On The Right Track
Mark Harper’s Bradshaw on 7 February, was one of the best and most encouraging speeches I have heard from a Transport Secretary.
Perhaps it was because of all the doom and gloom around and the rough ride that rail has had over the last couple of years that I feared the worst: a Treasury-led belt tightening, and cuts to services, leading to a downward spiral where more people abandon the trains and more cuts are made to make up the income shortfall.
Instead, Mark Harper signalled the opposite: a drive for more passengers and more freight on the rails to generate more income and make up the shortfall that way. He made the entirely sensible point that there is no use in cutting services if it reduces income.
Mark Harper was at pains to stress that his approach had the full support of both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, which suggests some pretty effective lobbying on his part, and doubtless also by his impressive rail minister Huw Merriman.
The Transport Secretary mentioned the support from the PM and Chancellor on at least three occasions, with the intention of assuring the audience that his approach was a government one, and not simply a Department for Transport one.
I was given an advance brief on his speech earlier in the day by DfT officials who volunteered the same point. Indeed, one suggested (accurately I think) that this was the first time a transport secretary, PM and Chancellor had all been pointing in the same direction on rail.
The same optimism was shown by the promise to roll out single leg pricing, something many, including Campaign for Better Transport, have advocated for a long time. The frustration is this roll out is still somewhat limited. We have had a pilot in place on some LNER journeys since 2020, and the promise in the speech was only to extend this to other parts of the LNER network.
Mark Harper stated that fares and ticketing issues are top of passengers’ concerns, and referenced the fact that there are 55 million different tickets available. It did occur to me that there may well be even more with his promise to trial a demand-based system. This is the idea that train tickets would be sold like airline tickets, with prices fluctuating according to availability.
To some extent, that system is already in place, in a crude sort of way, with peak tickets more expensive than off-peak ones, and advance tickets priced differently according to the train you want to catch. For those who want the best price from Liverpool to London, for example, a train mid-evening arriving late in London will almost certainly give you a better price than one mid-morning. But it seems more sophistication is going to be built in.
Overall, he set out four objectives:
- A streamline Great British Rail
- Empowering Operators to attract passengers in a way that simply doesn’t exist at the moment
- Reforming fares
- Growing rail freight threefold by 2050.
On that last point, he opined that goods currently on the road would be better on rail, which is a welcome, if indirect commitment to modal shift.
We also heard from the Transport Secretary a commitment to more open access which, although he did not specify this and indeed said the details were not a matter for him, we hope will mean a new service or two on the west coast mainline.
On the east coast mainline, we have not simply seen Lumo and Hull Trains prosper, but LNER too, as London-Edinburgh is increasingly being seen as a rail corridor. The train-plane split is now 67-33, compared to 50-50 on the west coast mainline.
This new emphasis on the private sector does, however, raise a couple of big questions. The first relates to the nature of the freedom that the private sector will have, and specifically the balance between risk and reward.
It is widely accepted that the franchise system had failed even before covid kicked in, so we will need to understand the differences between the risk-reward mechanisms that applied then and those envisaged now.
The second big question relates to what might happen after the next General Election which by law is less than two years away and could come much earlier.
Labour is committed to “renationalisation” though it is not clear what exactly that means. At one end, it could be a return to a central body directly running services itself, as British Rail was. Or it could mean central control of trains, fares, timetables, but delivered by private companies, so a bit like the operation of buses in London. That of course would not be very different to what exists now.
In the only overtly political part of his speech, Mark Harper criticised the idea of renationalisation, suggesting that when under public control, the railways had seen a steady decline in passenger numbers, and contrasted that with what had happened since privatisation where numbers had broadly doubled, at least before covid kicked in.
The challenge he and Huw Merriman face, therefore, is to demonstrate that his vision works and is the way forward, and to do so by the time the next election is called.
