Get Britain Moving - Labour's plans to fix Britain's Railways

[whole diary]

[eightonedee]

Monies being diverted from the pockets of the Directors of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) into the pockets of civil servants

I hope you didn't mean that TG. The shareholders of First Group will be the ones primarily benefitting from any profits from the current system (but also taking any losses - see GWR's 2020/2021 accounts), and the beneficiary of any saving will ultimately be the Treasury.

It should simply be reducing the net cost of subsidising our railway system. But as has already been aired, the proportion of costs that is actually saved is not likely to be that material. If I ruled the world it would go towards electrifying Didcot to Oxford, but it may not even reach Appleford.

[TaplowGreen]

Monies being diverted from the pockets of the Directors of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) into the pockets of civil servants

I hope you didn't mean that TG. The shareholders of First Group will be the ones primarily benefitting from any profits from the current system (but also taking any losses - see GWR's 2020/2021 accounts), and the beneficiary of any saving will ultimately be the Treasury.

It should simply be reducing the net cost of subsidising our railway system. But as has already been aired, the proportion of costs that is actually saved is not likely to be that material. If I ruled the world it would go towards electrifying Didcot to Oxford, but it may not even reach Appleford.

I was addressing Chris B's comment earlier in the thread "Mostly, it is the saving of public money going into Directors bonuses. simples".

[ChrisB]

It's still wrong though, isn't it? Not one civil servant will make any additional monies from this nationalisation

[TaplowGreen]

It's still wrong though, isn't it? Not one civil servant will make any additional monies from this nationalisation

(Sighs deeply).........OK......to be clear......I didn't mean that Civil Servants will be personally enriched, my meaning was that rather than Company Directors being paid, the money will be going to Civil Servants who will presumably be staffing the new quango that is GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) which has has already cost the taxpayer North of £50 million......and returning to my original point, I'm unclear as to how that reallocation of resources fundamentally improves the outlook for the customer waiting on the platform......

[ellendune]

(Sighs deeply).........OK......to be clear......I didn't mean that Civil Servants will be personally enriched, my meaning was that rather than Company Directors being paid, the money will be going to Civil Servants who will presumably be staffing the new quango that is GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) which has has already cost the taxpayer North of £50 million......and returning to my original point, I'm unclear as to how that reallocation of resources fundamentally improves the outlook for the customer waiting on the platform......

Are you suggesting that there would be more civil servants than current staffing? Surely strip out the complex contracts and you need less staff.

[Electric train]

Everyone is jumping to conclusions of what the structure of GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) will be, we should wait for the 2 White Papers which will state what the Governments structure of the railway will be.

Note there were 2 pieces of railway legislation in the Kings speech, one dealing with train operators and one for everything else.

Personally I think there will be a devolving / handing over of train services to the Metro Mayors where these exist, other services will be run as concessions / contract by the private sector. Network Rail, ORR^» (Office of Rail and Road formerly Office of Rail Regulation - about) and DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) will be changed.

The Labour Government changes to the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) railways will be as much if not more of a fundamental change to the UK railways as the changes made by John Major's Conservative Government privatisation in the 1990's; GBR legislation will not be just a simple "brining in train operation in house"

[grahame]

Everyone is jumping to conclusions ...

[snip]

The Labour Government changes to the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) railways will be as much if not more of a fundamental change to the UK railways as the changes made by John Major's Conservative Government privatisation in the 1990's; GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) legislation will not be just a simple "brining in train operation in house"

I don't know what the final shape will be.  But I do know that the changes thus far open a door to new directions, with limited certainty / view as yet as to the details of what those new directions will be.   A time of great opportunity but also of great risk.

[TaplowGreen]

(Sighs deeply).........OK......to be clear......I didn't mean that Civil Servants will be personally enriched, my meaning was that rather than Company Directors being paid, the money will be going to Civil Servants who will presumably be staffing the new quango that is GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) which has has already cost the taxpayer North of £50 million......and returning to my original point, I'm unclear as to how that reallocation of resources fundamentally improves the outlook for the customer waiting on the platform......

Are you suggesting that there would be more civil servants than current staffing? Surely strip out the complex contracts and you need less staff.

You would hope there would be far less expensive bureaucracy in the circumstances you describe however civil servants tend to expand to fill any gap, and reading Electric trains subsequent comments which, if come to pass, suggest at least as much if not more complexity in the system, I wouldn't be so sure!

Anyway, I remain here to be informed and enlightened as to how all this reorganisation/nationalisation etc is going to directly benefit customers......................perhaps one day my curiosity will be satisfied..........I am sure there must be something worth £50 million?

[Bob_Blakey]

I could be wrong but given recent experience and the current governance situation I suspect the following will turn out to be correct:

In something approaching a properly functioning democracy in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) the railway industry would be run entirely by the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) - or any successor organisation - with ultimate and sole responsibility held by the Secretary of State for Transport, one of our elected representatives, aided & abetted by the Minister of State for Railways (also an elected representative) with these two individuals supported by their civil servants and potentially a small number of junior ministers, the latter of whom would also be elected.

What we will almost certainly get with GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) is another additional, utterly awful, 'arms length agency' (AKA^▸ (also known as) NGO) that will not be subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny. There are plenty of existing examples of this type of arrangement which allows the aforementioned elected representatives to deny responsibility when the NGO 'goes native'. e.g. The College of Policing, who have persisted with the 'non-crime hate incidents' nonsense even after being told by the Home Secretary and the judiciary to stop.

These NGO's also always heap additional costs on the taxpayers.   

[IndustryInsider]

….perhaps one day my curiosity will be satisfied..........I am sure there must be something worth £50 million?

