Transport
Nationalised rail – but don’t mention the banks
It is not often I link to the Morning Star – which is now a journalist’s co-operative rather than a USSR tool! They are spot on about the alleged rail nationalisation from Labour – it completely leaves out the rail leasing companies – operated by banks, usually using ‘tax efficient’ offshore operations… They state: It’s... Read more
Costs of Curtailed HS2 Rail Link Still ‘Running Out of Control’
The last remaining section of HS2 – the high-speed rail link from London Old Oak Common to Birmingham – is very poor value for money and the Government appears to have skewed the cost to justify it being completed, MPs say in a critical report today.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee is highly critical of the benefits of high-speed rail after Rishi Sunak cancelled the extensions to Crewe and Manchester and East Midlands airports on the last day of the Tory conference in October.
The report highlights the accelerating costs of providing the last remaining link, the failure so far to find private money to extend the line to London Euston, and the prospect of slower trains to Manchester than the current tilting trains when the new high speed rolling stock has to use the West Coast mainline.
MPs tried to examine how Dame Bernadette Kelly, the permanent secretary and accounting officer at the Department for Transport could justify continuing with the project and are not satisfied with the Government’s explanation.
To justify continuing the project, when ministers knew it was poor value for the taxpayer as a stand-alone line, she wrote off the £23 billion at 2019 prices already spent on the project and included the saving of £11 billion it would cost to compensate contractors and restore the land if it was scrapped as a benefit to continue building the line.
But the report points out that costs are still running out of control with the final bill to complete the line going up to £67 billion at 2023 prices because of the huge hike in inflation that followed the Liz Truss government.
The report says to save money on the now scrapped extension HS2 will have to build a new connecting link to join the West Coast Line near Litchfield. The place chosen is Handsacre junction which is already described as “a choke point” for freight and passenger trains, suggesting the new HS2 service to Manchester could be held up there.
MPs also tested Rishi Sunak’s announcement promising private finance to build the Old Oak Common link to Euston and replacing the money saved by scrapping on new rail projects in Network North.
They found – five months later – that nothing had been done yet to secure any private finance and the Treasury was still looking at whether higher property values in London could justify asking for private finance. And there is no definitive list of new rail projects and some of the ideas – like the electrification of the line from Chester into North Wales didn’t even have a business case yet.
There is also a warning that if work on the link from Old Oak Common is halted it will cost much more money to restart the project.
Labour's Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair of the committee, said: “The decision to cancel HS2’s Northern leg was a watershed moment that raises urgent and unanswered questions, laid out in our report. What happens now to the Phase 2 land, some of which has been compulsorily purchased? Can we seriously be actively working towards a situation where our high-speed trains are forced to run slower than existing ones when they hit older track? Most importantly, how can the Government now ensure that HS2 deliver the best possible value for the taxpayer?
“Here we are after over a decade of our warnings on HS2’s management and spiralling costs – locked into the costly completion of a curtailed rump of a project and many unanswered questions and risks still attached to delivery of even this curtailed project.”
A DfT spokesperson to Byline Times: “We disagree with the Committee’s assessment. Their estimated cost figure for Phase One also does not reflect our decision to secure private funding for Euston, or the direction not to proceed beyond the Midlands.
“Our plans for Euston have already received extensive support from the private sector to invest and will offer a world-class regeneration opportunity, mirroring the successful Kings Cross and Battersea and Nine Elms development programmes.
“The Permanent Secretary has already written to the Committee chair setting out her assessment on value for money, and we have repeatedly made clear we will continue to deliver HS2 at the lowest reasonable cost, in a way that provides value for taxpayers."
Stranded
Privatisation and austerity don’t cut costs: they just pass them on to us.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th January 2024
The weather was worse than forecast. By the time I reached Bristol, at 5pm, all trains to the south-west had been cancelled, because of rising flood waters. It was no one’s fault – just one of life’s vicissitudes. What happened next was a different matter. I believe I’m still suffering the effects of it: I think privatisation has made me sick. In various ways, it has sickened the whole country.
Hundreds of people travelling to Somerset, Devon and Cornwall were ejected from my train at Bristol Temple Meads. In the information office, we were sorted into groups of four. Each group was issued with a code written in ballpoint on a slip of paper. This, we were told, could be handed to a taxi driver outside the station, who would take us to a station near home. It seemed an extravagant way for the company, GWR, to discharge its legal duty to provide either alternative transport or accommodation.
