Rail – partial nationalisation is not enough

With the arrival of the Railways Bill and the launch of Great British Railways (GBR), most – but not all – passenger rail services are to be provided by the public sector. Nearly all services in Wales and Scotland are already run in the public sector by Transport for Wales and Scotrail under the control and ownership of their respective devolved administrations.

Many of the former franchise operators are already in the public sector, and they and the remaining privately-owned ones will join the already public-sector Network Rail under the umbrella of GBR by the end of 2027.

Services on Merseyrail, London Overground and London’s Elizabeth Line are all provided under contract by private operators. A quarter of all Britain’s rail passenger journeys are made using these three private operators when added together – and there are no plans to transfer these services to the public sector.

In December, Transport for London awarded First Group an eight-year contract to run London Overground and wants to run more local services – Moorgate to Welwyn and Stevenage – which will move to private contract.

Private

Transport for Wales assumed ownership of the rail routes serving the South Wales valleys from publicly owned Network Rail. But the maintenance and operation of these routes is managed under contract by private multi-national contractor Amey.

Open access passenger operators’ services will continue to be private; their numbers look set to rise. Rightly described as “parasites” by rail union RMT, they can only turn a profit if they abstract revenue from public sector services. And it seems private open access trains are being given preference over public sector services, particularly on the West Coast Main Line.

Freight operators will remain in private hands. So will a huge swathe of engineering, cleaning and other functions that were once part of the core railway but are now outsourced. And the train leasing companies which have made vast profits since privatisation look set to continue to provide much of the rolling stock.

That all means that shareholders – many of them foreign – will continue to siphon significant profits out of the rail industry.

‘Shareholders – many of them foreign – will continue to siphon significant profits out of the rail industry…’

The reunification of many passenger services under GBR is a positive development and one which will see a return of a “single guiding mind”. This will integrate operations and centrally plan service provision, new train procurement and so on. Passengers will undoubtedly benefit.

But there are massive challenges ahead that nationalisation won’t fix. Passenger numbers continue to climb rapidly; around 7 per cent annually. The West Coast Main Line in particular is beginning to creak at the seams. Network Rail has stated that the southern end of the route is “already operating at the limits of its resilience”.

The Regulator – the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) – told Avanti West Coast to stop running four weekday services and a Sunday service on 14 December. The reason was to allow an open access operator to start running new services, and there isn’t sufficient capacity for all of them.

In particular, a busy and popular peak morning Avanti service from Manchester to London was ludicrously ordered to run empty from the start of the new timetable. The ORR cited concerns that allowing passengers to get on the train would “harm the overall performance” of the line. The decision was reversed two weeks before implementation – after a public outcry.

Full up

Aside from the issue of what will soon be public sector core services giving way to private open access services, this episode highlights that the West Coast Main Line is full. No more room for any more trains, passenger or freight.

HS2 was to be built to provide much more capacity along this corridor. The plan was to take fast trains off the West Coast Main Line and to allow more freight along with more regional and local services to operate on the existing line.

The Covid pandemic choked off passenger numbers, which only now are nearly back to the numbers previously carried. Just as well for the railways, as it meant that the looming capacity crisis was postponed for six or seven years.

But the HS2 project has now been reduced to a line between London and Birmingham and, if indeed that is all that gets built, may actually exacerbate the capacity problems that exist south of Crewe, particularly around Stafford.

Cancelled

HS2 was supposed to address the Stafford capacity problem with a new stretch of track from the outskirts of Birmingham to just north of Crewe. But in a piece of political opportunism designed to assist his re-election, the then Prime Minister Sunak announced the cancellation of this section in 2023. The route currently remains safeguarded, the legal powers to build are still in place and a significant portion of the required land has already been acquired.

That remains an opportunity to provide much needed relief to the West Coast Main Line north of Birmingham. The deadline on compulsory land purchase powers for this section of HS2 expire on 11 February 2026, just weeks away. Once the powers lapse, land already secured for the scheme is likely to be quickly and cheaply sold off, and the groundwork for this key stretch of new railway infrastructure dismantled.

The government shows no sign of taking this opportunity and reversing Sunak’s decision, or even safeguarding the route by extending land acquisition powers. A failure to act quickly means that the West Coast Main Line and much of the associated rail system will soon be completely overloaded, with no prospect of any solution for decades.

HS2 was supposed to be built with an eastern leg from Birmingham towards Derby, Sheffield and Leeds, providing additional capacity to relieve the very busy and rapidly filling Midland and East Coast Main Lines. But Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has formally lifted safeguarding on the route. This effectively means the end for the project, and no solution to those capacity issues.

Transport policy group Greengauge 21 recently published a paper suggesting a relatively cheap stop-gap measure to connect HS2 to the existing Birmingham to Derby line. But even that looks unlikely to be taken up by the government.

Passenger security and staff assaults is also an issue that the government needs to urgently address. It was highlighted recently when an employee of LNER and several passengers were seriously injured in a knife incident on a train between Peterborough and Huntingdon.

Strike looms

In the wake of that event, rail unions have demanded that planned cuts to the British Transport Police are reversed, and that more staff are employed in stations and on trains. RMT has threatened a national strike over inaction following a number of other incidents.

Nationalising some of the rail services may be a positive step, but not enough. The reasons for doing so are equally valid in many other areas of the railway. And the huge problems of lack of investment, under-capacity, passenger and staff safety, and skills shortages, must be tackled by the government as a matter of urgency. Failure to do so will condemn the railways to years of managed decline and condemn passengers to overcrowded and increasingly unreliable services.