VIEWPOINT |
19
The Cheek of it Chris Cheek
Jubilee Year The start of a new year inevitably triggers thoughts of what significant anniversaries will fall during the next twelve months – a tendency perhaps highlighted this year because of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the nostalgia-fest that will no doubt provoke through the spring and summer
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n the transport world, this year sees a number of anniversaries, some less happy than others. In the autumn, for instance, it will be seventy years since the Harrow & Wealdstone rail crash. That event, which saw three trains collide in a busy station, on 6 October 1952, cost the lives of 112 passengers and still stands as Britain’s worst ever peacetime rail disaster. During the summer, it will be fifty years since the passage of the 1962 Transport Act, which abolished the British Transport Commission and created a number of separate organisations in its place – including the London Transport Board, the British Transport Docks Board, British
This time last year the our editor, Sam Sherwood-Hale, asked Chris this question: Do you believe we are going to return to a single, vertically integrated, publicly owned railway? I wouldn’t go that far, but a reform to the franchising process. They haven’t published the Williams Review, it has been imminent for two years now, if Williams recommends the recreation of the SRA and contracting out operations to the private sector still, then it is not going to be a single integrated railway as we had prior to 1993, it will be a series of operating contracts, with the government taking the financial risk. But that is a modified form of franchising where the risks lie with the government and not the operators. The
Waterways Board, the Transport Holding Company and, of course, the British Railways Board (BRB) which, when it took office on 1 January 1963 would be headed by a dynamic modern manager recruited from the private sector, Dr Richard Beeching. It is a measure of the speed of change in world of nationalised industries that, of those organisations established by the 1962 law, BRB was almost the longest survivor. The London Transport Board and the Transport Holding Company had disappeared again within ten years, whilst the docks privatised as Associated British Ports in 1983. The British Waterways Board remained in being until 2012, though
by then it had morphed from a trading organisation into a guardian of canal heritage. There was little surprise when it was turned into a charity, the Canal & River Trust (though the Scottish canals remained in state control). This year, it will also be 25 years since the rail privatisation process was completed, with the completion of the franchising process by 31 March 1997, just in time to ensure that the incoming Labour government did not have the chance to keep one or more train operating company in the public sector. In the event, six new private sector operators commenced operation four weeks ahead of the deadline and BRB’s role in train operations came
Treasury is not happy about that and frankly, I don’t blame them. This is the difficulty with any essential service, you can contract it out to a certain extent but ultimately there is an overriding necessity to keep providing the service so if the operator does fall into difficulty somebody has to step in and do it. This was recognised in The Railways Act in 1993, the detailed procedures for step-in in the event of insolvency were laid out in the legislation right from day one, and arguably have operated quite well. All of the transitions from private sector to public ownership have happened relatively smoothly. One of the highlights of my consultancy career was helping two light rail bids in Nottingham and Croydon, and my favourite memory in each case was the party to
greet the first tram. For a consultant to see the physical representation of what you’ve been working on for months is a big moment. The lesson from Croydon was that you can’t have the private sector taking the revenue risk if the public sector is setting the fares. In Croydon as soon as it opened London Transport (as it was then) decided to have a premium between bus and tram which blew the revenue forecasts out of the window and caused all sorts of financial problems for the operator, which ended with TfL buying the contract out. So there are all these complexities and incompatibilities, so if you want the private sector involved then you’ve got to recognise that somewhere along the line the private sector needs to cover its costs and that requires flexibility.
Rail Professional
