Quintin Jardine's blog

I’ve just read that the coalition is planning to invest £8 billion in the rail network. the money will be spent on, among other things, about 2,000 new carriages, which will then be given to the franchises that run the train services. When that happens they’ll be looking for more money from the government to run them.

We’re bailing out Ireland, now we’re bailing out the railways. Fine, there are good trade reasons for the former, and good economic reasons for the latter. Our economy benefits from a prosperous Ireland, and from our own people being able to travel efficiently from place to place. But I am only a simple crime writer, so I’m struggling to understand why we need these damn franchises. There are twenty-nine of them, (or is it thirty-five?) nearly every one owned by a private company. These players include the likes of First Group, National Express, Virgin, Stagecoach and Arriva (if you’re lucky). BAA even own a couple of services. Take a look at the list and the only service you won’t find there is the line that picks up Harry Potter and his mates from platform eight and a half in King’s Cross. This corporate jumble is difficult to untangle, and there appears to be no meaningful integration between any of the operators. Their only common interest is profit.

At a time of national re-evaluation, maybe we should be asking whether we need these characters at all, and whether one penny of the ever-increasing burden of fares on passengers should be going into private pockets, most particularly since none of these operators have incurred any significant capital risk, or carry that responsibility.  The infrastructure is provided and maintained by Network Rail; it’s also a private company, officially, but in practice it’s public sector, since it doesn’t pay dividends and is £20 billion debt is underwritten by government.

I do not believe in State ownership of the means of production and distribution, but . . . If the state is paying the tab for the tracks on which our trains run, and funding the rolling stock, as recent experience has told us it must, then what is the point of paying private concerns to make an arse, as all too often they do, of the delivery of services to passengers? By and large, the NHS has worked for over 60 years. Couldn’t we have a National Rail Service, constituted along similar lines?