Christian Wolmar

In a letter to Keith Williams, the man charged with leading the Government’s Rail Review, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR offers some advice and a few suggestions

Dear Keith Williams…

DEAR Keith, I wish you lots of luck in your endeavour to sort out Britain’s railways. Many obstacles will be placed in your way, not least by government, so you will have to be courageous enough to plough your own furrow. I will try to help by setting out a few principles and thoughts, learned over the past quarter of a century on writing about railways, that may be useful.

Let me start off, however, by picking up on a point you made in your recent interview in

RailReview where I believe you to be fundamentally mistaken. You said: “Ultimately it is the taxpayer that is subsidising the railway and not all taxpayers use the railway.”

This is the type of narrow thinking which has guided the economic system known as ‘neoliberalism’, which has resulted in the terrible political situation that the country faces today. I hope this was just a slip of the tongue, rather than a real reflection of your understanding of the role of the railway in society.

First, you have used the word ‘subsidy’. Would you use that in the context of roads, or indeed the education system? It is an old canard that the railways are subsidised while other social provision is considered as investment. Please don’t repeat that error.

Worse, you have gone on to say that “not all taxpayers use the railway”. Well, they may not sit as passengers on it, but they certainly benefit from it - and therefore in a wider sense have used it.

I have never driven on the M9, but I may well have benefited from it because the whisky in my drinks cabinet or the shortbread biscuits I devour probably travelled along it. Similarly, the 1,000 freight trains per day on the railway probably means that everyone benefits in some way or another from the cheaper and more environmentally sustainable transport that the railway provides. And the 20,000 passenger trains means that millions of extra cars are not cramming onto the road network.

Those irate motorists berating the railway’s investment programme as a waste of money simply fail to understand the basic economic notion of ‘externalities’. So, if you are serious about producing a report that is supportive to the railways, do not start from the position that it is a subsidised industry that benefits only a small proportion of the population, otherwise you may be mistaken for that ghastly crowd from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Rant over, so here are ten helpful suggestions for ways to define your review:

Firstly, don’t consider the franchise system as immutable. I have been posing the question of ‘what is franchising for?’ since the first days of privatisation, and I have failed to get a coherent answer. Is it a way of offsetting risk? Of getting the best out of the private sector? Of saving taxpayers’ money? Of making the railways more efficient? Of attracting private investment? Of improving the passenger experience? You will struggle to answer any of those in a positive way.

Remember, too, that profit-making companies are guided by their need to make profits, and so any advice they provide you must be viewed in that context. The hostility shown by Stagecoach and a few others to the public sector is matched by the RMT’s hostility to the ‘privateers’, and should be viewed in that context.

Secondly, reduce the number of interfaces. I