The view that privatisation ultimately failed, leaving unreliable services and high fares, may be widespread. However, Prof Glaister argues that for a few years in the 1990s, the old privatised system actually worked well. Operating costs and subsidies were falling while the number of train services and passengers went up, he says.
And in the current context, it’s important to be clear about what nationalisation really means.
The railways Labour inherited weren’t, in truth, completely privatised, and nationalisation doesn’t mean a return to British Rail.
For example, the infrastructure manager Network Rail has been fully under public control for over two decades. A number of train companies including LNER and Northern had already been nationalised under the Conservatives. Scotrail, Transport for Wales and Caledonian Sleeper are controlled by devolved national governments.
And even those operators still on contracts issued by the DfT at Westminster have been heavily controlled by the government for years. During Covid, private operators started being paid a fixed fee to run services, while the taxpayer took on the financial risk. The terms of the contracts meant train companies had to “ask government for permission to blow their nose”, according to one senior industry executive, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely.
Highly profitable rolling stock companies (“ROSCOS”) still own the actual trains. Freight companies operate privately too, and there are a handful of fully commercial “open access operators” on the rails like Lumo, Hull Trains and Grand Central – although there are concerns within the industry that these could end up squeezed.
So what is often referred to as the nationalisation of the railways, in fact amounts to gradually returning passenger train operators run by private companies to public hands as their contracts expire – and making this the default.
