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Starmer Must Have His Head In His Hands.....
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I don’t know if anybody has told them, but the railways are already largely under government control, duggie.
At present, essentially the only aspect of railway operations that are in private hands and which the government plans to nationalise are the franchised train operations. The infrastructure, together with some of the larger stations, are owned, managed, maintained and developed by Network Rail, which is a governmental organisation.
The Rolling Stock Companies (“Roscos”) own the locomotives, passenger carriages and multiple units and the majority of freight wagons. There are no plans to nationalise these companies because it would cost far too much and sequestration of assets without compensation is, unsurprisingly, not on even this government’s agenda.
So that just leaves the train operators (TOCs). At present they pay a franchise fee to the government for the privilege of running their services. Among the important conditions of all franchise agreements:
- they must run trains to the level of services in their franchise agreement;
- they cannot make changes to their timetables without the agreement of Network Rail;
- they must provide suitable rolling stock in accordance with their franchise agreement;
- they must pay track access charges to Network Rail to run their services;
- they must meet performance targets laid out in their agreement .
In summary, the private TOCs (the only section of the railway industry the government intends to re-nationalise) are already heavily regulated and bound by conditions set by the government which are unlikely to change significantly when their franchises expire and are not renewed.
The only thing that will change is the franchise fees which TOCs bring to the industry will, of course, be lost. So that means that in order for the railways to simply stay as they are, those franchise fees will have to be replaced by an increase in government grants.
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