A railway fit for Britain’s future?

Paul Salveson is cautiously optimistic on government plans

The Government has been consulting on “a railway fit for Britain’s future” (see last Chartist), and the deadline passed in mid-April. The document sets out the Government’s vision for the future of Britain’s railways, which very much hinges on the formation of the “single guiding mind” of Great British Railways.

The document has worthy objectives, with a commitment to “ending years of poor service and fragmentation on the railways, by creating a unified and simplified system with a relentless focus on improving services for passengers and freight customers, as well as delivering better value for money for taxpayers.” It says that “whilst the Government’s Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act was the first step towards fixing our railways, we need further, more fundamental reform to fix the underlying structural problems and put passengers and customers back at the heart of rail services.” The consultation was broadly broken down into five main headings:

Many observers have commented on what the document leaves out, as much as what it flags up in its consultation questions. There is little in the way of an overarching vision for the railways as an expanding and dynamic part of a sustainable solution to Britain’s problems. There is an assumption – and it’s probably right up to a point – that bringing back a single “guiding mind” to the railways will simplify how the railways work and help reduce costs. There’s no question that it costs far too much to do pretty much anything on the currently fragmented railway. The recent case of the £100m “bat tunnel” for HS2 highlighted the nonsense of how today’s railway functions. There remain a lot of things that are unsaid but possibly assumed within the new “GBR” structure, which is going to take at least three years to establish. The clear desire is to bring back “track and train”. Network Rail and the numerous franchised train operators will effectively merge, though it remains unclear how that will work. In the last years of British Rail, a sectorised structure was formed, which was very successful. Sectors included InterCity, Regional Railways, Scotrail, freight, and Network South-East. It provided a clear focus and gave some very dynamic young managers their head. It was all wrecked by the Railways Act of 1993, which replaced a BR that was starting to show very positive results, with a costly, fragmented jumble of short-term franchises with little incentive to develop services, and the infrastructure body – the disastrously privatised Railtrack, which became Network Rail after being re-nationalised. Today, Network Rail has got a grip on how it manages the railway infrastructure, and many of the train operators are already in the public sector, currently controlled by the Department for Transport as far as most English operators are concerned. Scotland and Wales are managed by the devolved governments; London and Merseyside are the responsibility of the mayoral authorities. Over the next few years, all of the remaining privately-run train operators, at least those on contracts to the government, will return to the public sector. As GBR gets established, it will be interesting to see how an overarching structure takes shape. The assumption is that the existing operator identities, e.g. Great Western, Northern, LNER and so on, will disappear. Will they become part of a single centralised entity, or will there be scope for some degree of decentralisation and management focus. It will be a difficult job balancing the need to have a degree of overall coordination and integration whilst avoiding the dead hand of a centralised bureaucracy, which BR managed to avoid quite well in the 1980s. If there were a return to some kind of sectorisation, one model might be to have a single InterCity brand but with sub-brands covering, for example, West Coast, East Coast, Great Western, and the like, with their own focused management.  The big challenge is in the city regions, where there is already considerable devolution to authorities, including London, Liverpool, and increasingly Greater Manchester. The consultation is supportive of this process, and there is a clear “fit” with the white paper on English devolution. However, there will be a need for considerable flexibility as the bigger mayoral authorities may well be up to the mark and capable of taking on local services, but this may not be the case elsewhere. In Scotland and Wales, a lot of progress has already been made with their respective domestic services. A logical next step would be for Scotland, and probably Wales, to take on infrastructure responsibilities so there is a fully integrated operation for the two nations. In the case of Wales, this would have to include some routes within England, e.g. Cardiff to Chester via Hereford and Shrewsbury. It is worth noting that Wales already controls the Valley Lines network. Freight is a crucially important area, and the Government proposals do not radically affect the current privatised structure, in which the freight operators pay an access charge to run their trains. However, there are issues about train paths and harmonising the needs of local and InterCity passenger services with freight, and ensuring that the environmental benefits of rail freight are recognised in access charges. The other interesting challenge relates to open access “InterCity” operations such as Grand Central and Lumo, which will continue to provide services that add value to the network as a whole. For example, Grand Central has brought London services back to towns and cities such as Sunderland, Bradford, and Halifax. However, there is an issue about whether they should pay their full costs – currently, they don’t. There is an argument that says that’s OK as they are bringing wider economic benefits to “left behind” towns, which value an InterCity train service. The consultation also flags up the idea of a new passenger watchdog. The current Transport Focus covers all transport modes, including roads. Having a specifically rail-focused body would be a good thing, which could bring specialist knowledge to a complex subject. The interests of bus and tram passengers are best looked after by local or regionally based authorities. There’s one big issue which the consultation does very little to address, and that’s the old shibboleth of transport integration. Trains need to integrate with each other, ensuring connections between local and long-distance services. At the same time, trains and buses need to integrate at key hubs, with coordinated fares and ticketing in the cities.  Having the right infrastructure to get buses close to station entrances is a further issue that needs to be considered. We need to be much more creative with how we use station facilities, particularly ticket offices, following the farcical attempt by the last Government to close most of them down. I don’t think the threat has gone away, and we need to shout out loud and clear that people want a human presence on stations, as well as on trains. What will make or break Great British Railways will be as much about getting the right people into key positions as anything else. As I’ve argued repeatedly in these columns, you can have a failing private railway and you can have a failing publicly owned one. Very often, it’s having good people in charge that can encourage talent and innovation at all levels of the railway. It needs an element of inspirational thinking, and I think appointing Lord Hendy as Railways Minister was an example of that.  There are good people at all levels of the railway, some who are given the encouragement they need, others who don’t get that support. A good start for GBR would be to set up national and regional training academies across the country, which can cover all the skills that are needed to run a modern railway – not just the engineering, operational, and commercial aspects, but also the issues such as community engagement, accessibility, and social value. There is the potential for really getting a railway “fit for Britain’s future,” which mirrors the sort of Britain we all want to see. Let’s hope we don’t miss the chance.