Network Rail to be broken up?

PHILIPE · 1 Apr 2015

I recall when privatisation and the creation of Railtrack emerged, Railtrack announced in a blaze of glory all the things they were going to do. One was spending XXX£ on station improvements. What it was turned out to be was building retail outlets to get some rent in to make money.

RailUK Forums

Tetchytyke · 2 Apr 2015

Robertj21a said:
Presumably, you have no facts, no evidence, in fact nothing at all to support such ridiculous statements ?

I can think of two words ("mail" and "royal") and approximately 1,000,000,000 reasons to support such a statement.

Not to mention the privatisation of the probation service, where people out of prison on licence will now be monitored by a self-service checkout instead of a skilled and experienced probation professional. I suppose the only saving grace is that they won't be out committing crime if they're wrestling with a machine that thinks you have an unidentified item in the bagging area.

The historical evidence is that the only people who benefit from privatisation are the financiers. A little bit trickles down to people with pensions (who again, by default, are already relatively wealthy) but not all that much.

LNW-GW Joint said:
These are both essentially Canadian public sector funds invested for their members, and are hardly Osborne's chums

The largest "priority investor" for Royal Mail was Lansdowne Capital. The founder of Lansdowne is someone who has donated the thick end of a million quid to the Tories, and the strategic director at Lansdowne was best man at Osborne's wedding.

All pure coincidence, I am sure.

D60 said:
Our govt "privatises" things, because eu single market competition rules require state-owned infrastructure, utilities and public services to be "opened up to competition"...

Guess which country lobbied for these changes, and guess which flavour Government we had when that lobbying was taking place.

D60 · 2 Apr 2015

Arctic Troll said:
I can think of two words ("mail" and "royal") and approximately 1,000,000,000 reasons to support such a statement.

Not to mention the privatisation of the probation service, where people out of prison on licence will now be monitored by a self-service checkout instead of a skilled and experienced probation professional. I suppose the only saving grace is that they won't be out committing crime if they're wrestling with a machine that thinks you have an unidentified item in the bagging area.

The historical evidence is that the only people who benefit from privatisation are the financiers. A little bit trickles down to people with pensions (who again, by default, are already relatively wealthy) but not all that much.

The largest "priority investor" for Royal Mail was Lansdowne Capital. The founder of Lansdowne is someone who has donated the thick end of a million quid to the Tories, and the strategic director at Lansdowne was best man at Osborne's wedding.

All pure coincidence, I am sure.

Guess which country lobbied for these changes, and guess which flavour Government we had when that lobbying was taking place.

All largely true, I'm sure..

It is certainly true that the Single European Act which replaced the 'Common Market' with the 'Single Market' and its accompanying requirement to 'open up public services to competition', was signed by the Thatcher govt in, I believe 1982, and coincided with the subsequent era of great public sell-offs..

But then we see during the 2000s, a Labour govt implementing 'market reforms' in the NHS, and the early stages of 'liberalisation' of postal services... All part of the same over-riding agenda...

Anyway, if it was all some ideological "public vs private" battle, then it hasn't been too successful, since so many of our utilities, public services and infrastructure are now back in state ownership of some form or another, just mostly those of other countries.. (the notable current exception being Network Rail, until after the election at least..!)

And yes, small numbers of individuals were personally enriched along the way..

Bald Rick · 2 Apr 2015

Arctic Troll said:
The historical evidence is that the only people who benefit from privatisation are the financiers.

Some privatisations haven't worked. But many have benefited plenty of people. The privatisation of BT for example, which is far more effective, efficient and customer focussed than if once was (possibly hard to believe fir the last one, granted). And many of the financiers are the general public.

yorksrob · 2 Apr 2015

Bald Rick said:
Some privatisations haven't worked. But many have benefited plenty of people. The privatisation of BT for example, which is far more effective, efficient and customer focussed than if once was (possibly hard to believe fir the last one, granted). And many of the financiers are the general public.

However, I would argue that we reached the bottom of the privatisation barrel probably before the railways.

Royal Mail - haven't noticed anything other than the price of stamps going up more than usual. Utilities - overall, cheaper prices than the rest of Europe, but at the expense of sweated assets, and opaque pricing structures that have required continued state intervention ever since, bus deregulation - no coincidence that the only place bus usage has gone up since, is London, where it didn't happen.

