Labour's plans for the railways

[The Stationmaster]

52 minutes ago, C126 said:

 

I appreciate we are all getting a little over-heated in this thread, but you are not serious about the above, are you?  Have you lived through the last sixteen years of economic devastation for the majority?  I do not think it was the Labour party responsible for the economic policies and their consequences during all that time...

 

 

Define 'economic devastation'.  If you start off with an empty piggy bank how do you buy new toys/?  Similarly if you start off with empty state coffers how do you set about spending money?   As for "economic devastation' what we are seeing now is as nothing compared with real economic devastation as in the 1920s and '30s and compared with the rates some of us were paying back in the 1970s mortgage rates while no longer at an all time low are still quite reasonable.  similarly the ercentage of average household income spent on food has dropped massively over the years - in 1957 it accounted for 33% of household spend - currently is around 12%.

 

AWages and other incomes have increased massively even after taking into account inflation and the number of people out of work and actively seeking employment is fewer as a percentage of the total labour force than it has been in teh past although the raw number remains very high.

 

I know thi ngs vary around the country including salaries but benefits are. national.  I'm not saying we liv ina land of milk and honey because we don't but what please is this 'economic devastation. of which you speak

[C126]

I agree "economic devastation" is an emotive term, and which should be defined, but without having access to detailed economic web-sites to which to link, may I start with 'increasing health and wealth inequalities', caused by Osborne's austerity.  I would suggest, from partial memories of articles in Private Eye primarily, this was caused by an under-regulated financial network imploding.  The consequences for the majority of the population, coupled with an inept governing elite who under-performed after this global financial crash compared to other equivalent nations, has been pretty 'devastating', when incomes have stagnated at best (mine in the public sector has decreased by 25% in real terms), and things have not improved with Brexit and Covid.

 

Yes, we all have the opium now of colour televisions, buying tat on the internet, etc., compared to the 1930's, but compared to other nations, I think things could be much better for the U.K. population.  Sorry I do not have the time (or ability!) to write a cogent definition, but perhaps someone else can supplement this concept with other suggestions and evidence.  My point I was trying to make was, more than one certain party can mess up the economy, and it is not just govt.  Other agencies conribute to the mess, but the tax-payer usually foots the bill.

 

As to 'where to get the money', I would suggest expanding the fiscal net: again banks, multi-nationals, monopoly public suppliers, and many others, have had their taxes reduced over the years.  At least I think this is the case, if I remember Private Eye correctly.  🙂

[The Stationmaster]

5 hours ago, ruggedpeak said:

Perhaps from not having to pay profits and management fees to third parties, for not having massive duplication of administration across multiple TOCS and quangos to oversee them, having potentially more joinned up long term decision making on major spend and investment. As Phil-B has pointed out, the railway now costs far more than it did under BR to operate, so the money is there, just needs to be better managed.

 

This is the big lie around public services, that they need more money. They don't, they need competent management.

So how do the cost of all those things compare with the costs of doing the same things in BR days?  For a start all of the committees established to sort out disputes barred absolutely the presence of the legal trade from their deliberations - in fact we used to love chucking them if anyone was daft enough to be ring one with them.  That has changed so why has it changed - it wasn't necessary previously so wj hy is it now with extremely clear procedures and no wriggle room for the legal trade to  make money out of it.

 

And what ec xactly has been duplicated since BR vanished - all the BR sectors and sub-sectors had these various managerial functions you mention and 'disputes' or disagreements between them still had to be sorted out - sometimes in terminable meetings where doodling became the main task of some present (that was before bullsh*t bing was invented).  And what quangos are there?  The only one I can think of is RSSB which is a separate organisation which does what used to be done by committees inside BR that probably involved more people than does RSSB.

 

What isn't joined up about decision making any less now than it was in BR days - the multiplicity of coupling systems began on BR (and on some of the Grouped companies too); traction variety is less now than it has ever been.

 

Yes the railway costs more but ask why that really is and what is being unnecessarily included in the totals now that wasn't in the past.  Forget money and just look at the number of people involved above frontline jobs - that would make a very interesting comparison and that number is more relevant than the £ signs..

[jjb1970]

To me the success, or otherwise,  of the railways depends on establishing an arms length relationship with government and ending DfT interference. 

