No way to run a railway: UK’s trains have veered off track

After this year, it is perhaps no great surprise that the UK can’t make the trains run on time. This isn’t a Mussolini reference. The opening sentence of the Williams-Shapps plan for rail, published in May 2021, set that modest aspiration: “We want our trains to run on time.”

They aren’t. Too often, they just aren’t running at all. The public are braced for another round of industrial action in December and January, with the stand-off showing few signs of delivering the pay needed by workers or the modernisation of working practices that the system requires.

In parts of the North, in particular served by Avanti West Coast, Transpennine and Northern, services have unravelled with the proportion of late or cancelled trains doubling, tripling, or worse in the past year.

Meanwhile, the criticism of the 2021 review still stands. The railways lack “a guiding focus on customers, coherent leadership and strategic direction. They are too fragmented, too complicated and too expensive to run. Innovation is difficult. Incentives are often perverse”. What a shame that 18 months later so little has been done about it.

The review was published after the pandemic prompted wholesale taxpayer support of the railways, a tab that was still running at £13bn in the year to March 2022. In reality, though, it addressed the failures of a franchising system that was collapsing well before Covid-19.

A system characterised by vast, overspecified contracts, dwindling numbers of bidders and repeated franchise failures was already edging towards a form of the lower risk, lower reward contracts that were imposed thanks to lockdown.

The plan by Royal Mail chair Keith Williams was to establish Great British Railways, a new public body encompassing both services and infrastructure. The idea was that it could provide a “guiding mind”, overseeing new operator contracts and coordinating simplified fares, timetables, capacity and maintenance.

The model was very much Transport for London: a publicly-planned, publicly-fronted service delivered in the background by private operators.

It’s not fair to say that nothing has happened since (although the fact that one change involves the expunging of former transport secretary Grant Shapps’ name from the plans tells its own story about a year of political turbulence and dysfunction).

The legislation to establish GBR has yet to be brought forward. But its transition team has been working on new fares and ticketing, including pay as you go services, on longer-term strategy, and on how new contracts could be rolled out ahead of legislative action.

One problem is that a system where overall traffic remains at perhaps 85 per cent of pre-Covid-19 levels but has radically shifted between commuter, leisure and business usage is one that could really use some conscious and holistic oversight. Instead, it in effect has the Treasury, which must sign off every penny and has blocked even pilot schemes in areas such as dynamic pricing, according to industry sources.

Another is that the overprescription of franchising, where seat hardness, catering services, or permitted pieces of credit-card sized rubbish were specified by contract, has given way to a different system of counterproductive micromanagement. Every initiative, station improvement or marketing campaign must be cleared with the government.

Fair enough, perhaps, given who is footing the bill. But this would be an inefficient level of central vetting even in a fully-nationalised system. Oxera research for industry group Rail Partners showed that open access operators have outperformed government-contracted ones in terms of revenues since mid-2021, arguing that tweaking contracts to include some growth incentives could generate £800mn a year.

“Franchising involved the government using private industry as a shield for blame,” says Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer. “Now we have micro-level fiddling with nothing done to set an overall strategy for the railway, which is the opposite of what you need.” 

Until the system gets its guiding mind, the sector is reliant on a patchwork of legacy bodies and workaround solutions to try to make improvements. It is, as another saying goes, no way to run a railroad.

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