Perhaps the most comical was the privatisation of the 192 directory enquiries service, which led to a rash of annoying adverts and promptly halved the number of directory calls almost overnight.

eisenach · 3 Apr 2015

Bald Rick said:
Some privatisations haven't worked. But many have benefited plenty of people. The privatisation of BT for example, which is far more effective, efficient and customer focussed than if once was (possibly hard to believe fir the last one, granted). And many of the financiers are the general public.

That's not the BT I know ! Our neigbour had to wait a week for the overhead line to her property, which had been damaged by a fallen branch in a storm, to be repaired. And that was after the buck-passing, non-call-backs and general difficulty in getting hold of anyone who would do something, all of which filled several days first, not to mention the difficulty of reporting a line outage when you have no phone and the mobile coverage is erratic to say the least. Go on, tell me we shouldn't live in the sticks !

Agent_c · 3 Apr 2015

Bald Rick said:
Some privatisations haven't worked. But many have benefited plenty of people. The privatisation of BT for example, which is far more effective, efficient and customer focussed than if once was (possibly hard to believe fir the last one, granted). And many of the financiers are the general public.

BT Customer focused? Laugh you are having, right?

Go talk to their wholesale and openreach customers about "SFI"s - BT charging its customers to fix faults within the BT network, then we'll talk.

Hyphen · 3 Apr 2015

Agent_c said:
Go talk to their wholesale and openreach customers about "SFI"s - BT charging its customers to fix faults within the BT network, then we'll talk.

The BT privatisation and more recent spinoff of Openreach is an unmitigated disaster, and seems to work for nobody except BT's shareholders.

From the perspective of the MD of a small British ISP: (warning this won't make much sense to non-techies)

http://www.revk.uk/2015/03/being-fair-to-customers.html

fandroid · 4 Apr 2015

How to ensure that NR is efficient is a tricky one. Public/private/co-op/DIY the problem is the same. Without being able to do fairly simple comparisons it's just about impossible for anyone in charge to decide whether things need to be improved or not. BR did it (in the end) by making international comparisons. I really don't know why the top dogs in this country find it so distasteful to do serious benchmarking with other European networks. Global companies do it totally automatically. You would never get the likes of Anheuser-Busch InBev (the worlds biggest brewer) not knowing how every one of its national subsidiaries compares with every other one. I suspect that NR will be broken up, so that the bean-counters can have an easy life comparing one bit with another, and allow the English Tories to point out how 'inefficient' the Scottish and Welsh bits (ruled by other parties) are.

Agent_c · 4 Apr 2015

Hyphen said:
The BT privatisation and more recent spinoff of Openreach is an unmitigated disaster, and seems to work for nobody except BT's shareholders.

From the perspective of the MD of a small British ISP: (warning this won't make much sense to non-techies)

http://www.revk.uk/2015/03/being-fair-to-customers.html

RevK was who I had in mind when writing that...

D60 · 4 Apr 2015

fandroid said:
How to ensure that NR is efficient is a tricky one. Public/private/co-op/DIY the problem is the same. Without being able to do fairly simple comparisons it's just about impossible for anyone in charge to decide whether things need to be improved or not. BR did it (in the end) by making international comparisons. I really don't know why the top dogs in this country find it so distasteful to do serious benchmarking with other European networks. Global companies do it totally automatically. You would never get the likes of Anheuser-Busch InBev (the worlds biggest brewer) not knowing how every one of its national subsidiaries compares with every other one. I suspect that NR will be broken up, so that the bean-counters can have an easy life comparing one bit with another, and allow the English Tories to point out how 'inefficient' the Scottish and Welsh bits (ruled by other parties) are.

From what I remember of the era (the later 70s and 80s), I seem to recall that international comparisons were made... and I recall it being said that in comparison with continental state railway systems, BR could be considered (at the time) highly efficient (comparatively) in making the best use of the restricted resources made available to it by the Treasury, in comparison with its continental comparitors... This of course was not the narrative offered by politicians and the media with their own agendas to follow, much as we see today with the NHS and what's left of the Royal Mail... And with regard to the Scots running their own railway (operated by the Dutch state railway), and the Welsh running theirs (operated by the German state railway), it is clear that the 'divide and rule' agenda is well advanced..

High Dyke · 4 Apr 2015

yorksrob said:
Some sort of accounting fudge a la "not for profit company" may be in order again.

So why do Whitehall mandarins, if that is who is behind this story... insist on trying to re-invent the wheel?

LNW-GW Joint · 4 Apr 2015

High Dyke said:
So why do Whitehall mandarins, if that is who is behind this story... insist on trying to re-invent the wheel?