 

After that the big issue is money. The UK has high debt, has been deficit spending and economic growth hasn't been impressive, all of which is significant for spending plans. And it's not like the UK is a low tax economy.  We need to retain the willingness of markets to lend money, and at reasonable rates of interest. The answer might be to grow our way to funding investment but good luck with that. There are much bigger macro and geopolitical shifts in play too, I feel we are passing an inflexion point and politicians arguing about who owns railways is probably akin to the old adage about two bald men arguing over a comb.

Edited April 26 by jjb1970

[pete_mcfarlane]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

I'll tell you one thing Phil - one of the best things to come out of privatisation was contracts.  As an operator contracts actually gave me protection - protection against Railtrack carrying on with its increasingly daft levels of stupidity, protection which simplified a number of our work procedures, and protection which avoided wasting hours and hours of management time as we'd had to in BR days before we had the protection that Access Contracts gave us.   And as teh railway industry had been going on & on for years about separation og f infrastructure costs from other costs privatisation also gave people that.

Which of course led to one of the less helpful/informed criticisms of Privatisation - that it brought in a load of complexity like this, as if BR was run by half a dozen people in an office somewhere and things only got complicated once it was privatised. 

[The Stationmaster]

6 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

 

However HM Treasury realised that the level of subsidy BR was getting was far too low to make privatisation work - all these extra players with their contractual interfaces and a need to return a profit to shareholders would increase administrative costs and start taking money out of the industry as dividends.

 

Therefore the level of subsidy the privatised industry got was something like 4 times that British Rail received - yet in fact progress in many areas like new trains electrification and resignaling schemes stalled - sometimes for decades!

 

Although the original intention of HM Treasury may have been to wind the subsidy levels back down - that was in the assumption there was lots of ‘waste’ and ‘public sector inefficiencies’ which the private sector could eliminate. In reality (and something which caused several of the original franchise owners to almost go bust) BR was VERY efficient and there simply wasn’t any ‘waste’ to cut - so subsidies have remained way above what British Rail received - with a good chunk of it wasted on legal / administrative costs or taken out as dividends.

 

Roger Ford, the very respected of modern railways magazine fame has tracked these extra post privatisation costs (including factoring into account inflation etc)

 

Back in 2003 he said the following to a Transport select committee

 My submission is that a railway costing twice its historical average cannot represent value for money, even if quality of service had been maintained. While this submission has focused on infrastructure costs, the subsidies to franchises are also increasing. As an indication of the likely scale of the problem, the recently signed Southwest Trains franchise will pay more subsidy in each of the three years than the whole of Network SouthEast—that is, all London commuter services—received in 1990-91.

 

Just stop and think about that for a minute - ONE TOC was costing the taxpayer MORE than it cost BR to run the WHOLE of NSE for a year!

 

In subsequent years he had contracted to track this trend calling it the ‘Ford Factor’ and has shown that for every £1 BR would have spent the privatised industry now has to spend £4 to achieve the same result. That extra £3 is not coming out of the private sector - they existing to make money for shareholders - not lose it! Thus it is the taxpayer who is ultimately paying for this extra cost - something persons of a certain political perspective completely refuse to acknowledge when they bang on about passenger rises or ‘record investment’

 

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmtran/145/145web50.htm

Sorry Phil but in some respects that was not how The Treasury financial model for privatisation was intended to work.   Because I spent a dau y with teh Treasury team who worked on the financial aspects of privitisation I had the chance to ask them lots of questions, and they were happy to give straight answers.   Yes it did have a base case that the total sum paid to franchises would reduce (and also that income from some franchises would increase) because of improved efficiency.  In this respect 'efficiency' would probably be best measured as headcount in , for example, the way in which Virgin tore into middle management and supervisory jobs on the WCML when it first got that franchise.  But that was only part of the model.

 

The other art of the mdel - which the politicos failed to understand and gave in to greed - was in the way infrastructure would be financed.  This would be via Access Charges which would ensure that the infrastructure authority would be solvent and have the necessary funds to do its job.  Ths that money was seen as simply passing through the operating companies to the infrastructure authority as, in effect, a hidden subsidy which would be off the direct Govt books.

 

So the model did two things - first franchise costs would reduce due to improvements in efficiency, and secondly the infrastructure authority would remain cad sh positive without any ther form of subsidy from Govt.   But where it started to go desperately wrong was when the politricos decided to sell off the infrastructure authority and those who bought it saw it as a cash cow to pay duvidends rather than a not. for profit concern which invested its surplus income in its network.  Bob Horton had an awful lot to answer for let alone the gauge cornner cracking problem which was reallya direct consequence of teh way he ran the company seeking ever larger dividend payouts at teh cost of cutting maintenance.

