Latest news with #renationalisation
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Water firms should serve the common good
The Water Commission's failure to consider renationalisation as an option for the industry does not necessarily mean that we'll 'watch the industry continue to sink under the failed model of privatisation', as the Green party's co-leader, Adrian Ramsay, has suggested ('Less reorganising, more doing': landmark report alone won't fix broken water sector, 21 July). But, as you say in your editorial (21 July), it will mean that 'making water companies value the public interest more highly, relative to private profit, will be an ongoing struggle'. There is a way, however, of ensuring that the public interest wins this struggle. Change the laws on corporate governance. Legally require water and other private companies to operate in the interests of the common good, and develop a regulatory system to ensure that this happens. This would make it easier to prosecute CEOs and other senior executives, should they fail to run their companies in the interests of the British people. In legislating this way, the government could take its lead from the German constitution, article 14, clause 2 of which states: 'Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.' In so doing, the government could take note of the fact that this is a legal cornerstone of Germany's social market version of capitalism – one that for a long time has surpassed Britain's in terms of its higher levels of prosperity, with far lower levels of HendersonLeeds I could accept a privatised water industry if I had a choice of provider. As a Severn Trent customer, the only way to change my water supplier is to move house. There is no incentive for Severn Trent to offer me the best service it can, as there is no penalty for not doing so. Pious statements about regulation are easily addressed by looking at the regulatory bonfire that occurs every time we elect a Tory government. I've been a Labour voter for 40-plus years, and was incensed enough to think about changing my vote over the benefit changes disaster, but now have a positive reason to consider a vote for the Green party – an unambiguous commitment to nationalisation. This is the only way of getting an accountable BowdenBirmingham Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Telegraph
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Labour's great rail revival has already hit the buffers
Labour came to power with a pledge to improve Britain's creaking railways, spearheaded by a headline-grabbing commitment to renationalisation. But a year on, the Government stands accused of blocking the resurrection of dozens of routes across England, most of them mothballed since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. The decision to relaunch just one defunct train line out of dozens was announced by the Government earlier this month. In doing so, it has sparked anger in communities across the country, many of which were given hope by ministers who pledged to reconsider a fleet of reopenings, despite scrapping Boris Johnson's Restoring Your Railway programme last year. In the event, the Bristol to Portishead line was the only new service to feature on a list of more than 50 rail and road upgrades unveiled on July 8, touted by the Government as 'the biggest boost to England's transport infrastructure in a generation'. When asked about future reopenings last week, Lord Hendy, the rail minister, said that the projects would have to compete with other upgrades and would get no special treatment Douglas McClay, a campaigner for the restoration of passenger services on the 31-mile, freight-only Ivanhoe Line between Leicester and Burton-on-Trent, says its exclusion from the department's to-do list was a severe disappointment. Named after the historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, which was set partly in the area, the line would have provided the Midlands with a new east-west corridor and restored passenger trains to towns including Coalville, Swadlincote and Ashby de la Zouch, costing £100m in the process. 'I simply don't understand' The route was one of hundreds of branch lines and low-footfall services that fell victim to Dr Richard Beeching's infamous 1960s savings plan, as the former British Railways chairman oversaw the closure of around 5,000 miles of track and almost 2,500 stations. 'We were still holding out despite what had happened with the Restoring Your Railway fund and the message from one of the MPs on our line was that things were coming along, don't worry too much at the moment,' says McClay. 'But this seems to close the door. I can't see anything else that's likely to appear. The irony is that our business case had been scrutinised and was, we gather, at the top of the list for reopenings and sitting on the minister's desk to be signed off when the election was called.' Rebecca Smith, the Conservative MP for South West Devon, says the Government's assessment of the value created by reopening railway lines is flawed. Appearing before the House of Commons transport committee last Wednesday, Lord Hendy said proposals were considered according to their estimated impact on economic growth, employment and homes. However, Smith told the meeting that another of the rejected lines, from Plymouth to Tavistock, would have helped address chronic transport in an area set to receive £4.4bn of defence investment that the Government says will create 25,000 jobs. 