From
Conservative HomeBy George Bathhurst George Bathurst is a former Conservative Councillor and Lead Member at Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. As well as promoting better transport solutions he works in IT infrastructure and cyber security.
"A Conservative government has renationalised the railways, having suspended all the commercial franchises as the Coronavirus lockdown began.
"On the face of it, this is a big setback for ConservativeHome readers who believe in the value of free enterprise. The Daily Telegraph thinks that there is no way back. There is, however, a better version of the future available to us.
I am personally in agreement that current changes will help us towards a better railway setup, but can we please leave the options on the table and not assume that there because some elements of the current system have failed, the answer must be changes along the line suggested by Mr Bathhurst. The current less than ideal situation if, of course, the fault of our of fashion politicians from the last millenium, further messed up by a Labour government:
First of all, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the partial ‘privatisation’ of the railways in 1997 was botched, rushed through by a badly discredited John Major at the very end of his term. The reform was undermined from the outset by Tony Blair, who seized on the Hatfield crash to semi-renationalise the tracks. This further bodged a complex and opaque system that might have been designed to give privatisation a bad name.
There is a common frustration with just how long it takes to get rail improvements, and Mr B knows about that
After ten years of promoting one, I have personal experience of how the system works to stop rail improvements.
[snip] - Seven paragraphs on the Windsor Link proposals
He goes on to explain why the system is currently as it is
You can understand why the system exists: it protects both civil servants and ministers from blame, because nobody is responsible. But this is also the reason why I, as a private rail promoter, am pleased that Grant Shapps has effectively nationalised the railways.
Ah ... I wondered why it was so complex
There are two things that can happen now. The worse is that the crazy system continues, just wholly inside the government. The political issue with this is that there is now nobody else to blame. The the inability of the existing, over-centralised system to deliver for today’s passengers, let alone expansions to the network, will soon overwhelm the current Secretary of State just as they did his predecessor.
The better outcome is that nationalisation serves as a temporary step, not just for the Coronavirus crisis and not just before reverting to the status quo ante, but as a clean slate for a far more fundamental change to the way we build transport infrastructure. This is the opportunity for local government, communities, and the private sector to step up.
Mr Burke goes on to suggest that 'judge' and 'jury' are too closely linked and tells us to solve that ...
We need, therefore, to separate out the functions of the designing and building railways from approving them. The DfT» needs to have a role more analogous to the Planning Inspectorate for buildings. That is, it is responsible for approving new transport infrastructure, but not for proposing or delivering them, let alone operations.
In retrospect, I was over-optimistic that the Government had begun to recognise this two years ago when I was partly responsible for the ‘Market-Led Proposals’ initiative. It was being inundated with rail ideas and needed a consistent way to deal with them. It turned out to be a trap, and all 35 of us that submitted formal proposals had our time and money wasted, being turned down for one reason or another.
The stumbling block was that the Government was fixated on perfect competition. It wanted, as one official explained to me, to compare apples with apples. I responded that comparing apples with oranges is what we all do every time we go to the supermarket and we do it just fine.
We need a similar ‘competition of ideas’ for the railways: where you don’t need to be an existing incumbent to propose an improvement; where individuals are treated equally regardless of background; and their ideas are considered on the same basis as officials’ own ideas. Crucial to making this work is putting responsibility for delivering the promised improvements onto the same people who propose them.
I find myself far from convinced that we would end up with a network - rather we could be back to the very early days of railways where construction of local lines was by the local businessmen, who then discover that it wasn't as profitable / easy as they had hoped and contracted operation of their line to a mainline company, then were bought out by that company. I do find myself agreeing with the looking at ideas, but I'm unconvinced that "individuals regardless of background" can have the same overview of the picture of what can be done and would work as those who have been in the industry for many years. Far better, in my view, to combine the ideas as skills to add together the elements to produce a bigger and better whole to take us forward. And, yes, that may mean that ideas such as the Windsor Link don't make it, or don't make it in the form that the borough leader wants for people within the borough. Better, maybe, to link north - south via Heathrow?
