Monday essay: Welcome to the hybrid railway
Labour’s plans for the passenger railway have received plenty of attention over the past few days, although some of the general media coverage was ill-informed or potentially misleading. Some sources talked about ‘UK Rail’, when Northern Ireland is nothing to do with this, but few commentators seemed to notice the quiet change of the status of Great British Railways from ‘guiding mind’, to ‘directing mind’.
Labour’s detailed proposals for railway reform are ambitious. They take the plans set out in Keith Williams’ Rail Review and build on them, with the result that a new railway industry emerges. This will still be a hybrid industry, financially speaking, although it will hardly deserve the label ‘privatised’ any longer. In a nutshell, if Labour gains power, the infrastructure and core passenger services (those operated by the former franchises) will be state-owned, and administered by ‘Great British Railways’. During the first five-year term of a Labour Government the core periods of the existing (passenger) contracts will have expired, and they can then be ‘folded in’ to GBR.
The Labour Party has published its proposal for creating Great British Railways, which is called ‘Getting Britain moving’ and runs to 28 pages. Speaking in London this morning, shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said: ‘If I am secretary of state, I won’t be running the railways day-to-day, but I will act as ‘passenger-in-chief’ – setting the strategy and objectives for Great British Railways, and holding it to account. ‘But, unlike current Ministers, I will trust the experts. Experts who don’t just come from the rail sector – because we all know that it can sometimes be a little too inward-looking. But external experts in providing exceptional customer service.’ She revealed that if Labour is elected, instructions will be given immediately to the Department for Transport, Network Rail, the Rail Delivery Group and the Operator of Last Resort ‘to work together from day one to create a “shadow” Great British Railways’.
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