Nationalise, regionalise, democratise: a treatise for New British Rail

1. MY KINGDOM FOR A BRUNEL

    It can often feel like the United Kingdom is eternally haunted by some Victorian spectre: from foreign relations, to architecture, to things wrapped in pastry, so much of the country harkens back to an imperial institutional dream - and it is a dream.

    The railways of Great Britain, among the oldest in the world, are haunted in the same way. But they also suffer more recent spectres: British Rail, the state-run provider of passenger rail transport in Great Britain, has been dead for barely twenty five years. Now, the country runs a compromise. The tracks themselves sits in the public sector under Network Rail, following the dire safety concerns of privatised Railtrack. Meanwhile, the train operating companies (TOCs) and rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) are private tenders.

    Crucially, however, Great Britain and the UK are not one and the same, and it is Great Britain that has part-privatised rail. Across the sea in Northern Ireland, there is one publically owned company, NI Railways, which began managing track, trains and services across Northern Ireland in 1967. It is a small system - 225 stations cut back from 900 in the early 20th century - but an efficient one. It is accountable to the public, free of costly bidding processes, and committed to long term enhancements. These are the benefits that accrue from a nationalised service. And they are benefits that the rest of the country has eschewed in the name of neoliberalism and a spectre of competition.

2. HYPOCRISY? MORE LIKE EUROCRACY! ALTHOUGH THE EU IS GENERALLY OK

    The privatisation of rail travel in Great Britain was actually brought about by an EU directive - requiring that member states separate the "management of railway services" (tracks) from "the provision of railway transport services" (trains). While this by no means enforced private service provision, it set the benchmark: the aim of the split was to encourage competition for the "trains" segment in a market that had previously seen a natural monopoly for both: nominally, in the past 50 years, most European countries had one company running both trains and tracks.

    While a majority of member states took the directive as intended - an opportunity to split off trains and tracks while keeping them, broadly, in public ownership, the United Kingdom was different. Just two years after the EU directive, John Major introduced the Railways Act 1993: a total restructuring of British Rail. Management of the tracks was contracted out to Railtrack - later reformed as arms-length Network Rail after a series of crashes. The train services themselves were divvied up through a franchising board, splitting the country up into 25 chunks, each with a train operating company (TOC). This was the diversion: it would have been perfectly in line with the EU directive to keep the tracks, at the very least, in public hands. But the Thatcher government had committed to privatisation of British Rail, and Major had committed to follow through. Where the EU directive was practical, while the UK act was ideological. Consumer choice was cack-handedly championed in a sector that is literally on rails. Within 20 years, subsidies had risen to almost half of total ticket revenues, season ticket prices were skyrocketing, and, cruelly, the sandwiches hadn't gotten much better.

    The fundamental question is this one: what solutions are available that can synthesise the lessons learned since the dissolution of British Rail? And how can we prove that they are better than the status quo?

    The simple answer is one that is already being deployed across several government departments, albeit in an unequal fashion: regionalism.

3. FRANCHISE MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A TRAM

    Regionalism is at play both in terms of the national agenda (the promise to "level up" the British economy) and individual projects, whether it is HS2, East-West Rail, Northern Hub or the recently released Rail Needs Assessment for the Midlands and the North. The devolved governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all technically have control over their transport policy - but as noted above, only in Northern Ireland does rail provision differ substantially from in England; the rail franchises in Wales and Scotland are sold to TOCs just the same as those in England. It's an accidental, ongoing hegemony: when the franchise map was created, there were no devolved administrations. Now, because there has been no change in policy in England, Scotland and Wales have stagnated likewise. The fact that intercity services - run by TOCs that also operate stopping trains - cross regional borders mean that any public provision would have to be piecemeal and, therefore, complex and inefficient.

    So what needs to be implemented is a country-wide regionalism - NI, Wales, Scotland, and each region of England - with rail franchises per area, as well as separate franchises for intercity services. This response would carry through the benefits of nationalisation - still very real and existing - as well as the benefits for a regionalised system that can be accountable to the people it serves. England as a whole is too large, unwieldy and disunited; but implement regional transport authorities - like TfL or Transport for Greater Manchester writ large.

    This proposal is not new. Nicole Badstuber, transport researcher at the University of Cambridge, has called multiple times for rail franchises to be brought into public hands as the contracts end, establishing publicly owned regional authorities in their place. Badstuber argues that "an integrated network could reduce excessive costs of fragmentation through cooperative working, coordinated planning and knowledge sharing." I will now briefly lay out in my own words why those arguments still stand up to scrutiny.

4. JOINED UP THINKING, LINED UP PROJECTS

    Perhaps most aggressively: provision of railway travel would become a service accountable to the state. Having the tracks and trains under a single umbrella would mean that co-ordinating departures and arrivals at ever-more busy stations like Waterloo would be far easier to manage. Collaboration like this is technically possible under the status quo - Network Rail operators at Waterloo can request that trains skip stops to cut down their delays. However, the enforceability of this collaboration elsewhere is restricted by the will of the train operating company in question. But regardless of TOC willingness, there will always be bureaucratic hurdles; two companies, both with spurious links to central government, are likely to struggle when it comes to communicating and collaborating. Especially in the online office, being part of the same organisation has huge collaboration benefits and can really help cut down red tape. Just think of all the trouble you've had with diary clashes over people "outside your organisation", or issues with document sharing. Now imagine that, writ large on Waterloo's train tracks. Badstuber is totally correct; fragmentation costs are a real and sincere issue, and they have definitely grown since the nineties.