I imagine they are trying to make a meaningful dent in the government's public debt, AAA rating etc.
The aim would be to make NR saleable, and then sell it, like ports/airports etc.
ln its current form it is probably not saleable.
Too much government debt, and we get to be like Greece.
The same pressures would be on Labour or whoever comes next.

D60 · 4 Apr 2015

High Dyke said:
So why do Whitehall mandarins, if that is who is behind this story... insist on trying to re-invent the wheel?

Because Whitehall is a branch office of a supranational system of govt, and obediently abides by its every directive.. (usually with 'gold-plated' knobs on)..

yorksrob · 4 Apr 2015

High Dyke said:
So why do Whitehall mandarins, if that is who is behind this story... insist on trying to re-invent the wheel?

If only I knew

Realistically the infrastructure can't be truly privatised because of the level of state investment - and he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

State ownership is out of fashion and has been for the last thirty years, so the only viable alternative is a sort of arms length half way house.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

D60 said:
Because Whitehall is a branch office of a supranational system of govt, and obediently abides by its every directive.. (usually with 'gold-plated' knobs on)..

We need to learn the art of calmly ignoring/bypassing European directives that our continental partners excel at. Unfortunately, as the European Commission likes to behave like the Tory party with exotic accents, and our two main political parties are Tory and Tory lite, this seems unlikely to happen.

ChiefPlanner · 4 Apr 2015

PHILIPE said:
I recall when privatisation and the creation of Railtrack emerged, Railtrack announced in a blaze of glory all the things they were going to do. One was spending XXX£ on station improvements. What it was turned out to be was building retail outlets to get some rent in to make money.

Railtrack had to produce a Network Management Statement (NMS) - I have the first one somewhere in the garage - about an inch thick , packed with exciting options for massive investment and betterment. The likes of "Rail" really bought this vision .....

None of it funded by government or operators come to that .....mind you , this was 1996 - another century and another world.

D60 · 4 Apr 2015

yorksrob said:
If only I knew

Realistically the infrastructure can't be truly privatised because of the level of state investment - and he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

State ownership is out of fashion and has been for the last thirty years, so the only viable alternative is a sort of arms length half way house.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

We need to learn the art of calmly ignoring/bypassing European directives that our continental partners excel at. Unfortunately, as the European Commission likes to behave like the Tory party with exotic accents, and our two main political parties are Tory and Tory lite, this seems unlikely to happen.

Good answers.. and highly pragmatic... And therefore not on any foreseeable agenda while our railways, and other public services, utilities and infrastructures are regarded as a 'common european resource', and 'open' to being plundered almost at will by those who are so much better at being 'european'..

merlodlliw · 6 Apr 2015

NR has already been broken up,"Network Rail Wales exists" , plus the Minister for Rail in Wales wants more control of the Network Rail Welsh operations,following NRs cock ups on the Rossett to Saltney redouble and others.

The Planner · 6 Apr 2015

Its Network Rail, they are not separate.

45107 · 6 Apr 2015

ChiefPlanner said:
Railtrack had to produce a Network Management Statement (NMS) - I have the first one somewhere in the garage - about an inch thick , packed with exciting options for massive investment and betterment. The likes of "Rail" really bought this vision .....

None of it funded by government or operators come to that .....mind you , this was 1996 - another century and another world.

How much of it has actually been completed ?

merlodlliw · 7 Apr 2015

The Planner said:
Its Network Rail, they are not separate.

It is Network Rail,but it has its own Management based in Cardiff,which is a big change.

The Planner · 7 Apr 2015

All the routes do, LNW, LNE, Western, Anglia etc etc...still one company where Mark Carne calls the shots though.

LNW-GW Joint · 7 Apr 2015

merlodlliw said:
It is Network Rail,but it has its own Management based in Cardiff,which is a big change.

I think there is only one set of NR accounts, and all the policies and planning are aggregated at UK level.
NR Wales is a Route not a company. It doesn't have any more autonomy than the other 9 routes.
I'm not even sure it is fully separated from the previous Western and LNW routes - there might still be shared operations, for the GW electrification project for instance.
NR Scotland is more separate geographically but the same corporate rules apply.
Breaking up NR would have all sorts of implications, not all of them favourable.
Does Wales want to service its share of NR debt (£5 billion or so)?
Other rail bodies like ORR and RAIB are also UK-wide, with no talk of devolution for them.

Network Rail to be broken up?

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