Is Labour's Railway White Paper good government policy?

Well it's a useful fiction to compare to reality as it unfolds in the new Brexit/Covid-19 world of the future.
I guess it is the result of a lot of work by left-leaning think tanks and academics, with a layer of unionism on top.
It's also more detail than I ever remember Labour (or any political party) putting out as a master plan for the railways.

In recent times Labour has never allowed an "arm's length" operation of the railways, and it fact it was Brown and Darling who gave us DfT micro-management of rail.
The battle is always with the Treasury, who despise big-spending sectors like rail, which deliver uncertain returns only over a long period.
On top of that, we are heading into two black holes - Brexit and the massive public debt of Covid-19.
The Labour plan doesn't really set the economic and fiscal context which we are now in.
The tens of billions now being spent on the fallout from Covid-19 is money that won't be coming in rail's direction, and rail's own coffers are emptying fast.

Just as the Treasury is resisting Tory fares reform because of the revenue impact, they will surely baulk at a wholesale reorganisation of rail without cast iron guarantees (the sort that Mick Cash keeps demanding) that the change will be "revenue/cost neutral".
The paper keeps referring to practice in Germany with Deutsche Bahn.
This organisation is being readied for tendering of passenger services, and freight is private as it is here.
It is also in deep financial difficulty with repeated budgetary problems, and the difficulty of getting agreement from the Länder for investment and specific projects.
Not exactly a good comparator for a new GB Rail organisation.

There is really rather too much detail on the proposed organisation of GB Rail.
A regional/mainline split is sensible and will map on to the devolved authorities (though it will mean splitting the GWR operation, for instance).
As far as I can see HS1/2 are not mentioned, certainly not in strategic terms.
Somebody has had a fine time "playing trains" and largely reinventing BR's Regions/Sectors.
I think that sort of thing could have been left until the principles are agreed - which they won't be.
I also don't see how we get to a national zonal fare system without major surgery.
I can guess what long-term HR planning means - abolishing DOO, as in the recent Labour manifesto.
Transferring all employment to GB Rail also means union ability to bring the railway to a complete halt again.
Insourcing contractors to Network Rail requires NR to be able to offer continuous work - that's not so easy with stop-start investment policies.

All very interesting, but so much waste paper seeing as Labour are not going to be in a position to implement it for at least 5 years.
I think I'd call it a Green Paper (for discussion) rather than anything a government would enact, which is what we expect from Williams/DfT.
For good or ill, Grant Shapps is the one we have to watch, not Andy McDonald.

Moderator note: Split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/labours-railway-white-paper.202919/


I haven't read the document in detail, but I've skimmed through it. My overall impression is there are some good ideas in it, and some careful thinking that has gone into it - but it's fundamentally flawed because it's not coming from a place of 'How can we make the railways better? Let's examine the options (With one possible option being, nationalisation)'. Rather, it's coming from a place of 'We want to nationalise the railways. What reasons can we come up with to justify doing so'. And that's not the way you make good policy.

What Labour say they will do and what they will actually do are quite different. It is great to hear that they will be doing more electrification but where will those funds come from and will they ever happen, I haven't read the paper yet but from reading these posts they haven't said where they will electrify.

Ironically the micromanaging the DfT has done in recent times has done more damage.

DynamicSpirit said:

I haven't read the document in detail, but I've skimmed through it. My overall impression is there are some good ideas in it, and some careful thinking that has gone into it - but it's fundamentally flawed because it's not coming from a place of 'How can we make the railways better? Let's examine the options (With one possible option being, nationalisation)'. Rather, it's coming from a place of 'We want to nationalise the railways. What reasons can we come up with to justify doing so'. And that's not the way you make good policy.

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That is the case with many on the left though unfortunately, things are always driven by ideology rather than a factual basis and that frustrates me no end as someone who cares far more about the quality of service than who owns it.

I remember many years ago when there was a council owned bus operator and a private operator who used to operate in a certain town in the UK. The local Labour MP jumped up and down when it was revealed that a fifth of the private operators services ran late. He was in the press calling for the services to be transferred to the local council because of a poor standard of service.

Meanwhile the local council operator had nearly double the percentage of services running late. I asked the local MP if I was going to make any representation for the route to be handed to someone else and he wasn't the slightest bit interested in it but continued to publicly call for the private operator to lose their routes, despite the fact the public operator was doing even worse.

