IT is no surprise that the prospect of taking Scotland’s railways into full public ownership has been back on the agenda of late. When Abellio took over ScotRail in 2015, there were all kinds of promises about more capacity and faster journeys, but the performance has been patchy at best. It is only natural that frustrated passengers are asking whether there is a better way to run a vital public service.
In Abellio’s defence, there have been improvements in some areas – punctuality is slowly getting better for instance. But complaints have increased and the company has failed to meet its targets in a number of key areas, including cleanliness. All of which raises the question: if this is the best that a private tendering process can offer, perhaps we should look to nationalisation instead?
The irony is that Abellio is a state-owned company, albeit one owned by the Dutch state, which for some people has only increased the argument for nationalisation. In The Herald today, the general secretary of the transport union TSSA, Manuel Cortes, asks, not unreasonably, why millions of pounds is going to a Dutch state-owned company when the money could be going to a Scottish company instead. He goes on to call on the Scottish Government to end the franchising system for good and renationalise the railways.
The only problem with Mr Cortes’s argument is that the Scottish Government does not have the powers to order a full re-nationalisation in a system in which the railway infrastructure, from the tracks to the stations, is owned and managed by Network Rail, a UK Government quango. It is also tempting to see nationalisation as a panacea, whereas in fact the nationalised service rarely, if ever, received the investment it needed.
Where there is a real prospect for improvement – and the reintroduction of an element of nationalisation – is in reform of the current franchising rules. Currently, the rules state that while public sector companies from other countries can bid for a franchise, public sector operators in the UK cannot. Clearly, this is an illogical state of affairs and the Scottish Government is right in its plans to end it. The question of which public sector company might actually bid for the ScotRail franchise is another question. One suggestion is Calmac Ferries; another is that a new government-owned company might be created.
The point is that public sector companies would not necessarily deliver a better service just because they are publicly owned, but changing the rules would remove the inconsistency in the system. There is nothing necessarily wrong with a foreign company running Scottish trains, but there is something wrong with a system which excludes Scottish public sector companies.
And whether it is a public or private company that runs our trains, the Government’s role remains the same: to hold the rail companies to their promises and to ensure everyone is heading for the same destination: a service focused on low fares, reliability, and a fair deal for taxpayers.
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