Labour rail strategy
Labour’s Rail Policy Adviser IAN TAYLOR details the party’s thinking behind rail renationalisation
Labour‘s Rail Policy Adviser IAN TAYLOR discusses why the party wants a fully integrated railway in public ownership.
Shortly after his election as Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn summed up his party’s policy aim for the railway as “a fully integrated railway in public ownership”.
Two years on, after Election results unanticipated by the commentariat and with Labour now riding in front of the Conservatives in some polls, there is heightened interest from the rail industry and others in understanding more about Labour Party policy for the railway.
Why and how is the Labour Party developing a policy for a railway fully integrated across all of its functions throughout the whole of Britain and entirely within public ownership?
As short-hand, we will shorten this policy aim to a ‘national vertically integrated railway under public ownership’, with apologies to Britain’s component nations of England, Scotland and Wales for using the term ‘national’ to mean Britain-wide. The Northern Ireland railway is already unified under public ownership and is spatially separate, so does not need to be considered as part of this discussion.
I will concentrate on some of the key issues that Labour wants its plans for the railway to resolve, the main things it wants the railway to deliver that it presently cannot, and the principles it is applying to development of detailed proposals for the structure and operation of a publicly owned railway. In a future issue of RAIL, I will look at those proposals in more detail.
Fragmentation: politically under-appreciated
The biggest structural issue for a Labour government to address will be the
Comments from staff give an impression of railway staff who care about passengers and the railway, who are frustrated that its present structure tends to undermine their professionalism, and who are doing their best to make the railway work for passengers despite its fragmented structure.
fragmentation of the railway resulting from privatisation. However, for understandable reasons, political discussion of issues arising from rail privatisation has tended to focus much more on the issue of ‘dividend leakage’ from the railway to private shareholders, with the profit levels of some of the rolling stock companies offering particularly juicy targets.
Dividend leakage is, of course, a valid concern. Indeed, I was co-author to Transport for Quality of Life’s 2012 report Rebuilding
Rail, which pointed out that some £ 0.7 billion of about £1.2bn yearly excess costs to the railway from privatisation could be attributed to dividend leakage. That report attributed about £ 0.3bn of excess costs per year to fragmentation of the railway.
At the time of that calculation, we applied fragmentation costs estimated by background research for McNulty’s Rail Value for Money
Study. That costing was almost certainly a considerable underestimate, since it applied solely to the fragmentation between the different train operating companies, and between them and Network Rail. Fragmentation costs deriving from ‘friction’ at the many interfaces created from Network Rail’s continuing high levels of outsourcing should be added in, as should the £ 60 million
or so spent by train operators bidding for franchise competitions every year.
However, rather than the added costs of fragmentation, it is the direct frontline impacts that fragmentation has on the railway that are liable to be most damaging. These are many and varied, but have been the subject of even less political discussion. This matters, because there is a particular political challenge for Labour at this moment in railway development - Britain is moving towards a much more devolved railway.
Scotland has full devolved powers over rail franchising, and Wales will gain equivalent powers in the near future (albeit later than anticipated). London and Merseyside have full devolved powers over rail franchising, while the North of England, although presently chaffing at merely having ‘statutory influence’ over franchising, still hopes to gain full powers over franchising in future. The West Midlands aspires to follow suit and has formed a rail governance body for that purpose. Other regions of England have also expressed interest in devolution of rail franchising.
From a political perspective, this process appears to have unstoppable momentum. And from a railway perspective, it appears to be gaining a record of local improvements that adds weight to the devolution case as time goes on.
So, the context in which Labour must consider how to tackle fragmentation is: “what is the best way to achieve both the benefits of devolution and the benefits of a national vertically integrated railway under public ownership?”
For this reason, Transport for Quality of Life has undertaken research into the direct impacts of fragmentation, to inform Labour Party policy development. The data arising provides the background for discussion of how Labour should structure a publicly owned railway to function better. Most of this data is original and has not been published before.
The passenger perspective of fragmentation
More than 18,000 rail passengers throughout Britain were contacted to understand how they are affected by fragmentation in the railway system. The survey asked rail travellers to relate their experiences in their own words, with multiple-choice questions to enable easier input from those who did not wish to provide personal comments. Some 2,600 people responded, of whom 700 provided personal comments, amounting to more than 1,600 comments on the different questions.
About a third of respondents appear to experience no significant problems from fragmentation, because their rail journeys are restricted to repeated simple trips within the area of one operator that essentially operates a monopoly service, for which they are acquainted with the travel options and ticket variants.
However, a litany of problems was described by those who make journeys across boundaries between train operators, or on parts of the network where multiple train companies operate. The overall impression was of an outpouring of anguish, confusion and frustration. Comments were highly consistent and can largely be summarised by six big themes.
Myriad ticket variants, instead of ease-ofuse and simplicity.
Result: Passengers waste hours trying to work out the best ticket, feel frustrated at the end of it all, often feel they still don’t have the best ticket, resent the system making it so hard, and feel it is designed for the train companies rather than the passengers. Many give up and travel by other means.
Different rules (for example - peak/off-peak) on different parts of the railway.
Result: Passengers are often caught out and treated as criminals. Some get very anxious. Some therefore avoid making train journeys, because they fear getting it wrong or find it all too stressful.
Misinformation or lack of information, due to breaks in the system or complexity.
Result: Passengers waste time and energy trying to find information (often the information requirement itself arising from complexity of the system). They find their journey stressful as a result, and when they find information about one part of the system cannot be provided by another part, or find that information is wrong, they feel upset and aggrieved. Passengers scan information boards at London Euston during disruption caused by Storm Doris February 23. Ian Taylor says that when journeys don’t go according to plan, passengers feel abandoned and let down.