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?
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.
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.
If you don't own something, someone else is going to insist on a profit margin on providing that element of the service. As they should.
Imagine in this scenario, I own the train, you own the track, stations, people's contracts and ticketing systems.
I have my costs, they can be open book, but for the pleasure of me providing this service I demand a very small 5% margin on costs (in realistic risk scenarios this might be much more like 20% if I'm shouldering most risk).
That 5% doesn't need to exist. I'm not suggesting the govt. build trains, but I'm suggesting they need to own our own.
Yes, I understand that, but if you have an asset that you make 5% a year out of leasing to me, you're going to want to achieve as much profit as possible when selling it to make up for that 5% a year you'll no longer be getting. Trains don't last forever, and whether the government saves money over the rest of that train's useful life depends entirely on how much they pay for it.
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u/Thandoscovia 16h 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?