‘Bureaucracy’ to blame for rail woes
Bureaucratic dithering not privatisation is to blame for the state of Britain’s railways, an influential think tank says.
According to the Adam Smith Institute, privatisation could have been the answer to the problems with Britain’s railways.
But instead bureaucrats imposed a “widely over-complex structure”, which was worsened by the creation of Network Rail.
In a new report it calls for train operating companies to be given more control over the railways, and the major say in how station and track improvements are managed.
“Privatisation offered a chance to break the vicious circle of under-investment and poor performance in the public sectors,” said report author Iain Murray. “But the opportunity was missed.”
The report argues that governments had controlled the railways for so long that when it came to privatisation they could not let go.
The result was a structure that was over-complex, with too many regulators that made privatisation impossible to succeed.
And when the Labour government replaced Railtrack with Network Rail – which possesses “none of the private sector disciplines necessary to control costs and focus investment on what will actually benefit the travelling customers” – it simply made things worse.
Mr Murray argues that if the original privatisation concept of operating and infrastructure companies cannot be made to work, then train operators should be permitted to own or take control of the track they run their trains over. This would allow regulation to be scaled back, reduce uncertainty and encourage new long-term investment, he adds.
“If Britain’s railways are to play a future role in meeting out transport needs in the foreseeable future, they must be freed from their regulatory straitjacket,” he said.
Read Iain Murray’s report: How Not to Run a Railway.
