'The opportunity to have a real railway for the people is there.'

One of the flagship policies of the new Labour government is the plan to take the railways into public ownership, bringing an end to three decades of privatisation.

Opinion polling has consistently shown that policy is extremely popular with the public. It’s also popular with the people who work on the railways and the unions that represent them.

At this year’s TUC Congress in Brighton, Left Foot Forward spoke to Mick Whelan – the general secretary of the ASLEF union – about his support for the move to take the railways into public ownership and what a publicly owned railway could deliver.

Whelan started by setting out how privatisation failed on its own terms and the impact it has had on the railway. He told Left Foot Forward: “Strangely, I think it took covid to highlight the Ponzi scheme that was rail privatisation. Everyone talks about railways and how they make money. The railways have not made any money for the last 23 years. Privateers have made money, pillaging and taking taxpayer’s money with no rationale at all.

“So, if you look at the three basic tenets of John Major’s privatisation, it was going to be that privatisation would drive investment. Well, asset strippers aren’t interested in our industry because no one’s got any assets. None of the train operating companies own any railways, infrastructure or whatever else.

“The second thing was it was going to drive competition. Well, there’s been zero competition on the railways. You can only use a Virgin ticket on a Virgin train. So therefore it was more about protecting the fare box rather than creating an infrastructure that increased capacity. And of course the way that we managed the railways with hundreds and thousands of different tickets was also price it high to keep them off. If you actually look at the figures there was more passenger growth in the last few years of [British Rail] than there actually was under privatisation. And while there was growth under privatisation it was caused by GDP and it was caused by population growth, it wasn’t actually caused by the model itself.

“And the third tenet of John Major’s privatisation was competition would drive prices down. Well we know that ticket prices went up by 65 per cent over a period of time. Even if you rationalised it to take account of inflation, it’s still 23 per cent. And then the Tories brought in that awful law that fares will automatically go up, required or not, by RPI. So you got some vast jumps.”

Later, he moved on to explain some of the benefits that a publicly owned railway could deliver. Focusing on improved efficiency, Whelan said: “What you do get is the economies of scale. What you do get is the benefit of investment. And what you do get is that anybody who works for the new [Great British Railways] isn’t restricted to only working in their own company. So, when I worked in British Rail, I could drive any train anywhere within three hours of my location. They could send me to Crewe, they could send me to Preston”.

He then continued: “Under privatisation and sectorisation, you lost that flexibility, you lost that benefit. With that then is the opportunity – because we’ve got so many salary scales – with the benefits you’re going to get from the productivity levelling up, to then also level the salaries up and have it in common. Because our biggest problem is we’ve got in some companies three sets of drivers on different salaries because the franchise has been cut up so many times, and you can ameliorate that under one body.”

Whelan also made the case that a publicly owned railway is crucial to delivering the ‘green agenda’ and a ‘greener and better transport system’, as well as getting people ‘out their cars’ and ‘back onto trains’. Pointing to how public ownership of rail has worked in Scotland and Wales, Whelan argued that a nationalised railway enables governments to take more steps to attract people onto the railways.

He also highlighted that through public ownership, the Welsh Government has been given “the flexibility they need for their plans and their vision for the future of where they want to extend their light rail, where they want to bring their railway into the communities, where they want to build their transport links for the homes they’re going to build in the future.”

Despite all this, Whelan is pragmatic about what public ownership will deliver. He acknowledges that public ownership won’t transform the railways “overnight”, but told Left Foot Forward that “the opportunity to have a real railway for the people is there.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: ASLEF

Comments are closed.