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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » On the wrong track: the government needs to be seen to be getting a grip of the rail fiasco
In the most recent Mori Issues Index (published on 4 May but with fieldwork going back well into April), not a single person out of the 1001 questioned said that transport was the most important issue facing the country. This compares against two people who responded with ‘pandemics’, another two who said AIDS, four who put forward ‘animal welfare’, six whose chief concern was nuclear weapons, and 251 who said Brexit or the EU. These responses (as well as others) were all given unprompted. Even when asked to list other important issues, only 4% identified transport, placing it outside the top 20 issues.
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IMO Labour have been concentrating on the'wring' thing: they are so one-eyed about renaationalisation, they have been concentrating unfairly on the privatised TOCs, when they could have been targeting Grayling. But that would partially mean criticising the nationalised parts of the network ...
I'm also unsure what Grayling can do in the short term to sort out this mess, and as the threader says, it will rumble on for some time. There will be a fair amount of pressure on him.
It really is a horrendous mess, and one of the railway's own making. It is a victim of its own success.
"Since the Ministry began in 1919, only eight Ministers of Transport or Secretaries of State have lasted more than three years in post:
Wilfrid Ashley (Con)
The Lord Leathers (War Coalition)
Alfred Barnes (Lab)
Harold Watkinson (Con)
Ernest Marples (Con)
John Prescott (Lab)
Alistair Darling (Lab)
Patrick McLoughlin (Con)"
Grayling became Secretary of State nearly two years ago.
If that is passed, then we can have a second referendum.
And if Remain wins that - if of course, that was one of the ballot paper options - then we will need to have a best of three referendum.
Can't say fairer than that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/andy-mcsmiths-diary-chris-grayling-the-worst-lord-chancellor-for-342-years-no-worse-10114748.html
But what do you expect from Fenn Poly?
He fails to address three key questions.
1. Why can foreign states run our railways but not our own state?
2. Why is the busiest railway in Britain accepted in the public sector but the other railways are not?
3. If nationalisation is good enough for six of the last ten years on ECML and now again then why rule it out as a permanent solution?
And finally,
4. What is franchising for?
And the UK railways enjoy the second highest level of customer satisfaction in Europe:
http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/flash/fl_382a_sum_en.pdf
Hmm. May check the odds. Not sure either way about this.
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The Thatcher government intensified commercial pressures. Targets for subsidy reductions amounted in real terms to a 25% cut between 1983 and 1986 (Ibid, p. 122). However, in a period of strong economic growth in the mid-1980s, all three passenger businesses increased their incomes, with an aggregate growth in real passenger income of 36% between 1983 and 1989 (Gourvish, 1990, p. 130). By the early 1990s the network was investment-starved but effective at controlling costs. In 1989, British Rail was recorded as being 40% more efficient than eight comparable rail systems in Europe used as benchmarks, whereas in 1979, it was no more than 14% more efficient (Ibid: 149).
If one looks at longer distance travel..... say London to Manchester or Manchester to Leeds, then driving can be an option but there are two problems. First of all there’s the aforementioned congestion at each end and secondly if one drives onself that’s all one can do for that time. At least on a train one can read or, assuming there’s space, write or work on a laptop.
Virgin Train East Coast with a satisfaction rating of 92%, above C2C!
Polling suggests otherwise! All TOCs have a net positive satisfaction rating.
However, this Saturday I’ve THINGS TO DO, so I’m off, so sorry, can’t participate further. Have fun!
Winning the world cup might change the mood but a re-run of the referendum is more likely
PS The Japanese railways are pretty good, but they should contract out the road planning - numbering and roundabouts and things - to the British.
I'm open to all of these, and there are problem and opportunities with all of them. As for renationalisation, the biggest is that the proponents have no answers to simple questions about how it would work - it's an ideology. In fact, in most cases they don't even care about the questions - they evidently want renationalisation even if it won't work. This gets annoying after a while.
You want to renationalise the railways. Good. Convince me. My questions are, i believe, fair and well-sourced. And I shall answer your questions, even though you never answer mine:
*) Franchising is an attempt to get good services for the passenger. Since passenger numbers have doubled since it was introduced, it may just have worked.
*) Renationalisation has many difficulties, which I keep on bringing up. Most of all, nationalisation did not work very well in the past. Perhaps the railways are too big to be run as one organisation - witness Network Rail's current woes?
*) What would I do? The franchising system needs reworking at a minimum. The DfT's causing too many problems. Going further than that, we need to think about what the railways are *for*, and how the organisation(s) can best fit that purpose.
*) This shambles could have occurred under a nationanlised system - it is the currently nationalised parts that have for the most part, failed.
