The Economist - USA (2019-08-17)

TheEconomistAugust 17th 2019 41

1

M

any officeserfs like to slip away ear-

ly on Friday afternoons in the quiet

summer months. So anger boiled over on

August 9th when several rail lines were

shut down following a power cut. Delays

were so bad on lines going north from Lon-

don that it was quicker for some commut-

ers to trudge home on foot. The snafu was

the fault of the electricity industry rather

than the train companies. But it added to

the railways’ growing reputation for unre-

liability. With dreadful timing, it was an-

nounced a few days later that fares would

go up again next year, by 2.8%.

Boris Johnson’s government is con-

sumed by the task of getting Britain out of

the European Union by October 31st. But

before then it must also make two big deci-

sions about the railways. The first is wheth-

er to go ahead with hs2, a high-speed line

between London and the north (see box on

next page). The second is how to fix the rest

of the network. This autumn an official re-

view by Keith Williams, a former British

Airways boss, will consider how to reform

the franchising system under which most

lines operate. Mr Williams has already said

the current set-up has “had its day” and

talked of “revolution, not evolution”.

The Williams report was commissioned

after a catastrophically botched timetable

change last summer led to nearly half the

trains in northern England being delayed

or cancelled. The incident exemplified

how the railways, which made much pro-

gress after being privatised in the early

1990s, have gone off-track. Last year delays

and cancellations reached their worst level

in nearly a decade. At the same time pas-

senger numbers fell by 1.4%, the first dip

since privatisation. Amid all this, passen-

gers are paying more. Ticket prices have

risen twice as fast as wages since 2010.

When Britain broke up and sold British

Rail, the state-run monopoly, it hoped to

spur competition and cut costs. With this

aim it embarked on a radical experiment,

tried before only in Sweden, of separating

the management of the tracks from that of

the trains. Politicians feared that chaos

could ensue, and some politically sensitive

lines could close, if the system went from

rigid state monopoly to free-market free-

for-all overnight. So they introduced a sys-

tem of franchises, in which companies

could bid for the right to operate specified

services, to ensure continuity and allow for

the subsidising of loss-making services.

The opposition Labour Party, which

came to back privatisation in the 1990s,

wants to renationalise the network. Andy

McDonald, the shadow transport secretary,

argues that privatisation has left “a frag-

mented and inefficient network that drives

up costs”, and says the answer is for a single

state-owned firm to run both trains and

track. Most voters seem to agree. A poll last

year by bmg Research found that 64% sup-

port nationalisation. (The same is not nec-

essarily true of rail-users, notes Anthony

Smith of Transport Focus, a watchdog. It

finds that passengers care more about hav-

ing a reliable service than who runs it.)

Supporters of nationalisation compare

Britain’s railways unfavourably with those

in other European countries, where the

state plays a more active role. Yet, perhaps

Railways

Getting back on track

Rising fares and falling punctuality are undermining confidence in the

rail-franchise system. What should replace it?

Britain

42 ThefutureofHighSpeed 2

Also in this section

— Bagehot is away

Read more from this week’s Britain section:

Economist.com/Britain