Chris Grayling should resign over East Coast – now’s the time for Network Rail to step up

The only thing stopping us re-nationalising the railways is Tory ideology and greedy franchise owners.

Transport Minister, Chris Grayling’s refusal to bring East Coast mainline in-house doesn’t make sense on any level.

If this is his attempt to look thrifty with public money it fails: ending the East Coast franchise early will mean the public purse forfeits well over £2 billion that would have gone back to the Treasury between now and 2023.

Neither does it meet passenger demand. The recent National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) results were appalling, even to passengers who have been worn down by bad service, unreliable trains and overpriced fares.

The NPRS showed satisfaction with ‘punctuality/reliability’ within train operating companies (TOCs) running at between 51% and 98%. To give this a benchmark, when East Coast Trains went public it achieved 91% satisfaction reviews and returned over a £ billion to the public purse.

Or we could look at other criteria: if you want to keep ticket prices low privatisation is still a nonsense.

Train fares have risen twice as much as wages since 2010 and have TREBLED since privatisation in the 1990s.

Going back to the satisfaction survey results, it’s high fares which irk passengers most. No single train operating company got a satisfaction rate above 76% and the lowest came in at just 21%.

And in the context of eye-watering fare hikes, if you wanted to say, at least we are investing for an efficient and effective service in the future, our privatised railway still doesn’t cut the mustard.

Frankly as a route to greater efficiency and reliability, continuing with the separation of wheel from steel, or carriages from the track – and the private running of each – is a dead end.

Our railways benefit our economy by enabling the movement of people, goods from factories and businesses to customers, as well as for tourism and ensures we’re reducing polluting our environment.

In many places, our British rail network is beyond capacity and we have long needed track upgrades, new lines and the development of faster and more efficient trains.

Private enterprise has long been mis-sold to as being more edgy, more motivated, or somehow more agile than boring old state-run industry, but this is simply untrue.

One of the reasons that Europe’s rail services are doing so much better is because for the most part they are run in public ownership. This allows greater investment and lower fares as no dividends are paid to greedy shareholders.

I was recently told by an apprentice engineer, a TSSA member, working in our rail engineering sector, that at college she was learning about the newest, most efficient systems but at work she was fixing out of date software with what she described as “sticking plaster solutions.” This is the lunacy of the private market in action.

If you want to prevent other franchises from defaulting and keep confidence in the system they need to be run by the government.

This point was recently clearly made by former Labour Transport Minister Lord Andrew Adonis who is quite rightly furious at Grayling for insulting taxpayers and letting Virgin East Coast completely off the hook.

Allowing billionaires Souter and Branson to simply hand back the keys when they can no longer make a profit shows the system up for what it really is – a complete scam.

Grayling has completely failed in his duty to hold East Coast’s owners, Stagecoach and Virgin, to account.

Worse still he helps keep Souter and Branson laughing all the way to their lavish banks.

This week it was announced that the Transport Select Committee want to bring in Grayling for a second time and hold him to account for misleading them and also to get to grips with exactly why he let Virgin and Stagecoach off the hook.

The nailing of Grayling is a start and I hope it will be his undoing. But what we really badly need is to bite the bullet and bring the franchise in-house.

So hand over the keys to Network Rail. The staff know how to run the railways without Branson or Souter. Our union’s members have run the service in five different uniforms over the same number of decades. This isn’t something new for them, It’s all in their day’s work. All that would change is that no private owner will be skimming money off the top.

Manuel Cortes is General Secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association.

3 Responses to “Chris Grayling should resign over East Coast – now’s the time for Network Rail to step up”

  1. Alasdair Macdonald

    … and a substantial chunk of the PLP.

  2. NMac

    Bring Back British Rail ASAP

  3. Nabil

    Cortez proving why he’s only good for looking after the ticket offices…. Hand it over to Network Rail? Network Rail are the cause of all the railway’s [problems, not the solution!

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