This means the one substantial thing they can really compete on at franchise time is the amount of subsidy they get, or the amount of money they return, to the treasury. This is what has led to East Coast's woes.
As for growth in passengers, this would have happened whether the railways were privatised or not. Change in employment locations, increased car fuel and insurance costs and lack of city centre housing have all played a part.
2) Perhaps it should not be; London's rail transport isn't necessarily a shining success.
3) Because it wasn't necessarily a success. Witness the extra Lincoln services that were not introduced the first time the state took over in 2010.
4) I have answered this below, and could probably write a long (and hopefully relatively informed) tract on it.
IMO ownership doesn't matter. What matters is if it delivers to the country a rail system that the country needs. That might be nationalised, privatised, a combination, or a.n.other system.
Your problem is that you evidently have no idea or interest in what will work; you've decided on renationalisation and that's that.
As for the Tube, part-privatisation was of course tried under Labour with the PPP and it was a disaster.
Unfortunately, this sort of simplistic view is very common.
I utterly disagree that the growth in passengers would have occurred to the same scale under BR, especially as BR didn't have the ability or mindset to manage growth. They did a great job of managing a shrinking network, but that is very different too a doubling of passenger numbers.
So yes, I agree the growth of numbers is all down to privatisation. But privatisation was a massive factor in freeing up the railway's mindset.
But that's not necessarily a reason to keep them privatised ...
Is that it?
One of my fears about a 'return to BR' renationalisation is that the organisation would just be too big, which I fear is the problem we are seeing with Network Rail. In fact, it was probably the biggest problem with BR. A series of concessions might help break that structure up a little organisationally, especially if a little competition can be brought in. But rewards need to be given for increasing passenger numbers and service quality - the concessionaires need set aims for the concession.
Well the UK is now worse. Big Brother has arrived and only 34 years late
I think NR it’s too big, too bureaucratic, too vast and very public sector in mindset. Worked with it and heard it from the horses mouth far too many times.
TfL isn’t much better.
Putting Anazina's question the other way around, given all the organizations and cultures attempting any given problem, what are the chances that of all the organizations in the world, your own particular nation's government would happen to be the best at running it? Not very high, so you should have a model that lets you switch to whatever organisation is.
PS Matt Yglesias also made this point about central bank governors: Countries have a habit of picking their own nationals to do this job, but what big countries should be doing is picking someone with a good record running a smaller economy.
I have said plenty of times on here that I favour a mixture of nationalisation and concessions, on a case by case basis.
I presume you are espousing the argument that franchises are better because the involve “risk” for the operator... in which case you should read up on Revenue Support
He seems to keep getting into scrapes.
Could it be that the PB Tories are ideologically wedded to franchising? It’s not my place to say.
QED.
1985-86: 686 million
1989-90: 812 million
18% increase.
https://tinyurl.com/y9wr78tj
Why, I hear you ask? Because it's not as you claim.
In the good old days of BR a train would break down or there is a defect in track or signalling, and little may happen because of the costs of fixing the issue, which no-one wants to pay. It's move convenient and cheaper to have trains that aren't as reliable, or track with lots of TSR's (Temporary Speed Restrictions).
The current system works, in that it hurts the people causing the delays. If your train breaking down costs you ten thousand pounds, or a speed restriction five thousand a week, it encourages you to get out and fix the issues. And since the other organisations are external, you are not just shifting money around one large organisation: the money leaves you.
And we end up with a more reliable railway.
That said, the main difference I see is on food offering and customer service. I use it 5-10 times a year. Compare and contrast:
Old privatised East coast - nice enough food, great service
Nationalised East coast - got the first train out of London on a Saturday morning, the restaurant in standard didn’t open for 40 minutes. Was famished by the time it did.
Virgin East coast - better than original food. Service just as good as before it was nationalised
And, of course, decent chunks of that line have competition, too. Which is a consequence of privatisation. More trains from York to London than one can shake a stick at...
F1: an early ramble about Canada:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2018/06/early-canada-ramble.html
Do you have any evidence for your claim?
It's a great way of prioritising work as well, which BR tended to be a little slapdash over.
(Alright, alright, I'll stop my puns for the moment!)
The sad fact is that there are several areas like this and too many mediocrities in office responsible for them. The ability of May to get rid of them is greatly inhibited by the minority status of her government but, depressingly, that isn’t even the whole story. She has chosen to promote mediocrities of her own. So much to do and so little talent.