    The question of co-ordinated planning is linked to the ability of TOCs to contribute financially to new projects in their operating areas, so we have to ask how they are doing financially. At present, TOCs operating in Great Britain make on average 3-4% profits annually, and the shareholder dividend is likely to number in the billions of pounds.

    Meanwhile, the incentive for TOCs to reinvest profits in their area's railway is comparatively insubstantial: it's intuitive that a short term contract to operate trains on a railway does not incentivise large-scale improvements to said railway, when it will be years before such a project bears fruit. Another operator could take over, and, a lá Boris Johnson, take the credit for their predecessor.

    Here's another roadblock (railblock?) to large-scale improvements: multiple TOC franchises in Great Britain are run by state-owned TOCs in other countries such as France (SNCF) and The Netherlands (Abellio). These companies openly acknowledge that their profit is funnelled back into their respective national franchises, as opposed to the British railway network. Co-ordinated projects are left off the table.

    One notable exception is the East-West Rail link from Oxford to Bicester – a collaborative piece between Chiltern Railways and Network Rail. The total budget for the Oxford-Bicester link was £130m, of which a significant portion came from Chiltern. One of the key reasons why they were prepared to contribute was because they were awarded a 20-year long franchise, meaning they had an incentive to commit to long-term service improvements. Otherwise, there is little reason for TOCs to work to improve infrastructure in ways that only accrue benefits in the long-run.

    Full-nationalisation sceptics such as Lord Adonis have argued that the country should adopt a mixed model, whereby state-run companies bid for TOC contracts at the same time as private ones, to help generate competition. But that doesn't solve the problem of investment incentives highlighted here, and it eschews the benefits of joined-up thinking as well.

5. ELECTRIFICATION PROCRASTINATION

    Co-ordinated planning is particularly important in an era where transport must decarbonise rapidly, and the easiest way to get this done is by electrifying the railway. The fact of the matter is that there’s only a smattering of properly electrified tracks in the UK; two of them, the West and East Coast Mainlines go up the spine of the country, and were completed in the 70s and 90s respectively.

    The most pressing electrification was on the Great Western Mainline, as it was the only “trunk route” in the South without electrical current. This was completed through to Cardiff in 2020 though some work remains on spurs and the remaining section through to Swansea. The Midland Main Line (run by EMR from St. Pancras to Sheffield) is only electrified through to Bedford, with plans to complete through to Corby by 2021. Further electrification to Sheffield was scrapped as it is planned to eventually deliver as part of HS2, though not until 2033 – a dire delay by all accounts.

    The benefits of electrification include saving energy, more consistent speeds, and better environmental performance. This isn't just because electric trains are more efficient but also because they avoid the particulate pollution of diesel engines. This is why electrification in the UK is so pressing, on any and all routes where it fits the scale and the specification. It’s the most accessible strategy open to Network Rail for improving passenger rail nationwide, as the change is entirely under their power – it’s up to Network Rail whether a given line is electrified, and train operating companies have to be responsive to changes on the tracks, not vice versa. The windfall from delaying Crossrail 2 could easily be put towards expediting electrification countrywide - but a joined-up approach on this issue would also be far easier under a nationalised service.

    So, not only does nationalisation present opportunities for better co-ordination and value for money; through those opportunities, it offers solutions to the climate crisis. And before you ask, nationalisation is also overwhelmingly popular with the British electorate.

6. FROM TRAIN PLATFORM TO POLITICAL PLATFORM

    Recent YouGov polling found that 60% of British adults support bringing TOCs back into public ownership, with only 14% opposed and the remaining 26% "don't know". This trend has been persistent over the past decade: renationalisation has never stopped being popular in and age where regulated fares and public subsidy seem to be inexplicably rising in tandem. Of course, there are issues visible to consumers that could be addressed by nationalisation. The current system faces problems with accountabilities for delays: whether a TOC or Network Rail is responsible for a train not running on time, and who should therefore pay out. Disputes in this space cost the taxpayer up to £200m a year in legal fees, but they would be forgotten under a public system where TOC and track owner are one and the same.

    All that remains is to justify the regional element. By now it should seem intuitive: bodies such as TfL excel precisely because they are looking to improve the lot of a given area. It helps refine their scope and their standards if they know who they serve. Perhaps the Croxley Rail Link to Watford Junction would still be going ahead if TfL hadn't burned the bridge over building a railway line outside their jurisdiction. No taxation without representation, and vice versa! But what of those Watford folk? There's no equivalent for their sakes - no organisation they have a say in that helps them get to Hemel Hempstead or Tring. The closest they have is the intersect of the DfT, Network Rail, and the local council. When it comes to new infrastructure locally, that's hardly joined-up thinking. So if we want to create a state-run system that accrues the benefits Badstuber lists, it has to be regionalised as well as nationalised. Intercity lines could be run centrally so long as local lines were administered by region. And that's hardly radical; it's how England already manages its roads network, with Highways England on the "strategic roads" and local authorities on everything else. It's even easier to see the benefits of nationalisation with a programme in mind, and the road network is a good place to start.

    The extent to which services patterns have been dependent on government advice for the duration of the pandemic is just one more example of how rail transport - like all transport - is a social good, not a private one. When they can have such a massive influence over people's lives and livelihoods, holding the railways to the ransom of private operators is increasingly unjustified. The privatisation of British Rail was at the bottom of a long list of privatisations, each less excusable than the last. Even Thatcher, Prime Minister for thirteen years, couldn't fit it into her tenure - so Major was left picking at the bin ends.  Privatised rail is the zombie policy of a dead ideology, and it's a disgrace that we haven't got around to shooting it down.