional rail authorities could replace the franchises
The time really has come to admit that the whole franchising morass has reached an absurdity that even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have conceived.
The only real evidence in favour of the status quo is that passenger numbers have grown dramatically since privatisation, but it’s impossible to prove if a nationally owned model (or an alternative form of privatisation) might not have done equally well… or better.
And I’m not blindly speaking in favour of nationalisation - a system of regional franchising, with infrastructure in the hands of the inept and almost moribund National Rail, really does feel like the worst of all possible worlds.
We need nothing less than a revolution in the way the railways are organised. It seems to me that if competitive tendering for rail concessions can work well in London and other urban centres, why not on a bigger scale in the regions?
The aim, surely, has to be a railway industry that’s better able to respond quickly to local conditions and better able to serve the needs of local people, while still operating on a commercial competitive basis.
One answer might be for franchises to be transferred to public companies limited by guarantee, wholly owned by a regional rail authority comprising local authorities in the region. The operation of trains - and yes, maintenance and enhancement of infrastructure - would be let out to tender.
It’s a shame the South West Trains franchise seems too far down the process of renewal, because this would have made an excellent basis for an experiment of this kind.
There is relatively little freight or ‘foreign’ passenger traffic in the SWT region; it’s a relatively profitable enterprise; and at Reading, Bristol, Exeter and elsewhere it competes with other franchises.
Also, a vertically integrated network would be ideally placed to rebuild the infrastructure via Okehampton, to push that competition on to Plymouth or possibly beyond.
Funding? Obviously a big question, but no more difficult than the rickety edifice in place at the moment, and in many ways much easier.
And Transport for London’s excellent London Overground network has shown the way forward. It’s an adaptive, responsive way of managing a railway system, and better - far, far better - than the franchised system it replaced.