THE debate over nationalising our railways is back in the spotlight with a renewed campaign by Scottish Labour towards that end. It follows the taking back into UK Government control of the East Coast Main Line, following the failure of the franchise run by Stagecoach and Virgin. Westminster’s Department of Transport will run the service until a new public-private organisation is appointed in 2020.
The route will now be known as the London North Eastern Railway (LNER), a name last used in the 1940s and which, oddly enough, might feed the nostalgia that arguably fuels much of the desire for a return to happier times when the railways were under public control.
Distance has lent enchantment to that perception. Nationalised railways left the station brightly but, by the time they were parked in a siding by privatisation, they suffered from chronic under-investment, and their punctuality and cleanliness left much to be desired. Popular opinion that now backs public control was just as enthusiastic back then for a private take-over. Support for privatisation was in those days bathed in a glow of pre-nationalisation nostalgia just as attitudes today view the pre-privatisation era through rose-tinted glasses.
So the viability of expectations about re-nationalisation remain open to question. Pressures of infrastructure in particular are such that it might be case of: meet the new boss, hardly in a better position than the old boss.
Undoubtedly, though, some form of public control is the direction of travel. The question is: should there be a stop along the way? That stop is the franchising system. At the time when Dutch state-owned firm Abellio won the contract to run ScotRail, public sector operators in the UK weren’t allowed to join the bidding.
That bizarre anomaly is being rectified by the SNP Government, which is looking to make a public sector bid, either through an existing state-owned organisation, such as CalMac, or through a new public body. The Scottish Government has been conspicuously taking its time, and Transport Minister Humza Yousaf has previously said that bringing ScotRail into public hands by 2020 would be “hugely ambitious”.
But he has also said that nothing is “off the table”. That was in response to supporters of outright nationalisation, including left-wing think-tanks and unions who want the franchising process ditched altogether and the railways operated permanently on a public sector basis.
Their thinking is that franchising encourages a short-term approach, overly optimistic projections and underestimated problems (see East Coast Main Line). Tendering, they say, might look transparent and competitive, but it invites unrealistic offers. It’s a shallow sales exercise that has no place in running the railways, which are a service and not a business opportunity.
There is some merit in seeking a railway service in which people might take pride, as they do with the NHS. But that seems hard to imagine. Many of the same problems will remain.
Jonathan Cowie, a transport economist at Edinburgh Napier University, has argued for a reformed franchise process that looks at “different ways to share business risk between the public and private sectors”. At least now we will have a level playing field between private and indigenous public sectors. Whether one of these two sides should leave the pitch altogether is another matter.
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