A little guesswork: the government has invested billions into these upgrades, and they wanted to see them used as quickly as possible. NR has been slow in delivering them, and was under pressure to reduce the delays in their introduction. A combination of NR continuing to muck up, and the DfT's desire to use them as soon as possible, lalong with the May scheduled timetable changes, led to this situation.
But AIUI you couldn't just use the old timetables as new trains were coming into use, along with other changes that made them unworkable.
I'm unsure they'll ever reach thee 24tph through Thameslink's central section ...
It's very frustrating as when they go in we should get direct services to London and Liverpool (and perhaps more usefully, Crewe).
The outcome of the current shambles is that passengers will desert the trains in much of NW England. They might as well shut the some of the lines, such as the Windermere branch, for good.
Jeremy Thorpe 'hit-man might not be dead', police admit
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44336859
A couple of months ago i visited my daughter in Gronnigan. At one point we had to switch trains and there was 2 minutes in which to do so. Any concerns about this being tight were met with mute incomprehension and so it proved. All the trains we were on there left and arrived within 10 seconds of when they should. I find these customer satisfaction numbers deeply untrustworthy.
Presumably there’s another Jeremy Thorpe drama out there which actually seeks to understand how a great liberal thinker should be driven to such moral squalor.
I think NR do the timetabling work from that large office building outside the station in Milton Keynes, if you wish to complain.
Closing rail lines is politically impossible and there is no way the Windermere branch in particular is going to close.
There are a few lines and station that certainly are economic basket cases but even these generally don’t get closed, eg read up on the story of Breich station (1 passenger/week) which the SNP government has insisted on keeping open at a cost of thousands.
With a baby in a pushchair and a toddler we had to use the elevators and once the number popped up we went out but then had to get 5 lifts to get across to the right platform. Big queues at every lift meant it took about 4-5 minutes to get some of the lifts so we got to the platform just in time to see the doors close without us.
Originally met with gruff indifference by the staff there who simply said it was our fault we were late, when I said that the platform wasn't listed when we arrived he said they put it up 19 minutes before departure, with doors closing 1 minute before departure. Great, 18 minutes is fine if you can walk. Stuck needing wheelchair access then with 5 lifts with a queue for each on then giving 18 minutes to cross the station is not very long at all.
The series does (rather crudely) counterpoint the the farce with quite stirring and surprisingly idealistic parliamentary speeches from Thorpe. I'd guess that his taste for the transgressive element of his sexual tastes (tbf forced upon him by the mores of the time) may have loosened Thorpe's moral compass, but that's just amateur psychobollox on my part.
Luckily for the government the train companies have been so awful for so long they are escaping the finger of blame at the moment. If it goes on much longer then o suspect that will change.
I would expect a new Labour government to announce a series of radical policies that might initially play quite well with the public at large. Personally I hope we never get to find out - the only thing that would get me to vote for him would be if the party went into the next election with an anti-Brexit stance.
That sounds like a Labour Party disciplinary process
There is an inherent conflict of interest between optimising the overall outcome on the railways* and maximising near term political outcomes. Politicians will, as a rule, tend to underinvest (spending on schools’n’hospitals instead), hold down fares, increase wages and not focus on returns.
Without taking a view on what the right points on the spectrum for each of those factors is, I hope you can appreciate that the politicians best outcome is not necessarily the best outcome for the railways.
Where a foreign government is the owner they are not subject to the political pressures (their voters are not directly affected) and therefore it can be run in order to optimise the outcome for the railways. That’s not to say it *will be* but it *can be*
* a blend between investment, fares, wages and returns
The reasons are obvious: the needs and requirements for civils is very different from operations, and running them both as one big group leads to problems and they are subdivided. Therefore there is always communication between subdivisions, even if they are both owned by the same overall entity. BR had loads of problems with this.
This is a real question about renationalisation: how will the new organisation be structured, and how will that structure lead to a good service for passengers and freight?
Essentially you may just end up replicating what we have now (especially if they go the 'cheap' way they are claiming and just let the franchise lapse).
There is another aspect with GTR that is not the case with Northern: AIUI their new trains are specified by the DfT. The new 24tph schedule through Central London relies on low dwell times at stations, and the new trains are designed to allow passengers on and off quickly.
Early experience seems to show that the DfT's assumption that passengers will get on and off quickly enough might be wrong, and if that's the case it'll be nearly impossible to keep to the timetables.
(All AIUI).
Labour will flesh out how it would dismantle Andrew Lansley’s structural NHS reforms to bring more health provision back in-house, in a wide-ranging consultation on NHS restructuring under a future Labour government.
The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, said Labour had now rejected the possibility of working within the existing structures, calling them unfit for purpose, and said the party would consult in the coming months over how it could re-establish a universally public NHS.