Outside, my group of four joined a queue that soon swelled, I reckoned, to more than 1,000. Most of us had no shelter. We stood in the rain, waiting – and waiting. At any one time, there were about 20 taxis on the forecourt, but scarcely any picked up people in the queue. On average, one group of four was finding a ride roughly every 10 minutes. At that rate, it would take two days and two nights to clear the existing queue, let alone deal with the new trainloads arriving. I began to feel pretty rough: I must have been starting a cold.
Few of us wore the kind of clothes required to resist a steady downpour. In the queue were elderly people, young children and babies – I was by no means the most vulnerable. Even so, the longer I stood, the worse I felt. I managed to speak to one of the hard-pressed station attendants trying to negotiate with the taxi drivers. Why were they using taxis, not replacement buses? “We tried the coach companies, but no one’s answering the phone.” Had this happened before? “Oh yes, it happens a lot.” Why weren’t the taxis taking people? “Most of them don’t want to do the distance. They’re getting to the end of their shifts, or they’re working part-time, or because of the conditions on the roads.” So how were we going to get home? “We’re doing our best.”
None of this was the fault of the workers, who were trying to achieve the impossible. But anyone could see that the numbers didn’t add up. Even if every taxi arriving at the rank had been available, there wasn’t enough capacity. Surely GWR wouldn’t just leave us there? After an hour and a half, during which our group moved forward only five metres and no alternatives were offered or announcements made, I realised I was going nowhere. I phoned a friend in Bristol, who kindly agreed to put me up for the night. By the time I reached his house, soaked to the skin, my cold had developed into a rattling fever.
The following morning, the trains were running again. Masked and drugged (though testing negative for Covid), I shivered through the journey. One of the passengers asked the ticket inspector whether she could reclaim the cost of her accommodation from GWR. He said he didn’t know. This triggered a lively discussion: most of those near me turned out to have been stranded the night before.
Some had waited till almost midnight, sometimes for six or seven hours, in one case coming dangerously close to hypothermia, before giving up and trying to find somewhere to sleep. At no point, they told me, did anyone inform them they were unlikely to get a ride, or offer an alternative to waiting for a nonexistent taxi. If someone with a health condition had died as a result of exposure, it wouldn’t have surprised me. Perhaps some people subsequently did.
And then it struck me: by issuing those taxi chits, the train company, GWR, had discharged its duty to provide us, as the rules insist, “with alternative means of travel to your destination”. Both government regulations and GWR’s pledges are clear: either they must get you home or they must provide you with accommodation. The Rail Delivery Group, which represents all the train companies, promises “if the last train of the day is cancelled, we won’t leave you stranded”. Technically, GWR did not leave us stranded: it gave us a scrap of torn notepaper that would have procured a taxi, had taxis been available. What seemed like extravagance when the chits were handed out now looks to me like a highly effective means of reducing liabilities.
When I described my experience on social media, people replied that similar things had happened to them, at the hands of different train companies. When I asked GWR how it justified its response, it told me: “No one was left stranded at Bristol Temple Meads overnight, and we were proactive in trying to help people complete their journeys in difficult circumstances … we are not aware of anyone who required overnight accommodation, or was not able to get a taxi.”
My cold turned into an upper respiratory tract infection, from which I haven’t fully recovered, five weeks later. I’ve had to cancel quite a lot of work. I can’t prove that it was caused by standing in the rain for so long on 4 December. But it can’t have helped. As usual with privatisation and austerity, costs have not been cut, just transferred from one place to another. They are always transferred in the same direction: from corporations or the state to individuals.
Similar things happen throughout our depleted public sector, whether it’s run by private companies or the tattered remains of the state. By letting flood defences crumble, the government’s balance sheet looks better, but much greater costs are passed to households and their insurers. By triggering, through austerity, a crisis in special educational needs provision, the Tories dump untold misery on families, in some cases forcing parents to give up their jobs to care for their children. By allowing the water companies to cut corners, the government ensures that swimmers and surfers are poisoned and tourism and hospitality businesses go under.
There are no savings from austerity and privatisation, just a wholesale shifting of costs. The rich pay less tax and the public service companies in which they own shares make greater profits. The rest of us pick up the bill.
Tesla wins – or not
This is an interesting Forbes article showing that Tesla has the highest accident rate in the USA. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20... Read more
RMT rep: the train operating company offer is a con members should vote to reject it
Effective pay cuts and continued downgrading and job losses – rail union insider reveals grim reality of offer being put to a vote among RMT members
Written by an RMT official and published on condition of anonymity.
Rail workers should vote down the pay offer.
