Transport UK
Passenger Rail

The railways are a mess. But it’s not all Chris Grayling’s fault ... Fragmented rail privatisation has resulted in a fiasco for which no one person or company can justly be held responsible

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The railways are a mess. But it’s not all Chris Grayling’s fault Fragmented rail privatisation has resulted in a fiasco for which no one person or company can justly be held responsible


Crowded station platform ‘Chris Grayling, the hapless transport secretary, is being cursed by rail commuters from Brighton to Bedford to Blackpool.’ Photograph: Alamy Live News.

Which question is best when something goes wrong? How to put it right, or who to blame? The first makes sense, but the second is more fun. That is why Chris Grayling, the hapless transport secretary, is being cursed by rail commuters from Brighton to Bedford to Blackpool. Today, yet another emergency timetable enters operation on Northern rail, announced with an inaugural cancellation on Preston station.

Grayling can no more run a train than run a mile. He has been in the post for two years of ceaseless controversy, but his job is merely to sit tight and fend off incoming fire, directed at his department and an industry that are both woefully unfit for purpose. For some 20 years since 1993, privatisation ran trains with a degree of success, but passengers are now dwindling and rail has hit the buffers.

Last December’s timetable fiasco, chiefly in the north-west and south of the country, was the direct result of over-ambitious companies encouraged by government to bid for new franchises with more trains. This depended on Network Rail upgrading track and signalling on time, and on drivers being retrained by a certain deadline. When both were running late last autumn, a coherent company would have backed off fast. Instead, each tier in the industry assumed someone else would catch up – and if not could be blamed or sued. It was precisely the outcome critics of fragmented privatisation feared.

In the 1980s, the Treasury thought rail efficiency would flow from replacing a single corporate hierarchy with a mass of internal sub-contracts between government, operators and an infrastructure company. The same principle was applied, by Labour and Tories alike, to the NHS, social benefits, prisons and probation. It went down great in management schools but it was wrong. The rail infrastructure company Railtrack went bankrupt, and its state-owned replacement, Network Rail, under-performed. Operating rail franchises have been vulnerable to fiasco. Whitehall is now more involved in running railways – and subsidising them – than ever under nationalisation.

Privatisation has not worked, not because a private company cannot run a railway but because the structure was wrong. Internal contracting and transfer pricing, as the NHS has found, does not suit a fast-moving public service. It corrupts corporate morale, diminishes executive responsibility, and shifts blame on to contracts.

Transport ministers, including Grayling, often muse that the railways would run better if each region were entirely in the charge of a single, vertically integrated company. They are right, but no one has the guts to bring it about. What should happen is plain. Network Rail should be broken up, and its assets put under regional operators, with long-term leases from the government. The boards of Virgin, Stagecoach, Arriva and the rest should run every aspect of their service. They could still be private, but “parastatal” – that is, regulated in the public interest.

Then, and only then, would we really know who to blame when the trains are late.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
People don’t want railways to be political totems. They just want them to work Andrew Adonis Read more

How can the Southern rail fiasco be solved? Look to John Lewis David Boyle Read more