Comment: Will DfT’s plans for the railway really be any different?

Philip Haigh considers the problems that the government will face with turning its A Railway fit for Britain’s future document from consultation stage into anything like reality.

The Department for Transport’s publication on February 18 of its White Paper into the future of Britain’s railways is a damning indictment of the DfT itself, and the way it has failed to provide strategic direction.

It’s held all the levers since Labour ministers abolished the Strategic Rail Authority in 2004, having created it in shadow form in 1999. DfT already owned Network Rail, and in axing the SRA it took over responsibility for deciding what it wanted train operators to deliver through franchises in England.

From this central position, DfT failed to co-ordinate track and train. It now complains that the railway is a complex web of “competing interests, unclear accountabilities, and no overarching direction”.

So, the future lies with Great British Railways, which will be an arms-length DfT organisation accountable to ministers. It will, according to the White Paper, be running a nationalised network while “working in close partnership with private companies… to unlock benefits and drive growth”.

The White Paper - called A railway fit for Britain’s future - asks 20 questions in a consultation designed to shape the way the government creates legislation to form GBR and give it the formal powers it needs.

It promises GBR trains running on GBR tracks to GBR stations, “all run by the expert leadership of a single organisation in line with clear strategic direction set by the Secretary of State”.

Yet that is what’s lacking from the consultation. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander puts forward no draft strategic direction for GBR. Without it, no one can properly assess whether the vision put forward in the consultation will deliver that direction.

Instead, her department puts forward six objectives. Rail must be reliable, affordable, efficient, accessible and safe. It also adds “quality”, which isn’t an adjective in my dictionary, so doesn’t list well.

Regardless, DfT doesn’t specify what level of quality, just as it doesn’t put any measure against its other objectives.

Nor does it rank them. Is reliability more important than affordability?

The DfT doesn’t say on this or other matters, aside from a short line on page 15 that says GBR will “ensure the railway delivers for local users and communities, rather than focusing solely on the national level”.

A few pages later, it contradicts this view when talking about access rights, saying: “GBR will have a clear remit set in statute empowering it to focus on delivering national benefits.”

OK, back to those objectives…

It explains efficient thus: “So that people know their journey will be as straightforward as possible, from booking to travel, and to provide better value for the travelling public and taxpayer alike”.

Well, yes, but how you measure that and how you assess the DfT’s proposals for GBR against that is another matter entirely.

The architects of privatisation in the 1990s might well have said the same thing. Their model had a track owner responsible for operating, maintaining, renewing and improving the fixed network on which train operators ran trains and paid access charges to do so. Today, the DfT says this is fragmented and promises that GBR will unite track and train.

However, it also proposes to create bespoke agreements with local mayors (in England only, because rail operations are devolved in Wales and Scotland).

Is there a difference between fragmenting the network with different train operators holding agreements with DfT and fragmenting the network with different mayors holding agreements with GBR?

The consultation promises that DfT will step back from day-to-day involvement in the railway. It talks about “ensuring GBR has genuine autonomy and freedom to take the decisions necessary to deliver for the people it serves”.

That’s good. But also easier said than done, because any complaints about GBR will land on the Transport Secretary’s desk and GBR will be beholden to ministers for money.

One of the reasons for the SRA’s demise was the DfT’s view that it was acting as if autonomy existed when ministerial reaction was saying otherwise. In other words, the SRA was taking decisions that ministers thought should be theirs.

GBR’s test will come when it faces decisions about matters such as staff terms and conditions (including pay), ticket office opening hours, and driver-only operation. Changes in any of these areas will prompt reactions from rail unions, which instantly makes the arguments political and puts them on ministers’ desks.

Yet perhaps the SRA gets the last laugh. Or at least its former chief executive Richard Bowker does. For back in 2004, he put forward a model as the DfT (under Labour’s Alistair Darling) was reviewing the railway organisation he had inherited.

Bowker proposed a national rail company that would be responsible for track and train. This would sit in the private sector, which reflected the railway of the day. Although DfT owned Network Rail, the company ran as if it was private and its debt was classed as private. That later changed with the National Audit Office reclassifying NR as a public body.

