Given the poor quality of journalism nowadays I shouldn't be surprised, but... the quality of the public debate on this is appalling (bearing in mind that those of us on here are not the public!)
It is quite clear that most people (including a lot of journalists and commentators) don't realise the majority of the passenger railway system is already nationalised. It seems
nobody has mentioned the fact that the non-DfT TOCS are on National Rail Contracts and therefore already under Government control. And certainly from what I've seen on Twitter the majority of opinion thinks fares are going to go down massively, that trains won't be late anymore and that everyone will get a seat. The minority of Twitter opinion thinks the Labour government will have to spend billions buying up privatised companies and we'll get British Rail sandwiches reintroduced.
My thoughts are, that firstly this just shows how inept the current Conservative government is. As even
The Guardian has pointed out, the underlying premise of this is the current government's official stated policy, but with all TOCS being in-house whereas the Shapps-Williams plan envisaged concessions. Of course we all know that the GBR plan has been sidelined, but on paper at least it remains the current policy. Yet they've had Tory politicians doing the media round today to
oppose Labour's proposal outright!!! It's popular, and it's near enough what they say they were going to do anyway. They even have a Transition Team, selected a headquarters and started work on designing a branding, but now they're pretending they are against it!
Open Access is dealt with in the Labour Party's policy document. The plan is that the Office of Road and Rail will remain as the statutory regulator for Track Access, so Open Access will still be allowed, however what they also say is that there will be "updated guidance" given to the ORR. The document also singles out for specific criticism the West Midlands franchise contract, as it says the growth in West Midlands was abstractive of revenue from other TOCs. So reading between the lines I expect that they will be
much harder against revenue abstraction, so probably that's the end of Lumo, etc.
I like the fact that they are aware of the tension between City Regions having control of their networks and the interests of the national network. I posted at length about this on another thread about Andy Burnham's plans for the Bee Network to take control of local rail services, and it's fair to say most of the posters on here don't see the problem. The current government also don't see the problem, hence them agreeing to devolve rail to the Bee Network in Greater Manchester, but - surprisingly - Labour's plans
do recognise the problem, which is good to see. It looks like GBR will be responsible for all services, including in City Regions, but that the elected Mayor will be able to influence and specify services (presumably with them paying any extra costs). This is a return to the 1980s system where the PTEs were able to specify services if they paid BR the extra costs of doing so.
Ironically this would give the City Regions
less control than they would if the current Conservative plans for wholesale devolution continued (which envisages more of a Merseyrail / London Overground arrangement), but I guess Labour can get more leeway with things like that, because their own politicians won't oppose them in the way they would oppose a Tory government.
Overall - and I'm not a Labour supporter by any means - I think the proposals are positive.
There are downsides, but these would have occurred anyway even if the Williams-Shapps plan went into force.
The downsides as I see them are:-
- Customer service for a unified large organisation will probably be worse. There's no incentive for them to do otherwise and quite a lot of incentives for them to decide it's the passengers' fault. See Euston overcrowding for an example.
- "Accountability" will in theory be to the Government, who funds them and takes the political risk for their decisions. So expect a lot more politician's excuses to be rolled out when things go wrong - "lessons to be learnt", "it may be bad but it was worse under the last government", "it was the wrong type of snow", "we're asking passengers to take responsibility to help us by not boarding trains", etc.
- Incentives to reduce capital expenditure that will go on government books and have to be diverted from building hospitals and schools. Not necessarily a bad thing, but things done on the cheap like Pacers, singling lines, maybe even line closures, all justified as being "enhancements that save the taxpayer money and deliver improved reliability".
- Industrial relations. Unless they throw huge chunks of cash at staff, which seems highly unlikely, unifying different TOCs to a single employer is going to be a source of friction and an opportunity for the Unions to do their job - enhance the benefits for their members. The chances this won't spill over into more strike action are pretty slim.
- Political tinkering.
The last bullet point is the riskiest one. It depends to an extent on who gets elected to Parliament and with what majority. If Labour get in with a slim majority, and have to rely on their crackpot MPs things would be different than if they have a 100 seat majority and can just ignore the Zarah Sultanas, Rebecca Long-Baileys and Richard Burgons of the party. There may be pressure to do stupid things such as abolish peak time fares, abolish First Class, compulsory seat reservations, etc. which would play well to the student activist contingent but lose the railway lots of money for little benefit.