What taking our trains into public ownership looks like
Taking train operations into public ownership is the right thing to do. However, leaving the role of the private rolling stock companies completely intact is a mistake. The government should create a publicly owned rolling stock company to gradually phase out the railway’s dependence on the profiteering private rolling stock companies.
This is normal in other countries, such as Germany and the USA. Perhaps more instructively, there are precedents in the UK for the public sector buying trains directly to get the best deal.
In 2013, Transport for London said that private finance for Crossrail’s purchase of around 600 electric multiple-unit cars would be “complicated and expensive” and won approval to buy them directly instead. More recently, the Liverpool City Region has opted to directly finance the purchase of 52 brand new Class 777 trains for Mersey Rail, rather than using private finance.
The government should set up a publicly-owned rolling stock company, which could be called Great British Trains, building on the successful branding of Great British Energy. This company would directly purchase and own all new trains in our railway system to replace privately owned ones as their current contracts end or as old trains are decommissioned.
A publicly owned rolling stock company could also consider manufacturing trains directly as well as repairing and maintaining trains. The aforementioned decision by Transport for London to directly purchase Crossrail’s trains, similarly involved the creation of 80 full-time jobs associated with a new maintenance depot to maintain those new trains.
A single publicly owned rolling stock company would enable the government to do the type of system-wide planning that would avoid situations where newer Heathrow Connect electric trains were destroyed by private rolling stock companies because they do not suit the current infrastructure, while at the same time old trains are still being run.
In the last 10 years, the private rolling stock companies have paid out around £3.6 billion in dividends to their shareholders, £360 million per average year. This money could instead be used to reduce passenger rail fares by 4.1%. Alternatively, according to the RMT, rolling stock dividends between 2012 and 2018 could have paid for 700 new trains.
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