Train operating companies (TOCs) were also private, but that is now also changing. So, today’s version of Bowker’s 2004 model would sit in the public sector, uniting track and train. You could call it GBR.

Darling wasn’t convinced and pursued a model that had the DfT take charge. Bowker went down fighting, warning Darling that it was “enormously risky to ask a department of central government to promote the kind of commercially aware, timely and risk-based decision-making and judgement that is absolutely essential for the effective operation of organisations such as SRA, Network Rail and the TOCs”.

History shows that the DfT failed, and that it’s now going back to something very similar to a model it rejected in 2004.

Yet Bowker’s warning remains relevant. Will GBR be able to make the commercial, timely and risk-based decisions?

The current consultation White Paper reckons it will. GBR will have the “freedom to take long-term decisions and manage trade-offs”, it says. But so did Alistair Darling back in 2004.

His White Paper said: “Government will set out what Network Rail is expected to deliver for the public money it receives, and on that basis Network Rail will lead industry planning, set timetables and direct service recovery.

“Too often under the current structure, companies have been able to pass the buck for poor performance.”

Now GBR is to be the railway’s ‘directing mind’. It will be responsible for day-to-day operational delivery “from delivering services to setting timetables” says DfT, as well as managing access to the network that it operates, maintains and renews.

The historical point bears repetition. Today’s railway structure is Labour’s. It’s one that the Conservatives inherited in 2010 but then handled very badly - starting with the collapse of the Intercity West Coast franchising deal in 2012, which was handed to FirstGroup after a competition. Incumbent Virgin complained and the DfT reversed its decision, which (perhaps fatally) weakened confidence in franchising.

Conservative ministers followed this with May 2018’s timetable collapse, which led to many, many cancellations and delays across Thameslink and Northern services. This further weakened franchising.

Both governing parties have played a role in bringing the railways to a situation where Alexander now pledges to “smash a broken system”. Now the only way to save the railway (from what I’m not sure) is to pulverize it. Saving the village by burning the village, you might say.

In this, decisions about who can run trains sit front and centre. The DfT believes timetabling and access is a minefield of “fragmented control, disjointed information, multiple decision-makers”, whereas GBR’s directing mind will create a “clear, accountable system that manages risks, assumptions and changes with clarity and fairness for all parties”.

It might. But the current system also consists of train operators whose DfT contracts specify in great detail the services they’re expected to run. Revamping a timetable on the scale of recent East Coast Main Line efforts exposes the contradictions in those different deals, even before train operators argue for services on behalf of the people who pay to travel on them.

I’m left with the strong feeling that the DfT believes rewriting timetables would be much easier if it wasn’t for those pesky train operators, and that life would be simpler if the centre could just dictate what’s going to happen. Passengers would receive the service that GBR sees fit to deliver.

Devolution suggests that GBR will be exchanging one set of pesky parties for another, in the form of England’s regional mayors. In its early pages, the White Paper talks about mayors “influencing and scrutinising” GBR. In later pages it talks about “bespoke agreements” with them, which strongly suggests legal backing.

Further evidence to suggest legal agreements comes with the DfT suggesting that mayors could take on service specification responsibilities and revenue risk.

By contrast, the White Paper offers Scotland and Wales only joint working arrangements between GBR and ScotRail/Transport for Wales.

For Scotland, this is to be strong, with engagement to ensure the relationship that the Scottish government has with NR transfers to GBR, which will retain ownership of Scotland’s tracks and stations.

For Wales, the arrangements will be strong and enduring says DfT. And, of course, the Welsh government owns the Valley Lines infrastructure, which gives it more certainty over services along them.

As more English mayors take powers over local transport, GBR will find its directing mind watered down across an increasingly fragmented network. This creates the very competing interests that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander rails against in her foreword to the White Paper.

There is no perfect railway system. British Rail had its flaws. So did privatisation, even as it doubled passenger numbers and brought huge investment from private and public sectors. GBR will have flaws too, but perhaps it’s the best ministers can do.