Comment: open access opens up new opportunities for government

Editor Dickon Ross on RAIL's coverage of the emerging role of open access in Great British Railways.

No one could say 2024 wasn’t a big year for the rail industry: the election of a new government with a new strategy for rail; a new Department for Transport team (more than once for some); new legislation already moving through Parliament; budget cuts; HS2 progress; and much more. 2025 could be even bigger.

Our RailReview articles in this issue include the formation of Shadow Great British Railways (SGBR), which is due to replace the GBR Transition Team that stops on April 1.

Beyond that, precious little detail has been made public. Laura Shoaf was appointed Chair, and SGBR is technically up and running… but still taking shape.

Paul Clifton talks to insiders who are close to the project to get the inside track on what’s happening.

What bodies will end up in the combined organisation? What will happen to train operators as they are nationalised? Will they be merged?

There may be savings to be had by removing duplicated back-office departments, but on the other hand it sems unlikely we’ll be asked to just wave goodbye to household names with such long histories.

It’s a time for optimism, but also a time of great uncertainty for the train operators.

Nationalisation is now a legislative certainty, rather than just a party policy. Rail Partners has decided to wind itself up. Its chief executive Andy Bagnall is a regular commentator in RAIL, and in his guest column he bids farewell from Rail Partners by warning that public ownership doesn’t necessarily solve rail’s problems, and that the government will still need the private sector involved.

That much has become clear from the government’s statements and from developments we report on in this issue.

Nationalisation doesn’t cover freight. Rail Freight Group Director General Maggie Simpson warns against letting freight slip between priorities at GBR, or creating unnecessary tension between freight and passenger services (pages 60-61).

Nor does it cover open access services, which are growing.

The Chancellor has repeatedly warned that the new government has discovered it had even less money available than it had thought.

Early on, this led her to cancel the Restoring Your Railway project. One of its schemes had been reopening the Fawley branch to passenger services. That might now be back on the cards, but thanks to private investment putting together an open access application, covered in our exclusive story.

Meanwhile, FirstGroup is applying to run an open access service from Paddington to Paignton - its latest move further into that sector. In its half-year results, it was clearly looking towards open access as one way to make up for losing franchises under nationalisation.

Philip Haigh notes the irony of Prime Minister Keir Starmer talking up his government’s role in First’s order for new trains from Hitachi’s Newton Aycliffe site. While the government pursues urgent nationalisation, this was in fact a private deal with little or no government agency. It’s a privately financed deal to build rolling stock for a private operation.

Nationalisation is coming. But the private sector will always be involved in various ways. That’s not a surprise - or even very controversial.

Even the most venerated of public service organisations, the National Health Service, has always had private providers involved, despite long-running fears of creeping privatisation. GPs, for example, are private contractors to the NHS - an arrangement arrived at in the organisation’s early days.

Every nationalised industry has some private sector involvement in it somewhere, from consultants to finance, or paperclips to property. It’s just a question of what, where and how much. The private sector will always play a part in rail somewhere, and it’s looking like this government will really need it to.