Labour’s plans for the passenger railway have received plenty of attention during the past few days, although some of the general media coverage was ill-informed or potentially misleading (writes Sim Harris).
The BBC, for example, said ‘private train companies have overseen a boom in rail usage in Britain’.
It is right to say that passenger figures have risen sharply since the 1990s (until Covid, anyway), but this sentence could have been taken to imply that the increase in demand was the result of privatisation.
In fact, passenger figures had started to rise in the mid-1990s before the franchises could have made any difference to the quality of services, although it is also the case that after privatisation the internal ticketing system tended (and still tends) to inflate the totals because each train used during a journey is counted separately.
Leaving the knotty problem of statistics aside, some sources talked about ‘UK Rail’, when Northern Ireland is nothing to do with this, but few commentators seemed to notice the quiet change of the status of Great British Railways from ‘guiding mind’, as suggested in the ‘Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail’ of 2021, to ‘directing mind’ in Labour’s document.
Another change was the treatment of the private sector operators who currently have National Rail Contracts, as successors to the former franchises. In the Keith Williams version, Great British Railways was to be a facilitator, not an operator.
He had said: ‘Great British Railways will specify the timetables, branding, most fares and other aspects of the service and agree a fee with the competitively-procured passenger service operator to provide the service to this specification. In most contracts, fare revenue will go to Great British Railways, with operators delivering to the specification and managing their costs in doing so.’
In other words, the new train operators would have concessions rather than old-style franchises, similar to those already awarded by bodies like Transport for London for the operation of London Overground and the Docklands Light Railway. Confusingly, the operating contracts for bus routes in London, Manchester and probably other places soon, although under the firm control of the local authority, are now being referred to as ‘franchises’.
The Government’s draft Rail Reform Bill, published earlier this year, steered clear of Great British Railways, creating instead an ‘Integrated Rail Body’, which would be ‘the appropriate franchising authority’. Although the Bill is very brief, this did suggest that private sector operators would be eligible to bid for operating franchises, although not necessarily on the previous model. Nothing is said in this Bill about any kind of ‘mind’, guiding or otherwise.
Labour has now suggested yet another structure. Under its proposals there would also be a Great British Railways, but this will not be awarding operating contracts. Instead it would be ‘responsible for the day-to-day operational delivery of the railways’. Labour says the reforms set out in Keith Williams’ Rail Review ‘do not go far enough’, because ‘they will not fix the fundamental problems that beset the industry – continuing fragmentation, inefficiency and waste’.
Labour says its proposed Railways Act would transfer ‘expiring train operator contracts directly to the new statutory body’ and remove ‘the requirement to return franchises to the private sector’.
The word may not appear in Labour’s plans, but this is renationalisation. The result will be a curious hybrid, with most passenger trains and all the infrastucture controlled by a state-owned body, while the private sector will be allowed to continue with train leasing, train building, open access passenger services, most freight services, ticket retailing and, presumably, running charter trains.
Great British Railways has already been given a temporary headquarters in Derby. If all this comes to pass, it is going to need a bigger building to get the job done.