By Professor Iain Docherty

THE collapse of Railtrack following the fatal crash at Hatfield in 2000, which revealed a catalogue of mistakes in running Britain’s railway infrastructure, was perhaps the most high-profile failure of the privatisation experiment. But as last week’s parliamentary answer from Scottish Transport Minister Humza Yousaf made clear, its successor organisation, Network Rail, is in danger of becoming the perfect example of everything opponents of nationalisation point to as the perils of public ownership.

In 2005, I was asked to act as Expert Advisor to Holyrood’s Local Government and Transport Committee during its inquiry into rail devolution. The committee heard a range of evidence about how best to run the railways in Scotland in an extremely short timescale dictated by that year’s UK General Election. One of the most remarkable evidence sessions was that involving senior executives from Network Rail (NR), who were extremely keen to talk about how much money they were spending in Scotland. But under pressure from the committee chair, former Labour MSP Bristow Muldoon, who himself had worked in the railway before being elected, and the current Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy and Connectivity, Fergus Ewing MSP, those same executives suffered in embarrassing silence when they were completely unable to say how much money was being raised in Scotland to pay for the railway, and whether their company was offering anything approaching value for that money.

In hindsight, this was even more of a warning bell than it appeared at the time. During its 15-year lifespan, Network Rail’s project management has been found wanting over and over again, and its spending has ballooned out of control. Major electrification projects in England and Wales have been hideously over budget for some time, with later phases now delayed such that they might never actually be constructed. But now we know many of the same problems are evident in Scotland. Any further delay to central belt electrification as a result of Network Rail’s poor management of the project would be extremely disappointing. The faster, longer, greener Japanese electric trains that are one of the major components of the current ScotRail franchise deal need this new infrastructure to run. Without these trains, the planned increases in passenger capacity and reductions in journey times cannot be achieved, and the consequent stimulus to the Scottish economy will not occur.

It is important to be clear that oversight of rail infrastructure management and Network Rail’s operations remain completely reserved to Westminster. As the Department for Transport has found to its cost – literally – NR’s style is simply to invoice government for whatever it (over)spends and expect the cheque to follow by return. Mr Yousaf’s statement suggests that Scottish mnisters are no longer willing to put up with this state of affairs, and rightly so. NR has often talked about its own devolution plans giving individual “routes” (of which Scotland is one) more control, but it has in fact done precisely the opposite, centralising key functions at its HQ in Milton Keynes. Many of ScotRail’s performance difficulties last autumn could reasonably be ascribed to the removal of timetabling expertise out of Scotland, with NR staff 300 miles away from the Queen Street tunnel closure completely devoid of the local knowledge required to manage the impacts of such significant disruption.

As the Scottish Government celebrates the early delivery of the M8 completion project and the imminent opening of the Queensferry Crossing – a stunning engineering achievement for its Transport Scotland agency, which has built the bridge to a price few thought possible at the outset – it is time to ask why we shouldn’t entrust management of the railway infrastructure to Transport Scotland as well.

If devolution had occurred after the 1992 General Election as was expected at the time, the Scottish Parliament would have inherited a vertically integrated ScotRail with responsibility for both trains and track, and an established governance mechanism to share costs between domestic Scottish and cross-border services. It would then be down to MSPs and those who depend on the railway in Scotland to decide how best to run Scotland’s railway, with a mix of public and private ownership as desired. This is not to say that further nationalisation would be a panacea, as the estimated 30-40 per cent inefficiency of the already nationalised infrastructure half of the railway business demonstrates. Network Rail’s inability to deliver what it is paid handsomely to do suggests the time is right to learn from the past and bring all aspects of railway management back to Scotland for the benefit of both passengers and taxpayers.

Iain Docherty is Professor of Public Policy and Governance at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow and a Non-Executive Director of the Scotrail Operating Board.