Comment: GBR in 2026 and support for open access and freight

Philip Haigh on new Transport Secretary Louise Haigh’s debut appearance before the House of Commons Transport Select Committee.

Great British Railways should be up and running by the end of 2026 at the earliest.

That’s the headline from Transport Secretary Louise Haigh’s first appearance before the newly appointed Transport Select Committee of the House of Commons.

We should also know which of the ten private rail operators running under Department for Transport contracts will be nationalised first, just as soon as the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill receives royal assent to become law.

The bill is in its final stages, so royal assent is perhaps only days away. It gives the Transport Secretary legal power to take English private train operating companies into the public sector, there to join the four already operating under direct DfT control.

To create fully Great British Railways as the owner of track and train and the ‘directing mind’ for rail needs a further Parliamentary bill, which Haigh said she hoped to introduce next summer.

She explained: “I don’t want anyone to underestimate the scale of the reform challenge that we are undertaking. I have always been clear that public ownership and taking operators under the Operator of Last Resort is not a silver bullet.

“We have to massively reduce and simplify the mass of regulations that has been built up over the last 30 years of privatisation and, frankly, stifles a huge amount of innovation and progress currently in the railways.

“In setting up Great British Railways, we have to establish an entirely new organisation that crucially has to have a completely new culture, and a new approach, that does not underpin any organisation that works across the railways at the moment.”

So, that’s not Network Rail Version 2 or British Rail Mk 2.

She added that GBR would “work single-mindedly in the interests of passengers”.

This emphasis on passengers has worried freight operators, who fear they will be squeezed off the tracks in favour of GBR services.

However, Haigh said: “We absolutely consider freight to be a passenger of Great British Railways,” and repeated her desire to give GBR a statutory duty to promote freight, complete with stretching targets, and to bring infrastructure investment that would help open opportunities to freight.

And there was comfort for private passenger operators working under open access rights, such as Lumo and Grand Central.

Haigh said: “We’re not being ideological. I’m very happy for open access to play a full role in the future of the railways.

“Lumo has done a very good job in encouraging people onto the railways, off airplanes. They’re providing a very reasonable service between London and Edinburgh and providing that competition with LNER.

“So, where open access isn’t abstracting revenue from the service and where it fits, crucially, because parts of the network are really constrained and at capacity already, which is again part of the reason we need Great British Railways to plan the network based on actual capacity.”

She concluded that she was “really, really happy for operators like Lumo or Grand Central to play a full role because they are delivering improvements for passengers”.

Asked about staff, Haigh said: “We’re faced with completely outdated terms and conditions across the railway and workforce practices that are not fit to deliver a modern and efficient railway.”

She explained that GBR gave the opportunity to develop a strategy that stretched across the whole workforce.

None of the committee’s MPs probed further to ask how the DfT plans with GBR to address terms, conditions and practices, but some of the problems are well-known.

They include continuing to have Sundays outside the working week, so that some train operators rely on volunteers to deliver Sunday services.

Unions have long called for change here. They doubtless welcome the prospect of more members as a result, but their members have traditionally liked the opportunity to earn overtime. The same tension applies more widely across rest day working, where paying overtime can be cheaper than employing more staff.

When previous Conservative Transport Secretaries raised the subject of terms, conditions and working practices, they were sharply attacked by rail unions. The subject was a core part of recent industrial action.

It remains to be seen how union leaders will react to Haigh’s words, but they come shortly after she settled the last round of strikes over pay and shortly before the next round of pay talks start.

Settlement came by removing the matter of reform from pay talks. Haigh is showing a willingness to tackle the subject, but it’s surely difficult to keep reform and pay in different siloes.

In a wide-ranging meeting that covered several aspects of DfT’s work, including buses and roads, MPs asked about High Speed 2.

Haigh was confident that public money would be delivering HS2’s tunnel between Old Oak Common and London Euston.

For Euston itself, she is following the previous government’s line of wanting to see private sector finance deliver HS2’s station through a development corporation. This, while taxpayers foot the bill for changes to Network Rail’s station.

It fell to the committee’s chairman, Ruth Cadbury, to ask the million-dollar HS2 Euston question: “Can we be assured that the final solution for Euston’s stations will be big enough, with adequate passenger circulation capacity and platforms to actually serve the rest of the 21st century?”

Haigh replied: “Absolutely. That’s the challenge that a number of iterations in the previous government have gone through, to set up the right delivery model that takes responsibility and can be held accountable for capacity for the track and for getting passengers out and into London but also in the station itself. We are looking creatively at private financing options.”

DfT Permanent Secretary Bernadette Kelly chipped in to say that there was now an opportunity to look at Euston’s three stations (high-speed, conventional and Underground) “as a whole” and to think about what is needed to meet future demand.

Kelly’s words might have more force had the DfT not spent the last decade presiding over both Network Rail and HS2 (admitting that the Underground station falls to the London Mayor).

Developing Euston has been characterised by order and counter-order which has kept changing the plan. Attempts to control costs led the previous government to cut the number of platforms for HS2 which, in turn, permanently hobbled its ability to extend HS2 services.

Adding indecision to private sector funding makes it more expensive, so if Haigh is to secure the funding she wants, she will need a very clear view of what Euston is to deliver.

But Haigh’s answer overall was woolly, placing more emphasis on delivery models than Euston’s needs.

That must change if she’s to have any hope of delivering a Euston that’s fit for passengers.