CarlisleCityRMT

Why the Environment Needs a Publicly Owned Railway

We can only encourage transport users to move onto our railways from higher polluting modes, such as the car and plane, if we increase the capacity of railways and make them more affordable. This will be difficult to achieve if we continue with the costly and inefficiant privatised railway.

Last year more journeys were made by train than in anytime since World War 2. Then the network was made up of over 30,000 route kilometres: double what it is today. The rail workforce is also considerably smaller than it was in the 1940's.

The steep rise in passenger numbers is largely due to the decade long strength of the economy and not the result of the success of rail privatisation. In fact, by a whole series of indicators rail privatisation has been a failure.

The most recent Government statistics published in Transport Trends, reveal rail investment costs three times more than under British Rail, while punctuality and reliability remain below pre-privatisation levels.

In addition, the last independant report into public ownership by the Catalyst think-tank in 2005 found, "The private firms that now make up the railway industry are currently receiving public subsidy three times larger than that received by British Rail". The paper goes on to say "At the same time the fragmentation of the industry has meant that infrastructure costs contine to escalate, estimated now to be running at three to five times their level prior to privatisation, with much of the increase having taken place since 2000".

Catalyst also found that around £800million a year - £15million per week - is taken out of the UK rail industry as returns to private lenders and investors. This represents a total "leakage" of £6 billion since 1996. Only last week the First Group reported annual rail profits of £120million, dividend payments of £69.5 million and "low" UK cash tax payments.

Costs and delays have been brought down by the decision of Network Rail to take maintenance back in - house. The continued chaotic and wasteful structure of privatisation was demonstrated by the rail distruption over the Xmas holiday period caused by the overrun of "Renewals" work undertaken by private companies, contracted to work for Network Rail.

With work still fragmented between maintenance and renewals and a very long contractor and sub-contractor chain, Network Rail simply cannot build the stable platform required to deliver long-term, sustained improvements without full operational re-integration.

The failure of privatisation has also been demonstrated by the failure of the London Underground Public Private Partnership (PPP). Following consistant poor performance, Metronet, which was responsible for the upkeep of two thirds of the tube, went into administration leaving the tax and fare payer with a bill of £2 billion.

Against this background it is also astonishing that there are now proposals which could see the privatisation of the Tyne & Wear Metro.