24 hours

28 May 2019

That's how much time we've got left to make sure rail review chief, Keith Williams, listens to passengers instead of private profits.

This is crunch time.

Keith has a really important decision to make - will he side with private companies who want to protect their profits by continuing to cause chaos on our railway? Or will he side with passengers and the public, who overwhelmingly prefer public ownership to more competition?

Honestly, the answer to that question is up to us.

How much pressure can we pile on Keith in these last crucial few days? How loud can we make passengers’ voices?

Private rail companies have been lobbying hard, trying to persuade Keith to recommend disastrous ‘Open Access’ in his review paper.

We’ve got to fight back - we can’t let them get away with making our broken railway even worse.

These disastrous proposals would see more private companies running services on our railway, in “competition” with each other on the same lines. In reality, on the railways, real competition is impossible - and not actually that helpful:

• Passengers just want to be able to get on the next service that turns up, instead of having to navigate more and more complex ticket options.

• If we let private companies pick and choose which services to provide, some rural areas will end up with no service at all, while the main intercity lines get more and more congested.

• And if you think the chaos of last summer was bad, wait until there are 3 times as many companies all trying to figure out their timetables and blaming each other for problems.

Public ownership is the only way to fix our broken railway - bringing all routes together under one unified, arms length company, run by professionals who genuinely have passengers’ best interests at heart - because they aren’t looking to make a profit!

It’s us vs the private rail companies, and we’re fighting for Keith William’s attention.

Make sure he hears us by signing the petition now, and sharing it with everyone you know.

The consultation closes on Friday the 31st, and we’ll be submitting our official We Own It response then.

We've got until 5pm on Friday to make this as big as possible!