 

Where the franchise costs went wrong was probably just as simple - removing the Franchise Director and putting the job with Civil Servants who had probably been licking stamps in a Labour Exchange the week before (nowadays they seem to commute from Vienna) removed the one vestige of professionalism and consistent involvement the system had.  And of course The treasury also got its mitts in there as well and started screwing non-existent moneys out of franchisees who could never get in that much revenue ina month of Sundays.   Compare the passenger franchise costs with the freight operators who in many respects have n0 choice but to stand on their own financial feet.

 

Personally I don't see all that much wrong with teh franchise system but it is alas wide open to poor or non-existent management bu y those who let the franchises - and the last people I'd employ to do that are Civil Servants.   No wonder it all costs more when you look at the financial shambles DafT created all on its own with the IET project.  if they can't control costs on their own project why would one expect them to be able to question the costs implied in franchise bids?

[Ron Ron Ron]

Mike is absolutely right about the damage the DafT and Treasury did to the franchising system, through excessive meddling and pure greed..

Franchising would have worked very well, without putting the bidding TOC's in a position where they had to bid way over the odds in order to win the contracts.

Also more fool the TOC's who ended up committing themselves to those unaffordable premium payments.

Those government departments created the environment for failure and the eventual collapse of the franchise system.

 

 

 

.

[roythebus1]

At the risk of going slightly off-course again, I hear of similar rumblings with the London Buses franchises. they are all bar one let to the multi-nationals usually run by overseas governments while the UK government isn't allowed to do the same. From what I hear the operators are up in arms over the electric buses fiasco, the road layouts imposed on their buses by the addition of cycle lanes everywhere, all designed by people who have obviously never driven a bus, let alone ridden on one. As for the contracts, they are being re-written mid-term and the operators have simply had enough Several of them are reported to have walked out of meetings with TfL officials over the impossible conditions that have imposed. That is why we read of some services being "backed" by operators as it is impossible to run them for the costs originally agreed.

 

TfL seem determined to keep fining operators for problems that are basically of TfL's own doing.  Some of the top people from the operators have told TfL in no uncertain terms what they can do with their contracts using almost barrack-room language.

 

To agree with what The Stationmaster says in one of his replies above, I remember interest rates on my mortgage being around the 17% mark when I was a train driver. Luckily in 198 Thatcher, for all her faults (and I still hate the woman to this day) for some reason authorised the train drivers to have a record-breaking pay rise. That enabled me to get a decent house in Streatham. then 2 years later she engineered the flexible rostering strike which saw all 28,000 drivers threatened with the sack for trying to protect our terms and conditions. like the ASLEF strikes thee days, it was more about T&Cs rather than the money. But she got her way. Railways were privatised and the race to the top for drivers' wages started. Waterloo drivers found that with the advent of Eurotunnel they could make the short walk across the concourse and almost double their money driving to Paris once a day instead of Waterloo to the City of London and back 16 times in a day. I suppose it's a pity the other rail workers pay hasn't gone up at the same rate as drivers' pay.

[david.hill64]

The fact that Labour appears to be willing to continue leasing trains via ROSCOs may be an indication of some economic competence by Rachel Reeves.  Some posters here seem to believe that investors should be willing to accept low returns on their investment for the good of the industry, but why should they? Would you invest your savings in an account paying 1% pa when you could get 2% in an alternative account with the same risk? No sane person would. Similarly the backers of the ROSCOS - the big financial institutions - have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to protect their investment. If you cannot get the return on money by investing in rolling stock leasing it will be invested elsewhere. Only when there is too much money in the system would it make sense to take on a lower return.

Pension funds may be willing to take on lower returns for zero risk investments - such as railway infrastructure - where there is a guaranteed income stream for decades, but rolling stock leases are not guaranteed for the life of the rolling stock even if DfT does provide protection after the first lease expires.

[Bon Accord]

Comparing mortgages and interest rates between now and 40 years ago really isn't illustrative.

For a start the average house price today is nine times the average salary (and rising), whereas in 1984 it was only four times.

Required deposits were significantly less and certainly back then much of the calculations were based on one wage, as opposed to today where two people can scarcely afford a mortgage.