'They say everything has been done with a focus on jobs, growth on housing,' she says. 'But if that is the case, the rural lines are exactly what they should be investing in. 'The lines already exist or the trackbed is there, so to not even give the money to assess a business case, I simply don't understand. They seem to find the money for the things they want to spend it on, like the pay rises for the train drivers. 'It has always felt to me like quite a political decision. There are a few things that were just scrapped because the Conservatives thought of it first.' Smith says the Tavistock Line would have linked Plymouth with places as far as Dartmoor and 'followed the money' being ploughed into the city's naval base. 'If you want to invest in these areas because they're useful to the country, in our case for defence, you've got to think about how the people you want to house in these areas are going to get to these jobs,' she says. 'And when you've got the beginnings of some projects that could be explored, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. Other countries throw up railways and stations way cheaper and quicker than we do. We're told it will cost a fortune and nobody questions it.' She cited the success of the nearby Dartmoor Line between Exeter to Okehampton, which attracted a higher-than-expected 500,000 passengers in the two years after it reopened in 2021, as evidence of the potentially huge returns from restoring defunct routes. McClay adds that the Ivanhoe Line would also have served 'huge housing developments' along the route that will now have to rely on single-carriageway A roads. 'We've been disenfranchised' The Restoring Your Railway programme, launched in 2020 with a £500m budget, attracted more than 150 applications, with around 20 earmarked for development. However, only the Dartmoor Line and the Northumberland Line, linking Newcastle upon Tyne with Ashington, Bedlington and Blyth, were given the go-ahead before Rachel Reeves scrapped the scheme last July, with just £50m spent in one of her first acts as Chancellor. The 100-mile East West Rail project between Oxford and Cambridge, which involves reopening tracks on the former Varsity Line, closed in 1968, and received £2.5bn in funding from Reeves last month, was not part of the scheme. Scotland, by contrast, has added several new lines and around 70 new stations in recent years, including Britain's highest-profile reopening to date – the £350m, 35-mile Border Railway south of Edinburgh on the site of the former Waverley route to Carlisle. Lord Hendy said that proposals previously financed under Restoring Your Railway should be regarded as 'unfunded' rather than cancelled. He said: 'When the prospect comes round of future funding, they'll have to be considered alongside [other projects]. What I can't say, of course, is what other demands would come up.' However, Smith says the Government should provide 'direct answers' as to which schemes have a chance of being taken up rather than give 'false hope' to rural towns and communities. McClay says the prospects for reopenings have also been hurt by the creation of a two-tier system where areas under a mayoral authority get money to finance local projects while others 'have their transport priorities dictated by Westminster'. He says that the Portishead route appeared to have been one such beneficiary, with the West of England mayoralty stepping in to provide financial backing for the line alongside the Government and local councils. The Northumberland route also fell within the remit of the North East metro mayor. Since the Ivanhoe Line straddles Staffordshire, Derbyshire (part of the East Midlands mayoralty), Leicestershire and the City of Leicester, it lacks a single cheerleader. McClay said: 'We are spread thinly across those authorities and we are not top of the agenda for any one of them. The great joy of the Restoring Your Railways scheme was that it treated all applications equally and did not require a local authority to sponsor them. 'Really, we've been disenfranchised. We're going to keep the home fires burning and we're not going to give up, but we have to be realistic.' Smith said she suspects that rail reopenings have slipped down the government agenda in part because they tend to provide links to market towns, when Labour is intent on directing spending at largely urban areas where its core supporters are concentrated. 'It depends how cynical you are,' she says. 'I think that might play a part. It feels like if it's not in the big city, they're not interested.' The DfT said that while £10bn is being spent on rail improvements across England and Wales overall, including three stations proposed under the Restoring Your Railway scheme, it has not been possible to fund every reopening scheme. A spokesman said: 'We have had to take difficult decisions given the difficult financial situation, but we continue to keep future funding under review.'
