Your editorial about Britain’s rail network (19 August) makes some good points, but the overall thrust that nationalisation is not the answer to its problems is faulty. The nationalisation of the railways in 1948 was an ideological act forced on Attlee’s government by a successful resolution from the NUR rail union at the 1944 Labour Conference. Herbert Morrison is known to have told the NUR: “You have lost us the election.” He was wrong, just as it would be wrong to suggest that the ideological privatisation of the railways in 1995 lost the Major government the 1997 election (it was already in serious trouble long before that).
Renationalisation is important to bring back together the parts of the network deliberately fragmented by the 1995 Act to make repeal as difficult as possible. Restoration of some form of the cost-effective late-BR management system would save money and considerable duplication of effort, permit in-house research and development and workshop production of equipment, and improve all-round efficiency. Under that system, a franchising of train services would be acceptable given operators with a contractual commitment to work with the owning authority to develop improved services, rather than maximising shareholder value. In other words a co-operative system, rather than either state capitalism or private mismanagement.
Les Summers
Author of British Railways Steam 1948-1970, Kidlington, Oxfordshire
Those claiming that transferring ownership of passenger rail operations from the private to the public sector would reduce commuter fares (Report, 18 August) are citing an urban myth. First, government sets the average price of season tickets, last year halting the decade-long switch of the balance of rail funding from taxpayers to passengers by pegging fare changes to no more than inflation, an approach this government has confirmed until the end of this parliament.
Second, excluding the commercial imperative to retain and attract passengers would bring an end to rail’s successful partnership between the public and private sectors that has generated a fivefold increase in money that operators return to government to reinvest in running more and better services, while profits have reduced in real terms.
Edward Welsh
Director of communications, Rail Delivery Group
Your report (13 August) on Network Rail’s predicament says that the Office for National Statistics is being blamed for bringing it back into the public sector in 2013. However, the real fault lies in Britain’s idiosyncratic borrowing rules. If Network Rail (or indeed, when it was publicly run, the East Coast mainline) were a German, Dutch or French rail company, set up as a public corporation, it would not suffer the same restrictions. This is because those countries, like the rest of Europe, only include direct government borrowing in their measures of national debt. That’s an important reason why their rail and energy companies can operate freely in the UK, while equivalent British companies are under constant Treasury scrutiny and have no commercial freedom. It’s the Treasury that should carry the blame for this, not the ONS.
John Perry
Masaya, Nicaragua