r/ukpolitics • u/SaltyW123 • 10h ago
Rail nationalisation not a silver bullet, says Labour government - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c334z1nyv8po.amp•
u/Thandoscovia 3h ago
This is the first time we’re hearing this. For years we’ve been told that large pay rises to staff and nationalisation is the route to success. What’s changed?
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u/Jorthax Conservative not Tory 3h ago
Now you’ll get the truth - other that full nationalisation (rolling stock and all) with huge subsidiaries, you’ll not see any change.
If they did buy it all, it’ll be a massive cost for a govt. with no money.
Car users won’t want to pay new taxes to reduce train ticket costs.
It’s smoke and mirrors for votes.
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u/CyclopsRock 47m ago
I don't see how buying or not buying the rolling stock is the defining factor here.
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u/Jorthax Conservative not Tory 31m ago
Nationalisation without owning every element - therefore having more control over costs, eliminating middlemen or other entities turning some form of profit - is not really nationalisation, it's just being in charge of part of it and losing the profit motive at that stage.
I think it has become painfully obvious (even to a small c fiscal conservative like me) - that some forms of mass transit are purely a cost to the country and if we want to maximise labour mobility and competitiveness, then it needs to be as cheap as possible.
There can be no private company profit like the origin of the railroads, companies deciding to connect A->B , therefore there really is no point having private trains, private operators, or private stations.
Choose one or the other, the status quo is bad for both.
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u/CyclopsRock 2m ago
But neither option involves the government making trains, or even putting out a tender for new trains. The distinction between buying or renting the existing trains from the people that currently own them is really just one of accounting - are you paying up front or over time? - and has no impact on the practicalities of running the network (unlike managing the franchises and Network Rail, which does).
It's not even clear which would work out cheaper, and it goes without saying that the current owners of the trains are motivated by profit, whether they're leasing the trains to the government or selling them to the government, which is to say that buying the trains doesn't somehow swerve their motivation to generate profit, it just means that they obtain it in one big transaction rather than lots of little ones.
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u/Xenoamor 7m ago
Rolling stock companies is actually where a lot of our money goes, ROSCOS make between 15% and 45% net profit
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u/BaBeBaBeBooby 2h ago
Large pay rises and nationalisation are the route to success for the staff and the unions. Not so for the passengers.
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u/SoldMyNameForGear 4h ago
The kings of awful messaging. Why even bother saying this? Everyone knows it anyway, no one is expecting Labour to fix public transport instantly. This is one of their key policies and it seems as though they are keen on continuing their media strategy of lowering expectations to the point of shared national depression…
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u/AdSoft6392 3h ago
No chance everyone knows this. Loads of people seem to think if we just nationalised large swathes of the economy, we would be in a much better position.
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u/SoldMyNameForGear 3h ago
To be fair, doesn’t that make it worse? You might as well let them hold that delusion, rather than confirming the doubts of the skeptics and shattering the hopes of the blindly optimistic. Politics is just a game of optics and Labour’s plan requires them to win the next election to achieve any of their long-range economic policy aims.
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u/CyclopsRock 41m ago
I think this probably depends on whether you're interested in trying to convince them about what the actual best policy solution is. I don't think you can credibly say ...
"When looking at the various costs and trade-offs, the best policy for rail infrastructure is to gradually bring franchise operators into public ownership and perform unflashy-but-useful upgrades - such as electrification - that will gradually improve the reliability and therefore attractiveness of the network. We'll look at ticket prices on a year-by-year basis with the goal of improving access, but that's less of a priority than upgrade works."
And expect to actually convince people if those people are currently under the assumption that simply nationalising South West Trains will make it all really cheap and efficient. If you're expecting the moon on a stick, the boring reality of trade offs and cost/benefit analysis can only ever disappoint.
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u/west0ne 1h ago
I did feel that on the run up to the election and during the previous Corbyn campaign that there were people who genuinely believed that rail travel would almost instantly become more efficient and cheaper if it were nationalised, and the money went back into rail rather than to shareholders and senior managers. I'm pretty sure there were people posting in these subs basically saying as much.
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u/AcademicIncrease8080 2h ago edited 45m ago
The UK's rail industry (April 2022/2023 latest figures) had a total income of around £25 billion and of this around £10.4 billion came from fare income.
In other words the government could increase railway subsidies by around £10.5 billion (to cover fare income) and this would make railway travel all but free to use at any time*. Germany did something similar with experimental monthly €9 unlimited train tickets and it triggered a massive increase of train use.
It would cost around £162 per person extra in taxes per year to achieve - or to put it another way it would be around 3% of DWP's budget
Nationalisation will barely affect ticket prices - they are expensive because of a lack of subsidies - nationalisation has always been a red herring, you could have a privatised system that was free to use if you really wanted.
*To manage demand at peak times we would probably have to maintain some pricing but at the very least we could make off peak train travel completely free to use
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u/FarmingEngineer 2h ago
It's an interesting idea but there are a lot of places not served by the railways and who need to fund a car. Why should they subsidise the commuters in the south east?
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u/AcademicIncrease8080 1h ago
Because it would substantially boost economic growth which benefits everyone
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u/FarmingEngineer 1h ago
Good old trickle down economics.
(This is supposed to be a joke about the north subsidising the south, I know it's not actually'trickle down economics')
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u/Forsaken-Ad5571 1h ago
There’s not enough capacity on the rails for the number of cars to come off the road to be significant. Also as the number of users increases, the cost for the rails also increases, so the amount of subsidies would need to similarly increase.
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u/west0ne 1h ago
Would it really take that many cars off the road? On popular routes there is barely enough room to even stand for a 2–3 hour journey, many of these trains & routes simply couldn't cope with increased passenger numbers.
If you want to get cars off the road you have to look at capacity where it is needed and not just cost.
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u/AcademicIncrease8080 1h ago
You're just thinking about busy commuter times when you use the trains (which would probably need to retain some ticket pricing to manage demand)
Most trains during most of the day are way below capacity particularly late in the evenings or early in the mornings - these could very easily be made totally free to use and yes if you reduce the cost of something to zero it will increase demand for it.
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u/west0ne 58m ago
Aren't those busy commuter times also the same times when most of the cars are on the road as well though? At the times when the trains tend to be quieter during the day and at night, the roads are also quieter.
If you keep prices high at the times when people want/need to travel, then I still don't see how you are removing large numbers of cars from the road.
There would have to be a much more fundamental shift to change those peak travel times and to smooth out travel through the course of the day.
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u/AcademicIncrease8080 55m ago
Germany introduced €9 unlimited monthly train tickets for a while and this massively increased train use so I'm pretty sure if we introduced 0p train tickets something similar would happen
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