Why should we vote No? The reasons are clear. A 5% pay rise for the year 22/23 is a pay cut in real terms; we had no pay settlement in 2021-22 at all. Rail workers were sent out during Covid, with little protection, to keep the country running. Some of us died. We barely received so much as a ‘Thank You’, let alone any financial remuneration for the risks we ran, or the effort we put in to keep the nation moving.
For the last year UK inflation has been at 10%+ for seven months out of twelve. This offer is derisory and should have been rejected out of hand. A settlement of at least 15% is needed just to keep members where they were in 2021.
A worse offer than was already on the table
The RDG [Rail Delivery Group of train operators], directed by the government for political expediency, have been forced to remove their destructive Workplace Reform proposals from the table. Their previous offer of 5% up front and 4% to negotiate those proposals has been fulfilled by the union side, yet this offer is even worse than that. Indeed it is significantly less than other public sector workers who have received settlements of up to 7% this year – but also had raises in 2021 and 2022 which we have been denied.
Despite the resounding rejection of government proposals by Travelwatch and Transport Focus, Workplace Reform remains on the table. The ‘no compulsory redundancy’ guarantees to December 2024 are so short as to be less of a promise and more of a threat.
The intention clearly is to return to cutting 30% of Station grades staff, one way or another. This cannot be acceptable to us. The opportunity to close ticket offices entirely may have gone, but they will be hollowed out and the reduction in quality of service that they provide will then be used as a reason for closure at some point in the future. Other station grades will be de-skilled and only some individuals selected for multiskilling – and their numbers worse than decimated too. Members’ Terms & Conditions and their pensions and benefits are under attack from this process.
Too much haste; dangerous proposals
The timescale is unduly hasty, too: TOCs’ [train operating companies] plans given to the unions in July would have shamed a plan sketched on the back of a fag packet after closing time and would have seen an increase in single staffing in all stations, to a critical level detrimental to the service and the safe operation of the railway.
If members vote yes then they are voting for 2023/ 24 pay to be based on the Workplace Reform proposals that the employers want. This will result in significant job losses of 30% across all station grades. Although none of it has been agreed the principle will be considered agreed by the votes in favour of the offer. Detail will be added later, guaranteed to be a disaster for members.
The 2023/24 pay offer will not be made unless Grades Councils agree to the employers’ demands. A big question members should ask themselves before they vote is, who in the RMT is negotiating for you with your TOC? This will be at Council level, not National. What skills and proven results do they have?
Any TOC going into dispute over 2023 /2024 pay will be on their own. This division is not in our favour. Acceptance will mean the National dispute is over, regardless of the mandate delivered by members in the recent re-ballot. The promise of back pay has been used to distract members from the negatives; a few pounds in the hand before Christmas used to blindside members.
The RDG offer will end the current dispute if we accept it. Rail workers currently have an extremely strong negotiating position. We are six weeks from Christmas and have a six-month mandate for industrial action. Returning an emphatic ‘No’ vote would strengthen this position as we would be able to return to the RDG and demand a significant improvement to the offer on the table.
If you’ve already voted to accept, you can change your vote
Members can change their vote even if they have already voted, right up until the closing date, by following the link in the original email they were sent.
Please lobby all your members.
Vote NO.
Skwawkbox understands that the deal being put to a member vote by the RMT would still involve major redundancies among ticket office staff – but that rail reps have been pleasantly surprised by the negative reaction to the offer among grassroots members.
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Rail Union Condemns ‘30 Years of Waste’ as England Marks Three Decades of Privatisation
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The RMT rail union has marked the 30th anniversary of the 1993 Railways Act that privatised Britain’s railway with new analysis revealing that the “three-decade debacle” has seen at least £31 billion leak out of the system.
Passengers are now paying eight per cent more in real terms to travel on a deteriorating system, the union says.
Tens of billions of pounds have been “syphoned out of the industry” by the private sector and into the pockets of the shareholders, according to the RMT dossier.
The railways remained nationalised in Northern Ireland and rail was re-nationalised in Wales in February 2021 and Scotland followed a year after in April 2022.
The RMT union has called for an end to the “disastrous experiment” since John Major began the process of privatisation through the Railways Act 1993. Unions have long called and for the creation of a single, integrated and publicly-owned railway company which they say would save around £1.5 billion every year and cut fares by 18 per cent, helping to encourage more people back onto Britain’s railways.
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An official government review, the Williams-Shapps report, in 2021 estimated that the costs of duplication and interface friction in the fragmented system might be worth £1.5 billion a year. Ministers say they are committed to unifying the railways through a ‘single guiding mind’ of a new quango called Great British Rail. However, the plans appear to have stalled and the system would maintain a complex network of outsourced firms.