Whilst interest rates were higher 40 years ago, today's homeowners are paying a LOT more for their property.

 

 

[melmerby]

25 minutes ago, Bon Accord said:

Comparing mortgages and interest rates between now and 40 years ago really isn't illustrative.

For a start the average house price today is nine times the average salary (and rising), whereas in 1984 it was only four times.

Required deposits were significantly less and certainly back then much of the calculations were based on one wage, as opposed to today where two people can scarcely afford a mortgage.

Whilst interest rates were higher 40 years ago, today's homeowners are paying a LOT more for their property.

 

 

In 1974 when I got married, the average house was £9000, the average wage was £2000, and mortgage interest rates were 11%.

By 1979 the average house was £18500, the average wage was £5000 and interest rates were 17%

 

The 1980s were very volatile with rapidly rising house prices, double digit inflation and a proper economic recession, that's when home buying started to become less affordable.

The trend has continued to this day.

[Ron Ron Ron]

1 hour ago, Bon Accord said:

Comparing mortgages and interest rates between now and 40 years ago really isn't illustrative.

For a start the average house price today is nine times the average salary (and rising), whereas in 1984 it was only four times.

Required deposits were significantly less and certainly back then much of the calculations were based on one wage, as opposed to today where two people can scarcely afford a mortgage.

Whilst interest rates were higher 40 years ago, today's homeowners are paying a LOT more for their property.

 

 

 

That's why you should treat any price, or cost  comparisons with the past, based purely on the the prevailing rates of inflation, with total suspicion .

For example the cost of a model train, a TV or a pair of shoes between say 1990 and 2024.

 

There are so many changing variables involved, relative cost of materials, variation in labour rates in different economies over time, different manufacturing technologies, different levels of overheads, relative costs of transportation and loads of other things.

Simply saying that inflation over that time period has been X % , has very little bearing on how or why prices have increased over the same period.

 

Those inflation calculators you can use, are interesting and amusing, but are far too crude to present a full picture.

 

 

 

 

.

Edited April 27 by Ron Ron Ron

[jollysmart]

On 27/04/2024 at 09:45, Bon Accord said:

Comparing mortgages and interest rates between now and 40 years ago really isn't illustrative.

For a start the average house price today is nine times the average salary (and rising), whereas in 1984 it was only four times.

Required deposits were significantly less and certainly back then much of the calculations were based on one wage, as opposed to today where two people can scarcely afford a mortgage.

Whilst interest rates were higher 40 years ago, today's homeowners are paying a LOT more for their property.

 

 

 

Until recently you could borrow £300K for around £1200 a month, if you had that level of mortgage with 17% interest rate you would be paying £1000 a week in interest alone. You are confusing the price with the cost of buying. When we wanted to move house I had to go to the building society and meet with the manager to apply for a mortgage, you can't compare the costs when you ignore one of the most significant parts of buying  a house.

[The Stationmaster]

I picked up an interesting point in the Labour policy document from the 'Daily Telegraph' cmments on it.  Assuming the DT read it right the document appears to be saying that freight services should get greater priority including 'not allowing express trains to delay them'.  I haven't bothered to wade through the iumpteebn pages of platitudes and political snake oil salesmanship to check the accuracy of that comment but if it is correct it would pose some interesting dilemmas for 'someone'.

 

The best example I know of, and have watched in action on 'Staff Information' screens at GWR operated stations is not so much 'express trains' but the impact of stopping trains, particularly Elizabeth Line trains where station stops are only a few miles apart and freights are obviously being heavily checked when following those trains.  In addition the frequency of Liz Line trains in the inner WRML area has caused the loss of freight paths (contrary to the original Crossrail operating agreement back in BR days). which has resulted in increased resource costs.

 

So what will Labour actually do in cases like this - although I'm pretty sure that I can guess, notwithstanding what they might have thought they were 'promising'.

[woodenhead]

@The Stationmaster Perhaps the thinking here is that private companies are paying for their access to the railway whereas nationalised services are not, in a world where the trains and the track are owned by the same team it would be wooden dollars unless it was a private sector train.

 

So similarly any open access TOC should get the same service a LUMO or Hull Trains service should get priority if being impeded by a late running nationalised service.

 

If it were all a level playing field it might discourage private operations if they felt that the government run trains had no incentive to run to time.