The Independent
26-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
LNER is ‘blueprint' for train nationalisation, minister says
LNER is the 'blueprint' for renationalising all train services in Britain, the rail minister said. Lord Hendy praised the operator for putting 'passengers first' and described it as a 'trailblazer for innovation'. LNER, which was brought into public ownership in 2018, is the country's fastest-growing long-distance operator. It carried 23.7 million passengers in the year to the end of March. That is the second year in a row it has set a new record for annual journeys on the East Coast Main Line, which connects London's King's Cross station with Aberdeen via cities such as Peterborough, Leeds, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh. In December the operator will run an additional 37 daily weekday services, as it increases its hourly frequencies between King's Cross and Newcastle from two to three. It will also enhance its weekend services. In 2023, LNER became the first operator to trial the 70-min Flex ticket, which provides passengers with some flexibility and is aimed at easing the fares system. The operator was also included in a partnership which fitted antennas inside two tunnels to boost mobile connectivity as trains approach and leave King's Cross. Lord Hendy said: 'LNER is making more journeys than ever under public ownership and has become a trailblazer for innovation across our railways from trialling simpler tickets to using antennas to boost wi-fi. 'They've proven time and again that public ownership can deliver cutting-edge services that put passengers first, and this is a blueprint that we'll be following as we overhaul the rail network and set up Great British Railways (GBR).' GBR is an upcoming public sector body that will oversee Britain's rail infrastructure and train operation. LNER managing director David Horne said public ownership has 'given us the platform to innovate, grow and focus on delivering for the people and places we serve'. He went on: 'We've shown that a publicly owned railway can lead the industry – from digital ticketing and greener trains to inclusive travel and simpler fares.' South Western Railway became the first operator to be renationalised under the Labour Government on May 25. The next will be c2c – which runs between London and Essex – on July 20, with Greater Anglia following on October 12.
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Great British Railways: renationalisation can put passengers back in the driving seat
Government guidance documents rarely feature soaring prose to fire the imagination. But a recent Department for Transport policy update contained one passage to lift the spirits of train users up and down the country. Setting out the future of Great British Railways (GBR), the public body that will oversee a renationalised and reintegrated rail network, its authors observe that 'instead of having to navigate 14 separate train operators, passengers will once again simply be able to use 'the railway''. Last month, this journey back to the future began as the first renationalised South Western Railway (SWR) service departed Woking for London Waterloo, complete with union jack branding and the logo 'Great British Railways: coming soon'. The remaining nine private franchises will be back in public ownership by 2027, by which time a new GBR headquarters will be up and running in Derby. The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, hailed the moment as a new dawn. There can be little doubt that a reset is badly needed. Fragmentation, in the name of competition, was the original sin of the destructive and ideological privatisation of the rail network in the 1990s. The wrongheaded decision to separate the management of track and trains led to confused accountability and buck-passing between train operators and Network Rail. Accompanying marketisation, and the restless search for profit, inaugurated an era in which a baffling profusion of ticket types did little to mitigate the cost of travelling on the most expensive trains in Europe. Poor performance by franchises such as Avanti West Coast and TransPennine Express (taken back into public ownership in 2023) undermined public confidence in an industry crucial to Britain's green transition. A period of disastrous industrial relations, and reduced passenger numbers since the pandemic, have compounded a sense of crisis. It would be foolish to hope for an instant turnaround. The future shape and finances of rail travel are still unclear, following the post-Covid collapse in lucrative commuter and business travel. But having been constituted explicitly as a publicly run 'guiding mind' for the whole network, carrying responsibility for both track and trains, GBR will have the power to rationalise its operations and place the interests of passengers first. A simpler, more joined-up ticketing system should be a priority. Somewhat bathetically, the optics of last month's SWR launch were compromised by Sunday engineering works and the need for a rail replacement bus from Surbiton to London Waterloo. Some things never change. But though free-market dogmatists will have relished that hitch to proceedings, a large majority of the population strongly welcome the prospective return of a vital public good to public hands. Much of their support, however, is undoubtedly linked to a hope that GBR will do something to address the often prohibitive cost of travelling by rail in Britain. On the subject of cheaper tickets, Ms Alexander has been noticeably reticent, pointing to current subsidies of £2bn a year. Labour should think bigger. In the 1960s, Ms Alexander's predecessor in the Department for Transport, Barbara Castle, pioneered the idea of a subsidised 'social railway' in the wake of the deeply unpopular Beeching cuts. After a disruptive and demoralising period, a similar level of imagination is needed today for an industry that delivers crucial economic, environmental and societal benefits.
Telegraph
27-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Do we really think that Heidi Alexander can run Britain's railways?