The point I am trying to make is that some people on the left are far more obsessed with who is running the service than the actual quality of the service and they will often call out private companies for doing a bad job of things, claiming they are only interested in the service quality, whilst ignoring local authority owned ones who are doing even worse to mislead the public.

In this case it's clear that Labour have focused on ideology above quality of service, they do not want to improve public transport, they just want to nationalise it and are looking for excuses to do so in a form of confirmation bias.

As exciting as all this sounds, we are stuck with the Tories for next 5 years , and I'll wager probably the next 10 as unbelievably Boris will come out of this crisis smelling of roses, be compared to Churchill etc and will go down as our greatest ever leader. As crazy as this sounds, the way populism has taken over this country, I really cannot foresee any other outcome.
So sadly, all this (sensible) talk of nationalised , integrated railways will come to nowt.

If this is an insight into the Labour brain pool, then thankfully its going to be decades before they can think about getting back into power.

I am glad Labour have finally acknowledged that EU Law prevents a return to the British Rail days of full state ownership of the railways and it wasn't a policy that the EU was going to change.

Some slightly misleading figures though they mention from 1979 until 1996 there were only 8 strikes. They forget to mention that 1979 was the year that Thatcher came to power and before that Labour were in government. Also there hasn't been a national strike since 1994 which happened under British Rail.

Also they think nationalisation will increase passenger numbers however if a nationalised railway was so great why are passenger numbers massively up since privatisation?

All of the document seems a bit unrealistic and voters just don't believe railway pledges from Labour or the Conservatives anymore as they rarely happen as planned. For example I was talking to a friend of mine in Leek and he mentioned how Labour was going to reopen Leek station. I then asked him how many times that had come up at elections as it's been mentioned since the 1990s however despite how many politicians from both parties are "calling for Leek Station reopened" voters there just don't believe it anymore. It's the same with the Leicester to Burton upon Trent line and the Matlock to Buxton line it's just not going to happen.

Most of the issues with the railway are not things which nationalisation will fix. Infact, it risks making it all a lot worse and a lot more expensive (nationalised firms always have much higher wages and staff do less work as the unions are unrealistic. Also things cost a lot more. You can get things cheaper in a local shop but you can't buy that stuff as it has to be competitively tendered for and people put in stupid high bids to scam gov agencies). When will Labour and 'WeOwnIt' realise that?

The fares issue is one of the biggest things it seems. That is due to legacy issues of train operators controlling fares on certain sections of track, devolution meaning outside of the main area, TOCs fares rise drastically (TFW, i'm looking at you here!), or general fare increases dictated by government.
If NR sorted themselves out, things wouldn't cost as much and fare rises wouldn't need to be so much. They waste so much money having 100 meetings for a weekend blockade. Just get the job done and pay for the materials at the best possible price (not via tender as that leads to increased prices compared of if they went out to a local shop for example).

For those winging about connections, a nationalised railway will not help that. If we hold a train in Halifax so you can get home, 30 people behind will miss their connection at Bradford. That won't change.


I don't get what Labour thinks will be improved. All the possible improvements have a huge disadvantage meaning it's not worth doing.

markymark2000 said:

Most of the issues with the railway are not things which nationalisation will fix. Infact, it risks making it all a lot worse and a lot more expensive (nationalised firms always have much higher wages and staff do less work as the unions are unrealistic. Also things cost a lot more. You can get things cheaper in a local shop but you can't buy that stuff as it has to be competitively tendered for and people put in stupid high bids to scam gov agencies). When will Labour and 'WeOwnIt' realise that?

The fares issue is one of the biggest things it seems. That is due to legacy issues of train operators controlling fares on certain sections of track, devolution meaning outside of the main area, TOCs fares rise drastically (TFW, i'm looking at you here!), or general fare increases dictated by government.
If NR sorted themselves out, things wouldn't cost as much and fare rises wouldn't need to be so much. They waste so much money having 100 meetings for a weekend blockade. Just get the job done and pay for the materials at the best possible price (not via tender as that leads to increased prices compared of if they went out to a local shop for example).

For those winging about connections, a nationalised railway will not help that. If we hold a train in Halifax so you can get home, 30 people behind will miss their connection at Bradford. That won't change.


I don't get what Labour thinks will be improved. All the possible improvements have a huge disadvantage meaning it's not worth doing.

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Have you seen the latest update on the famous “Ford Factor” in Modern Railways where RF now reckons it costs four times more to run a privatised system as it currently is compared to what BR used to get paid to run the show?