 

I guess the devil is in the detail - a timetable is a timetable and a private company should get no better than to arrive on time and if it is the cause of the delays then it should not then be able to demand preferential treatment to get back on time.

 

Equally, should charter services remain free of punishment for running late if they also got some sort of priority.

[Michael Hodgson]

Sounds improbable.

 

"Great Western would like to apologise for the late arrival of the Cornish Riveria Express.  This is due to an operating decision taken personally by the Rt Hon the Secretary of State for Transport to give prioirity to a goods train carrying roadstone to fill in potholes in the motorway".

[pete_mcfarlane]

There's probably some desire (probably in response to a pressure group)  to get lorries off the roads by making rail freight 'better', and this is the end result of 2 minutes of careful thought into the best solution. 

[eldomtom2]

On 26/04/2024 at 13:16, DY444 said:

Labour pre-1997 GE: We will reverse privatisation

Labour now: .....

 

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ...

In fact, Labour's 1997 manifesto specifically said privatisation would not be reversed:

Quote

The process of rail privatisation is now largely complete. It has made fortunes for a few, but has been a poor deal for the taxpayer. It has fragmented the network and now threatens services. Our task will be to improve the situation as we find it, not as we wish it to be. Our overriding goal must be to win more passengers and freight on to rail. The system must be run in the public interest with higher levels of investment and effective enforcement of train operators' service commitments. There must be convenient connections, through-ticketing and accurate travel information for the benefit of all passengers.

To achieve these aims, we will establish more effective and accountable regulation by the rail regulator; we will ensure that the public subsidy serves the public interest; and we will establish a new rail authority, combining functions currently carried out by the rail franchiser and the Department of Transport, to provide a clear, coherent and strategic programme for the development of the railways so that passenger expectations are met.

On 26/04/2024 at 06:27, jjb1970 said:

The problem isn't so much privatization as the way governments have managed railways and allowed DfT to micromanage. As with any idea, it can be done well or done badly, Japan privatized JR before BR was privatized and made a much better job of it than we did (which in fairness isn't unique to railways, Japan did did and does a lot of things better than the UK).

Well, if the TOCs had been allowed to discriminate against ASLEF/RMT members and tell local authorities "either you take over this unprofitable line or we're closing it" things might have been different...

[The Stationmaster]

19 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

There's probably some desire (probably in response to a pressure group)  to get lorries off the roads by making rail freight 'better', and this is the end result of 2 minutes of careful thought into the best solution. 

Apparently its is part of the paper where Labour make very clear their determination 'to get more freight onto the railways' and that would be assisted by giving freight trains the right priority.

 

However they don't understand the core issue involved which is really about resource utilisation & associated cost savings which help to make railborne freight more (or even at all) financially viable.  That means that trains have to run at certain times of day in order to turn round resources without having to use, say, an additional set of wagons.  Mind you I doubt Labour politicians are no different from any other politicians in this lack of understanding and it's equally clear that DafT and TfL don't understand it either.

 

I would give more credence to their 'aims' if they actually demonstrated that they understand tne issue rather than the naively inane statement reported (was it accurately? by the Daily Telegraph.

 

20 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Sounds improbable.

 

"Great Western would like to apologise for the late arrival of the Cornish Riveria Express.  This is due to an operating decision taken personally by the Rt Hon the Secretary of State for Transport to give prioirity to a goods train carrying roadstone to fill in potholes in the motorway".

Actually they, i.e the 'Giuard', did apologise for the delay to a West Of England train which I was on when it was hit for very nearly 15 minutes in total after a train of stone empties was let out from Theale ahead of it.  The IET was already running a bit late and the empties left Theale right time but instead of them being put inside at Newbury Racecourse Didcot TVSC had us following them all the way to Woodborough Loop.   

 

And of course after that magnificent piece of non-regulation our train was caught behind a  Weymouth train between Witham and Castle Cary so we were even further off our path and we ended up going inside at Tavistock Jcn to let a following, Penzance Bound, IET overtake us because it was running on time.  There was no apology from DafT for ordering a train which was suffering 'technical difficulties' (the biggest of which being that it was ordered by a bunch of (un)Civil Servants who knew zero about railways or trains and have never apologised for their error).

 

re my final comment - on the first day of IET public operation on the GWML the set I was on returning from Swansea got its revenge on one of the uncivil wallahs when water started to leak from the ceiling all over him.