Time for a national, publicly-owned, railway?

[amateur51]

I dunno. I expect they commission these programmes but do not produce them themselves. Either way it is an abomination.

Well I take comfort from the fact that with Camelot in charge of the Lottery itself, there is little chance of seeing the grinning one appearing on the screen

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8199194/Sir-Richard-Branson-to-serve-as-air-stewardess-after-losing-bet.html

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i think the improvement is in large part due to a focus on measuring customer satisfaction and its improvident in the franchise contracts, over the log term this has raised standards .... whether we are better off as taxpayers and as an economy i am unsure .... however it is very hard to disagree that the government at ministerial and senior official levels are in the words of Terry Thomas [and not Ed] a shower ...

it would be beyond irony for our transport to end up in French/Spanish/German national utility ownership along with our energy and water eh? our privatisation seems to be a process of transferring our national assets to be somebody else's national assets ..so much for competition eh ...

[jean]

Yes and...SNCF would be my model.

The SNCF TGV network is splendid, but local public transport (of any sort) in France is dismal.

A few weeks ago, I wanted to go to Poitiers for the day from a station about halfway down the line between Poitiers and Limoges. I planned to get the 9 am train, after which there was nothing until half past two.

I checked carefully that the train would be running, and presented myself at the (unstaffed) station in good time. And waited. And waited. Eventually a woman waiting with me found someone to phone, and discovered that the train had been supprimé. No advance warning, no announcement over any station intercom.

And the return ticket had cost 28 euros for the one-hour journey!

They are planning a TGV line over that route, and there's No a TGV graffiti everywhere.

[jean]

...It should have been possible to devise a better scheme than the Tory mess which I think was devised with the one purpose of asset stripping the property portfolio to Thatcher's mates

But don't forget that even Thatcher, much as she despised the railways, had the sense not to privatise them - she left that to John Major.

[heliocentric]

Time for a national, publicly-owned railway? Yes. Are there any serious arguments against it?

[jean]

Yes, and no.

But more about France. By chance*, the first item on today's FOOC was a comparison between St Pancras and the Gare du Nord that did not favour the latter.


* or not?

[PhilipT]

Time for a national, publicly-owned railway? Yes. Are there any serious arguments against it?

Er, yes. The recent record of civil servants running transport-related stuff is, umm, not good.

[Frances_iom]

But don't forget that even Thatcher, much as she despised the railways, had the sense not to privatise them - she left that to John Major.

I knew that which is why I phrased my comment the way it is - those who did well from the mess were her mates in the City (I think the then description re Railtrack was a Property company with a railway on the side)- the rolling stock hire company was another not so little boon-doggle for those with the right connections - the taxpayers have landed up paying more, much of which additional burden goes to the 'investors' - even the FT is commenting that Cameron's reshuffle conveniently moved a couple of ministers especially the deputy transport minister who is on record as wanting longer franchises and signed off the deal to give it to First Direct (who had already walked away from one contract and had an unenviable reputation as having made a right mess of the Great western system

[heliocentric]

Er, yes. The recent record of civil servants running transport-related stuff is, umm, not good.

I don't see how that's an argument against renationalising the railways, although it's certainly an argument against employing incompetent people to run them.

[John Shelton]

Er, yes. The recent record of civil servants running transport-related stuff is, umm, not good.

Well the policies they are required to support are insane. And any Civil Servant at any level of seniority who expressed opposition to the Great god Privatisation would be out on her or his ear before the words had finished leaving their lips, the e mail had reached its destination, the report had been collated. Add to that the systematic destruction of the idea of public service as a good in itself, the inculcation of the idea of an entrepreneurial Civil Service, and the recent record couldn't fail not to be good.

Look at the dividends Virgin has paid on its rail business, ripe with public subsidy, over the past five years. The suggestion from industry analysts is that there are so many tenders falling due that it will be impossible to go through the procedures: so the choice will be between taking lines into public ownership without the staff and resources to do so or to re-award franchises to the existing operators - who, in the true spirit of the private sector, will have the Government over a barrel and will hike the price (while setting in motion a PR machine to explain how it's all to do with service improvements / operator costs).

The idea of private sector cost effectiveness in 'delivering' public services is umm absurdist. The private sector has as imperative the making of profit, the paying of dividends, and lovely big salaries for those at the top. So-called efficiency savings ignore the frequent grandiose inefficiency of the private sector (what's efficient about its bonus 'culture'?). So pay for the lowest paid workers gets cut, the service gets cut back, safety gets compromised ... and competition between providers proves to be so often chimerical that the costs spiral out of any control.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The first thing hat happened when the railway system was privatised was for Railtrack to sit back and do nothing. The Hull-Scarborough line turned into a nature reserve with huge numbers of weeds and branches growing into the path of trains. But I thought (wrongly) that this neglect was cosmetic. But it wasn't, as Hatfield and Potters Bar were to confirm.

[scottycelt]

The first thing hat happened when the railway system was privatised was for Railtrack to sit back and do nothing. The Hull-Scarborough line turned into a nature reserve with huge numbers of weeds and branches growing into the path of trains. But I thought (wrongly) that this neglect was cosmetic. But it wasn't, as Hatfield and Potters Bar were to confirm.

The idea that there were no train crashes and the train system was really super when it was nationalised was certainly not my experience. My experience of it was exactly how I described it in an earlier post, no doubt shared by many others, and that was precisely why it was privatised in the first place.

Is it better now, warts and all? A resounding yes! If it were nationalised again I'm willing to bet the first thing a government of any colour would do would be to organise an 'Inquiry', then pay some already rich Lord a fortune (out of taxpayers' money, of course) to end up closing down half the lines. The '60s Beeching destruction of much of the rail network happened long before it was privatised!

Considering renationalisation is a bit like thinking of emigrating to Helsinki because we occasionally find Helensburgh a bit chilly.

[amateur51]

The idea that there were no train crashes and the train system was really super when it was nationalised was certainly not my experience. My experience of it was exactly how I described it in an earlier post, no doubt shared by many others, and that was precisely why it was privatised in the first place.

So making shedloads for chums of Tory politicians was never part of the deal then, scotty?!

How innocent I have been

[heliocentric]

Trains in the UK are horribly overpriced and overcrowded compared to those in many European countries, and the pricing system is byzantine. Both of these features are directly attributable to the way British Rail was privatised. Public transport should in any case be a service, not a business. Its primary concern should be its passengers and its employees, not its directors and shareholders. Whether British Rail in its time was well-run or not isn't really the issue.

[John Shelton]

Annual subsidy - over £5bn
Network Rail - debts exceeding £20bn
Fares - highest in Europe
Privatisation involving the removal of public subsidy would be a disaster so impractical and so beyond contemplation ... that some purists on the Right advocate it.

A resounding yes!, indeed.