Christian Wolmar
The RDG is failing miserably in its attempts to present a ‘united front’ and improve public perception of the rail industry, argues CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
“This is partly the result of declining performance, with more late and cancelled trains. However, they know there’s more to it than that - namely the public does not understand how the industry works”
YOU can imagine the scene. The rather desperate executives of the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), the ineptly-named organisation that is supposed to bring together the disparate organisations in the rail industry, are having a brainstorming session because they are worried about the reputation of the railways. They realise that the image of the rail industry is not as good as it should be, given that so many people are using it and politicians now seem to recognise that railways are a key part of the nation’s infrastructure. But somehow, we don’t seem to love the railways in the way we used to.
They recognise that this is partly as a result of declining performance, with more late and cancelled trains. However, they know there’s more to it than that - namely that the public does not understand how the industry works. There’s all these ever-changing names of operators, but when something goes wrong it is apparently the fault of an organisation called Network Rail. Yet it remains unclear precisely what it does, and whether it is really government owned. And there are lots of promises of improvements on the way, but they never seem to be on the lines that people are mostly using. Then there’s this wonderful HS2, but isn’t that going to be jolly expensive and a long time in construction?
So, the bigwigs at the RDG thought, “We need a campaign to show that all is well in railway world”. Last year they thought up the slogan of ‘Britain Runs on Rail’, which was quite effective but was publicised with a lot of videos which feature much CGI but precious few trains. The campaign was, though, a moderate success and made good use of British Rail’s famous double arrow logo.
However, the RDG brainstormers thought it was not enough. The trouble with the railways’ image, they mused, was that people do not perceive it as a single industry, but rather a disparate group of companies. So, they thought we need to present a united front and we need a word to focus on: ‘Partnership’. And while we are at it, they thought, there is a nice alliteration with ‘Prosperity’ which, after all, is what the railway hopes to generate. So we now have a jolly pamphlet – and a campaign – called In Partnership for Britain’s Prosperity. It was given the subtitle of ‘The rail industry’s plan to secure growth across our country’. But then they thought that wasn’t enough, so they added a second subtitle, in a smaller typeface and not in bold: ‘Together we are changing, investing and improving for Britain’.
This is clearly the result of too many cooks spoiling the broth, but also illustrates the problem. What is this worthy effort supposed to be achieving? We - the press and some industry bigwigs - were treated to a cringingly embarrassing launch at St Pancras, with the seats arranged around the statue of John Betjeman whose attention, fortunately, was elsewhere as he had his eyes permanently fixed upon the roof. One of the brainstormers had the odd idea of thinking that to show partnership, it would be a good idea to have a random bunch of employees from around the rail industry standing to attention behind the main speakers, among whom were Paul Plummer, the boss of the RDG, Adam Marshall from the British Chambers of Commerce and Maggie Simpson of the Rail Freight Group. In fairness, they had no seats either, but the whole impression was anything but partnership since the employees had no voice. Plummer did, at one stage, thank them, but if this was an effort to show togetherness, it failed miserably.
That’s because we all know that one of the problems blighting the industry over the past
“The whole structure is geared towards encouraging competition, which is the opposite of partnership”
year or so has been the long-running industrial dispute over the role of guards. If there is really to be a partnership in the industry between all the various ‘stakeholders’, then surely there should have been a speaker from the trade unions, representing the 100,000 or so people who work in the industry. Instead, they were a silent voice, standing to attention, as their superiors waxed on about partnership. Perception is everything at these events, and a bunch of people standing glumly to attention for 40 minutes is not a way of illustrating how everything is rosy in the railway garden
I asked why the campaign was being launched now, after 20 years of privatisation, and no answer was forthcoming. The peg, of course, was Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways. This whole PR effort seemed to be an attempt to counter this, without quite daring to mention it by name since the RDG is supposed to be non-political and the Labour party is scarily near to power.
There was, though, a fundamental logical problem with the attempt to portray the railway as a partnership. Over the past 20 years, since privatisation - and more important, fragmentation - the railway is not a partnership. Sure, at times it coheres well, but for the most part the various companies act in their own interests, as capitalism dictates. The whole structure is geared towards encouraging competition, which is the opposite of partnership.
Therefore, the RDG’s PR effort is bound to fall on deaf ears. It is like Theresa May standing in front of the press during the election having done a massive u-turn and trying to convince them that ‘nothing has changed’. She said it twice but it still failed to convince.
The other problem that the brainstormers faced is that Network Rail is now fully-owned by the Government and most of the money for investment comes from government coffers. Therefore, presenting the industry as this great private sector initiative does not work. The report suggests that at least £11.6 billion out of the investment of £50bn in the next few years (they presumably mean until 2024, the end of Control Period 6) will come from the private sector. However, most of that is for rolling stock, which is leased and therefore paid for by taxpayers and farepayers in contracts negotiated with the operators, which hardly represents the most daring form of venture capitalism. The RMT union, never measured in its statements, was for once rather spot-on in portraying the claims that this investment would be worth £85bn in societal benefits as being rather spurious. It is the sort of vague calculation that discredited the Remain campaign in the Referendum.
I support the idea of promoting the railway, which is what the RDG is trying to do. However, this has to be done with realistic appraisal of where the railways are succeeding and where they are failing, and a recognition that the current structure does not fit well with the concept of partnership. The problem is that the RDG is a slung-together organisation with few powers and little coherence. An initiative like this only goes to show how desperately the industry is crying out for a strategic independent body representing its interests and having the power to make decisions, something which ever more people across the railway agree upon.
Interestingly, Mark Carne, boss of Network Rail, told me after the meeting that his company is creating an organisation called the System Operator which will help it to prioritise investment projects and will have an active relationship with the train operating companies. Such a body is necessary, but I’m not convinced it is best placed to be within the current structure of Network Rail.