Ian Kelly is Senior Parliamentary Assistant to Greg Smith MP.
When it comes to railways, in recent political history there is no golden example to be cited for measured success in delivering on-time, on-budget, sustainable long-term improvements for passengers.
Post-war governments of both left and right mishandled and misunderstood Britain’s railway network (the world’s oldest and, arguably, most complex from a day-to-day operations perspective), leaving us with a situation with too many people using a network that is too old and too small.
Yet the Labour Government thinks that the best way to deal with the situation is through a dictatorial, top-down approach to the chain of command.
Unfortunately for rail passengers, civil servants do not know how to run the network: they do not have the years of industry experience that managing directors do. Nor is it a job that pays: last time I checked the average profit margin for a railway operating company was around three per cent.
(Meanwhile passengers howl on social media about the overly-generous sums they’re forking over in train fares, many not realising that they’re paying to prop up a failing system which has been left to rot.)
Passenger numbers more than doubled between the mid-1980s and late 2010s, with today seeing only a slight drop from the record 1.74 billion recorded in 2018-19. Meanwhile fares have increased by roughly 20 per cent on average in real terms since the mid-Nineties, though this remains below bus and coach fare increases over the same period.
No wonder morale is at an all time low.
Admittedly, we do have a strange system of semi-private operators running on publicly-owned assets; what seemed like a good idea in the early Nineties has failed to keep up with surging demand for both local and regional transport across all sectors of the economy. Too often trains are late, too crowded and too uncomfortable.
Yet no one has thought about changing it for the better. Instead, interventions have aimed at “good enough” – only for that glass-half-empty approach to underdeliver for both passengers and the taxpayer.
A big part of the problem is lack of competition. As part of the “privatisation” drive under John Major, nothing was left for the railway operators to decide for themselves: every journey, every procedure, every response to every situation that an operator could conceivably be forced to deal with, was non-negotiable.
The only competitive element was the bidding process, whereby prospective operators would bid for a franchise which would in turn be agreeable through a contract that specified how much the successful bidder would pay back to the Government through ticket sales.
These contracts were so rigid and the bidding process so flawed that several key operators, most notably those running on the East Coast Main Line – one of the UK’s busiest and highest-demand routes – lost their contracts after failing to fulfil their contractual obligations. No wonder Margaret Thatcher was so hesitant to attempt root and branch railway reform.
It was doomed from the start. Rigid contracts do not improve performance. In fact, binding agreements to run this many or that many services per day have prevented railway operators from delivering on their most basic function – providing you a seat on board their trains.
At the moment, to run but one extra journey in each direction per day requires the same amount of work from the operator as would otherwise go in to writing an entirely new timetable for all their services – we’re talking months, not days. By that point, any modelling that the operator is forced to do as part of their business case will be effectively redundant, making the whole exercise pointless and a huge waste of taxpayer’s money in the process.
This is neither good for passengers nor for operators. Everyone loses – except for the civil servants who are effectively in charge.
How should railway reform be done? By listening to operators, for a start. They know their passengers, stations, tracks, trains, and systems. And in a surprise to exactly no one, each operator runs their services differently.
Is this a good thing? Yes. It is surely in the passenger’s interest for an operator to have the ability to change their services and deliver a better experience for the paying customer.
If a timetable needs changing, don’t wait five months to do it. If a train needs lengthening, don’t insist on a business case. If new trains are needed, let the free market provide the best solution – the right trains for that specific part of the network.
A top-down approach, like the sort being touted by this Labour Government, would force us into a one-size-fits-all model that is non-adaptable and non-negotiable. This will lead to older trains and stations being run into the ground, resulting from less income from fewer commuters using the trains less often. That in turn will lead to fewer people taking the train, and this less income for the Government.
We are facing a race to the bottom, and risk our railways becoming toxic assets. No one wants that – and the taxpayer can’t afford it.
When given the space and autonomy to be run properly, there is every incentive for operators to provide the best service possible. Despite an overall fall in commuter journeys, off-peak journeys have in most cases exceeded pre-Covid levels.
This is most evident in the new “rural suburbs” that feature, at their core, modern housing estates popping up at the edge of towns (once villages) in the middle of the countryside – but which happen to have a railway station. And as our towns and cities get more congested, the incentive to take the train for shopping, eating out, outdoor adventuring, or going to watch a match becomes more attractive.
As for commuters, never has it been easier for commuters to ditch the train and drive to work instead. You are after all guaranteed a seat. Yet this is far from ideal: congestion worsens, the environment suffers, and road conditions worsen under the weight of ever bigger and heavier vehicles, which leads to more frequent long-term road closures and more wear and tear on your car.
All this costs the taxpayer more in the end. So why perpetuate the problem? Why not give passengers a reliable, comfortable and efficient service?
This is a no brainer for rail operators. Unfortunately, the know-it-all Labour Government would rather talk down to us as passengers and operators as the experts.
With so much bureaucracy producing so few results, there is no incentive for operators to take long-term decisions and invest in a network which is slowly eroding from the chronic underinvestment and overuse.
This is, after all, what led to the ridiculous idea of building a dedicated high speed rail line between our two biggest cities in the form of HS2 – a line which is no longer quicker than current offerings and which is no longer planned to open as a city centre-to-city centre service.
The sooner this Government and all future governments understand this, the better. We cannot leave the system to slowly erode and collapse under us. Let’s remember: we invented railways. Now it’s time to reinvent them.