Yes, a few years after the new structure is in place and we can all decide whether it has worked or has been a disaster.

Or course, £50m is a tiny sum in the grand scheme of things anyway.

[TonyK]

You would hope there would be far less expensive bureaucracy in the circumstances you describe however civil servants tend to expand to fill any gap, and reading Electric trains subsequent comments which, if come to pass, suggest at least as much if not more complexity in the system, I wouldn't be so sure!

I've retired now, but I still enjoy watching old re-runs of Yes Minister, which still make me laugh. In the world beyond 50-year-old sitcoms, civil servants do not expand to fill any gap, with the exception of a few individuals. My own former department shrank considerably over the last two decades of my tenure to fit the year on year reductions in budget allocated by the government. As an example, there were once five social security offices and several Jobcentres around Bristol, plus a regional office each for DWP and the Employment Service. The two regional offices are gone, along with 4 of the 5 social security offices, and three of the Jobcentres have been combined with them in a spare bit of space in the city council's offices. Three separate fraud investigation units are now all part of one smaller, but far more effective, service. If it was headed before by a full colonel with three Lt Colonels, each with half a dozen majors over a pyramidical command structure, it is now run by a captain with a couple of lieutenants and some good NCOs. There is no such thing as a salary scale any more, or at least wasn't when I left, something which had perverse effects far different to those intended.  It is an awful lot leaner than a decade ago. Some of this change reflects advances in technology, some changes in benefits, some political dogma, all driven purely by cost. Customer service has not benefited.

In a publicly owned railway, all drivers, TMs^‡(resolve), signalmen, managers etc will be civil servants, all liveried alike. No bonuses will be paid other than those in lieu of actual consolidated pay rises. No dividends will be paid, other than to the treasury in the unlikely event of a profit. The Chancellor will determine what money is available for investment, DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) will determine what results it wants from that investment, and GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) will determine how best to achieve that. Done properly under the right leadership, it could be a wondrous story of renewal, growth and general happiness and peace to all. Before buying an advance return to the Sunlit Uplands, though, remember that it could easily become a cash-starved wreck where not even the threat of regular beatings will improve morale. I have seen both scenarios played out in the public sector in my time, and will watch with keen interest from behind my pension.

[TaplowGreen]

Naturally I defer to your knowledge of your own small area of the Civil Service prior to your retirement however as a whole, Civil service numbers now stand at over half a million, a rise of over 100,000 FTE in the last decade (including rises in the numbers employed by the DWP) . Not something which is indicative of a "lean" institution, given (as you allude to) advances in technology etc.

Notwithstanding this, and moving away from the (albeit interesting) diversions, on to the second paragraph of your piece, perhaps you'd like to have a stab at suggesting the benefits to the customer of the changes you suggest/are proposed by Labour?

[IndustryInsider]

Naturally I defer to your knowledge of your own small area of the Civil Service prior to your retirement however as a whole, Civil service numbers now stand at over half a million, a rise of over 100,000 FTE in the last decade (including rises in the numbers employed by the DWP) . Not something which is indicative of a "lean" institution, given (as you allude to) advances in technology etc.

If you tapped the same search query into Google I did, it’s worth pointing out for context that they’ve only risen back to roughly where they were fifteen years ago after a huge fall following the 2010 spending review.

Part of the blame being attributed to the Brexit farce and the Pandemic.

[TonyK]

Interesting observations from both. Brexit certainly inflated the civil service, with the need to adapt national legislation from European standard to British. I think that supposed to be temporary, but I'm not sure the numbers are falling so quickly, but it was a recruitment of staff for jobs that did not exist before, with no obvious immediate reduction in the existing roles. Other roles have seen the Civil Service take over jobs previously done by other bodies, such as legal, fraud and compliance staff from local authorities, the Post Office and others. This is almost the reverse of the 5% cut in civil servant numbers achieved by Jim Hacker at the Ministry of Administrative Affairs by reclassifying the typists. The number of prisoners in Britain's jails has almost doubled in the past couple of decades, which I assume would need an increase in admin staff, if not probation officers. The pandemic, after a slow start, saw new staff hired to help with the extra mountain of urgent stuff, with some results in my former department entirely in line with my predictions at the time. As II says, that still takes us back only to the levels prior to the 2010 spending review, and not everywhere. Incidentally, in 2010 I was hopeful of being thrown onto an early scrapheap because of the review, but the cuts where I worked were targeted towards other roles, and I had to wait. I was, it seemed, too useful.

There are interesting insights in this from the Institute for Government, revealing that operational departments shrank more quickly after the rebound than policy departments. DWP, MoD, MoJ, HMRC are all down on the 2010 headcount, but the Department for Media, Culture and Sport is 340% up. I didn't know that until just now, and have absolutely no idea why. The Cabinet Office has fared well, but we are told there are too few immigration office staff to process applications from recent arrivals, and cuts to HMRC would seem counter-intuitive when money is short. There will, I am sure, be adjustments over the next year or two.

What GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) will do to the sums remains to be seen. If it can be set up as a stand-alone arms length sort of this, one would imagine that the staff will not be civil servants. It isn't that simple though, as staff will presumably be TUPE^▸ (The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006.)'d in from DfT^» (Department for Transport - about), Network Rail and wherever else, and the previous Labour administration found that any mixing of departments causes enormous problems unless all are given the terms and conditions enjoyed by the staff arriving with the best. That didn't stop the next administration from making the same mistakes, but someone has hopefully given it all a bit of thought. Hopefully.

[Mark A]

The report itself: is this it?

Mark

https://www.urbantransportgroup.org/resources/types/report/rail-and-urban-transport-review