The Financial Times, that most fervently socialist of newspapers, reports that the East Coast franchise – the only one of the British rail franchises owned by the state – is outdoing the private sector. Mark Odell reports:
The state-run East Coast mainline has emerged as the most efficiently run rail franchise in terms of its reliance on taxpayer funding, raising questions about a recent government decision to privatise the operation.
The ORR found that among the rail franchises that make net payments to the Treasury, the East Coast mainline, which has been run by the state since November 2009, is reliant on just 1 per cent of government funding once cost of infrastructure is taken into account.
The reliance on state funding of the other nine franchises that make net payments to the government ranges from 3 per cent to 36 per cent.
The news comes shortly after the government announced plans to refranchise East Coast to the private sector. Odell reports that those plans were “designed to draw a line under the months of chaos in the UK rail industry triggered by the West Coast fiasco”, but they were widely seen as a spoiler for Labour’s plans for the railway system, which would have kept the franchise in public hands.
As Railnews writes, “a new East Coast franchise, once let, would be difficult and expensive to reverse until it had run its natural term, which could be ten years or more.” That’s quite a long time to bind the country into a style of management which seems to be sub-par.
Maria Eagle, Labour’s shadow transport secretary, used the report to double-down on that position:
Considering the East Coast service makes one of the highest annual payments to government, receives the least subsidy and is the only route on which all profits are reinvested in services, it makes no sense for the government to prioritise this privatisation over getting the rest of the industry back on track.
Of course, even “privatising” East Coast might not be quite what it sounds like. As Christian Wolmar wrote in 2011:
In a way, it’s funny. The Brpitish railway system is slowly being renationalised, but not by our own government. Rather, it is being taken over by foreign state-owned railways that now have an interest in almost half the franchises, and in one of the three open access operators as well.
That’s as true now as it has ever been. Not one of the three companies bidding to run the privatised parts of Crossrail – operations will still be run by the nationalised Transport for London – is privately held. Instead, the largest transport project in decades will be run by a partnership of a British state-owned firm and either the French, Dutch or German national operator.
The free market: it’s a funny place, sometimes.
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