Puffing and wheezing its way on to the parliamentary agenda, the Department for Transport’s long-promised bill to reform Britain’s railways was finally published last week, in draft form. Almost certainly, given limited legislative time before the next election, it will never be voted into law. As Labour’s shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, waspishly observed, it was fitting that this final act of strategic mismanagement should lead to a disastrously late arrival.
It is six years since the government commissioned a review of the rail industry, following timetabling chaos in the north of England. Since then, multiple transport secretaries have presided over what has amounted to a rolling omnishambles. In the north, cancellations, late-running services and overcrowding have brought the network into disrepute. The cancellation of HS2 beyond Birmingham, and the related downgrading of Northern Powerhouse Rail, have made a mockery of the government’s supposed levelling up ambitions.
Nationally, ministers’ mishandling of pay negotiations with unions has inflicted extended misery on travellers, and needlessly alienated an entire workforce. Most recently, government-backed plans to shut more than a thousand station ticket offices proved so unpopular that they were binned almost as soon as the public got wind of them.
The common thread in this sorry sequence has been a refusal to invest sufficiently for the long term, and a blinkered determination to prioritise cost-cutting across the network. Since the pandemic, this Treasury-driven approach has assumed that the railways need to permanently adjust to a new reality, in which an economic model dependent on business travel no longer applies. Though passenger numbers are now back at 90% of the pre-Covid peak, revenues have not kept pace, and guaranteed income from commuter season tickets has fallen away.
The new normal does not seem to have troubled the private companies that lease out Britain’s trains – their profits trebled last year. But it is the lamentable shortsightedness in Whitehall that truly exasperates. According to forecasts from one specialist rail consultancy, the number of people travelling by train could double by 2050. This would be exactly the right direction of travel, helping the country make the necessary move to a greener transport network. Handled with imagination and flair – for example, in relation to ticketing – it could also deliver huge social benefits. But a misconceived austerity strategy is inflicting reputational damage as service standards drop, grievously undermining industry morale and risking a spiral of decline.
Beyond a commitment to renationalise train operators as existing contracts expire, Labour has largely been keeping stumm about its own ideas. It has so far not ruled out creating an independent Great British Railways-type body to run the industry, as envisaged in the DfT’s draft bill. But what the railways need above all is a government focused on growth not decline, which recognises the strategic importance of public transport in Britain’s future.
After a period in which industrial relations have reached rock bottom, the rail unions and train operators should be seen as partners in that wider vision. A new era of ambition and collaboration is required, after the scandalous dysfunction of recent years. The curtain must come down on a period in which passengers have been paying more for less, victims of an overbearing Treasury that has known the price of everything and the value of nothing.
