Thirtieth anniversary of the 1993 Railways Act.

RAIL UNION RMT marked the 30th anniversary today (Sunday November 5, 2023) of the 1993 Railways Act that privatised Britain’s railway with a new report which revealed that the three-decade debacle had seen at least £31 billion leak out of the system while passengers were paying eight per cent more in real terms to travel on a deteriorating system.

As a result, tens of billions of pounds have been siphoned out of the industry ever since by the private sector and into the pockets of the shareholders of the host of companies that feed off what should be a vital public service.

The union called for an end to this disastrous experiment and for the creation of a single, integrated publicly owned railway company which 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. 

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said that the report showed 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 governments wildly unpopular and unworkable ticket office closures plan was driven by a system that sought to protect profits at the expense of passengers. 

“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.

The origin of the decimation of Britain’s railways is the failed experiment of privatisation. In 1994, an embattled Conservative Government took it upon themselves to crown Thatcher’s wishes by selling British Rail into private hands. Unlike British Airways, however, the sale of British Rail could never seek to generate proper competition – it would never work, not even in theory.

Railways can only facilitate a single train at any one time. Railways consist of popular profitable routes and unprofitable routes serving smaller communities. Railways require large upfront investment to make progress. Air travel never had these issues. British Railways should’ve never been put into private hands.

If I were a businessman in 1994 and wanted to take advantage of the new rail liberalisation policy, my rail start-up could surely try and bring in a new competitive route from Leeds to London? Sadly, it couldn’t. The line would already be in use for another service. Even if I could secure a spot on the line, I’d have to win a contract from the government. The companies that win government contracts are granted exclusive rights to some of the most profitable routes for an extended duration of time.

Private rail companies are therefore (and by design) ...