What excitement. I travelled into central London today on a state-run train. It was just like old times. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s the government owned and operated virtually everything, not just the railways which were nationalised in 1948. The telephones (BT), our power (CEGB), coal (NCB), steel, shipbuilding, water (various water boards), the buses, even flying (BA). Until 1972 you could go on a state-organised holiday with Thomas Cook. Almost 30 years after the trains were privatised they are being returned to state ownership starting with South Western Railways (SWR). This process is being done in a piecemeal way: when a private operator's franchise expires it is nationalised and will become part of Great British Railways (GBR). SWR happened to be the first in line, not because it is especially bad. Indeed, my own experience is that it has been pretty good other than when the unions went on strike or the already renationalised Network Rail had messed up, which was hardly the fault of FirstGroup which ran the trains until Sunday. Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, took the first People's Train out of Waterloo and declared it to be a 'new dawn' when most of us old enough to remember British Rail see it as a step into the past. Of course nothing had changed. Indeed, the very first renationalised SWR service involved a rail replacement bus: the 05.36 from Woking to Waterloo had to terminate at Surbiton because of Bank Holiday weekend engineering works. The trains bear the same livery and have the same staff. They will eventually be rebranded with a GBR logo though not for a few years. Ms Alexander said there would be a 'cultural reset' for the railway whatever that means. One thing we do know is that the Government will be responsible for ensuring investment in new rolling stock, fare policy and ensuring the trains run on time. The reason BR was privatised was because by the mid-1990s none of these could any longer be guaranteed when the Treasury had competing demands on revenues, not least from a rapidly expanding welfare state. This is even more the case today, so where will the money come from? The politics are problematic as well. Ms Alexander says the re-nationalisation means 'moving away from 30 years of inefficiency, delayed services and failing passengers, and moving confidently into a new really is a watershed moment.' We shall see about that. When the carriages start to look run-down, the fares go up and trains are late because the drivers are on strike for ever bigger pay rises from a Labour Party they have helped to bankroll there will be only one body to blame: the Government. She added: 'Of course, change isn't going to happen overnight. We've always been clear that public ownership isn't a silver bullet.' Indeed, not. In fact it is invariably a dead hand because nationalised industries have none of the market pressures faced by commercial operators. But it must be conceded that the railways – and to an even greater extent the water industry which became a massive rip-off of taxpayers – do raise legitimate questions about the efficacy of privatisation. It is worth remembering how radical this was at the time. In a speech to the Tory Reform Group in 1985, the former prime minister Harold Macmillan, then 91 and with just a year to live, pronounced a characteristically patrician verdict upon the privatisation programme of the Thatcher government. It was, he said, like selling off 'the Georgian silver'. His speech was widely ridiculed: here was an essentially Edwardian figure unfashionably wedded to the notion that the state could run industry and public utilities better than private companies. Yet 40 years on there is a resurgence of Macmillanesque hankering after a sepia-tinted world when the trains were run from Whitehall, electricity was provided by the Soviet-sounding Central Electricity Generating Board and water board chiefs were appointed by civil servants. But it cannot be denied that the sale of the public utilities did not create the benign market conditions – or the mass share ownership – that had been envisaged. Privatising 'public good' industries upon which everyone relies and which are natural monopolies was always fraught with difficulty. Since the scope for competition was limited, regulators were needed to protect the interests of consumers and they have not done their jobs properly. It was also hoped that moving these businesses into private hands would ease the pressure on the taxpayer; yet the subsidy to the railways is greater now than at the time of privatisation. On top of that, the UK state relinquished control of utilities only for foreign government-controlled companies like EDF to move in and take over. But even though privatisation was not as propitious as had been hoped, that is not an argument for their return to state ownership, as the unions propose and many people unhappy with their performance would like to see. This is not an ideological point but a pragmatic one: the old system was inefficient, costly and beset by institutionalised inertia. Since privatisation, there has been investment that would simply not have happened had the utilities remained in state hands – especially after the financial crash of 2008 when the biggest spending cuts were in capital projects. The failure of privatised utilities to perform well does not mean they will do better in state hands. In fact, history suggests otherwise. Nonetheless, the benefits still need to spread beyond the boardrooms of a few multi-national cartels. If privatisation of industry and utilities was the challenge 40 years ago, today it is the desocialisation of public services like health and education, with a move towards a social insurance scheme in the former and vouchers in the latter to provide greater choice. No political party is proposing such a radical approach and are just harking back to a world that has long gone. If the answer to the failings of privatisation is re-nationalisation, then the wrong questions are being asked. After all, Macmillan's error was to imagine that the family had any silver left when, in reality, it had already been pawned several times over.