Office for Rail Regulation figures show how much rail fares have risen in real terms since the network was privatised.
The train tracks, signalling and many of train stations themselves are currently managed by government-owned Network Rail, but it is saddled with huge amounts of debt, some of which stems from the collapse of private operator Railtrack in 2002.
The rail system currently faces allegations of a “worst of all worlds'' situation, with a highly fragmented system but with the Department for Transport directly appointing operators to run regional monopolies. The previous franchising system was scrapped in September 2020 amid a collapse in passenger numbers, with the DfT guaranteeing the rail firms’ income.
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said that the briefing shows that while Britain’s 30-year experiment with rail privatisation had been “great for the City boardrooms” it had been an expensive debacle for passengers.
“Under privatisation the rail system has become a cash cow for the cloud of parasitic private interests that swarm around it, but passengers have got an increasingly expensive fractured railway with 55 million different fares, plagued by service cuts and cancellations and run by people fixated with cutting staff costs.
“Indeed, the government's wildly unpopular and unworkable ticket office closure plan was driven by a system that sought to protect profits at the expense of passengers,” Lynch said.
He added: “The U-turn on ticket office closures and the 30-anniversary of the debacle of railway privatisation should be a turning point that leads to the establishment of a nationally integrated publicly owned rail network run as a public service, a move that would be massively popular with passengers and communities,” he said.
Throughout privatisation, the annual outflow of funds would have enabled, on average, a cut of 14% in fares. If the railways were nationalised now and the flow of funds into the private sector was cut off, the money saved could fund a cut of 18% in fares, the union says.
For the travelling public, the cost of rail is now almost 8% higher in real terms than it was in 1995, before privatisation was completed. This figure has dropped in the last two years only as inflation has risen. Until the cost-of-living crisis, when fare increases were decoupled from RPI inflation, fares were consistently 15-20% higher in real terms than before privatisation, according to official figures.
It was meant to be a disaster, but the doomsayers appear to be in retreat.
Josiah Mortimer
But passengers have seen little of this money reinvested in the railway. Instead, "it flowed out of rail into the pockets of the shareholders of the host of companies that feed off what should be a vital public service," a spokesperson for the union argued.
For passengers, the fragmented system has meant rising costs, timetable chaos, 55 million different fares, cancellations, service reductions, attempts to cut staff from trains and stations and, most recently, the "wildly unpopular" attempt to close all Britain’s ticket offices, RMT says.
The new TSSA rail union General Secretary, Maryam Eslamdoust, added: “Privatisation has been an expensive failure for taxpayers and passengers alike. The privatized system simply doesn’t work...
"It’s time for the Tories to accept that privatisation hasn’t worked and bring all Britain’s railways back into public ownership. Taxpayers and passengers deserve nothing less."
Opinion polls consistently show public support for nationalisation of railways. The latest Yougov tracker shows 64% in favour of public ownership and just 11% opposed.
Byline Times have readers reacted to the privatisation anniversary by mocking the state of the railways. One said: “I love the fact my train journey at weekends is mostly on a bus!”
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Michael Spring wrote on Threads: “When I left Hartlepool for Kent (300 miles) in 1984 I frequently went back for visits by train. It was quick, reliable, pleasant and affordable. I went this week and it was a total nightmare – slow, unreliable, stressful and eye-wateringly expensive.”
Another reader added they’d celebrate by trying to buy a ticket. Except “the ticket offices are closed at Blackfriars.”
“It’s mostly unaffordable (and unreliable) to travel by train - unless you book way in advance and Taurus is ascending in the east. It’s tragic,” one wrote.
And on X a Byline Times reader said they’d celebrate with “a commemorative toasted bacon sandwich…with a couple of those little plastic sachets of ketchup you rip open with your teeth, half a cup of tea & an entirely inadequate potlet of UHT milk.”
Another said if they’d known the anniversary was coming up “I would have booked an advance purchase trip 11 weeks ago.”
Others were understandably embittered: “[I’m celebrating early by standing all the way from London to Plymouth!” Another replied: “[It’s a] replacement bus service for me. I'm welling up.”
The first private train in February 1996 was actually a replacement bus service, according to a report in the Independent.
The Government was recently forced to cancel plans to close nearly all ticket offices following public anger over the moves to save cash.
You can read the RMT briefing here. Industry lobby group Rail Partners was contacted for comment.
Do you have a story that needs highlighting? Get in touch by emailing josiah@bylinetimes.com