I am also a bit bothered that you seem to think decent wages and conditions for rail workers are somehow a bad thing and that if you treat people well they will all fall asleep at work! The suggestion is that German style industrial relations might apply, nothing Marxist there despite Karl being a Trier lad !!

Germany hasn't exactly been blessed with good industrial relations recently - eg prolonged DB drivers' strikes in the last year.
It also hasn't got as good a safety record as we have.

All the EU "state" railways are following the Fourth Railway Package which has the intention of breaking the monopoly they have enjoyed in the past.
DB, SNCF, FS, Renfe and the rest are, or soon will be, nothing like the cosy centralised setup in Labour's proposals.
Multiple operators, competed contracts and open access is the order of the day.

LNW-GW Joint said:

Multiple operators, competed contracts and open access is the order of the day.

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Now yes but post the COVID-19 crisis?

I'm not sure whether the modern way of doing anything in this country is comparable to how things were previously, with modern health and safety standards, environmental protection issues, greater worker rights etc

I imagine a 2020 nationalised British Rail would be significantly more expensive to run than the 1980s version.

Mikey C said:

I'm not sure whether the modern way of doing anything in this country is comparable to how things were previously, with modern health and safety standards, environmental protection issues, greater worker rights etc

I imagine a 2020 nationalised British Rail would be significantly more expensive to run than the 1980s version.

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Quite; and many factors are nothing to do with privatisation, fragmentation, franchising, devolution and similar 'reasons'.

To take just two themes:

Firstly in the early 1990s trains were far less sophisticated than they are nowadays. Contrast a fairly spartan Class 150 or 319 with a modern unit. Air conditioning, better collision resistance, improved fire retardancy, TPWS, OTMR, GSM-R, CCTV, CIS, ERTMS, much bigger door stand-backs to expedite boarding and alighting, accessible toilets, wheelchair spaces, more luggage stacks, plug sockets, wi-fi, regenerative braking, sometimes bi-mode, better power-weight ratio, higher maximum speed, computer diagnostics and so forth.

Quite apart from higher initial cost these arrangements often mean fewer seats per vehicle, so a larger 'equivalent' fleet, more extensive testing, commissioning, compatibility assurance and training, etc.

Secondly, the entire growth phenomenon. Route upgrades, platform extensions, power supply reinforcement, additional depots and stabling capacity, double-decking or alternative extension of station car parks. Quite apart from the significant direct engineering cost these schemes now have to meet far higher planning, consultation, environmental and other standards. It is far more often necessary to invoke really complex statutory processes such as Transport and Works outside the old railway boundary.

8H said:

Have you seen the latest update on the famous “Ford Factor” in Modern Railways where RF now reckons it costs four times more to run a privatised system as it currently is compared to what BR used to get paid to run the show?

I am also a bit bothered that you seem to think decent wages and conditions for rail workers are somehow a bad thing and that if you treat people well they will all fall asleep at work! The suggestion is that German style industrial relations might apply, nothing Marxist there despite Karl being a Trier lad !!

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I fully support decent wages but do they deserve some of the wages? That is the bit I dispute.

Privatised railways are better. Look at how well Virgin did on the WCML and Arriva did at ATW. It's all about who you give the franchise too. Give it to a shoddy firm and things go tits up and it costs more. Public agencies waste money on trivial things, wages go silly high with little justification for it and all of councillors start their unrealistic demands which also push up the cost of the ops.

Network rail and the DFT are perfect a examples of how bad public agencies are.

markymark2000 said:

I fully support decent wages but do they deserve some of the wages? That is the bit I dispute.

Privatised railways are better. Look at how well Virgin did on the WCML and Arriva did at ATW. It's all about who you give the franchise too. Give it to a shoddy firm and things go tits up and it costs more. Public agencies waste money on trivial things, wages go silly high with little justification for it and all of councillors start their unrealistic demands which also push up the cost of the ops.

Network rail and the DFT are perfect a examples of how bad public agencies are.

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But conversely look how badly NX did at East Coast and how well TfL Rail is doing.

Its about getting in the right people not necessarily going hell for leather for a particular model of ownership.

With the Virgin v ATW case, I think more of that is down to the fact that ATW was let on a (long!) contract that didn't require them to do anything, so they didn't do anything whilst Virgin had incentives to do well that ATW didn't (at first at least!) and was subject to multiple franchise agreements over it's tenure, requiring different approaches each time

markymark2000 said:

Public agencies waste money on trivial things

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For example BR got a patent on a flying saucer.

Dr Hoo said:

It is far more often necessary to invoke really complex statutory processes such as Transport and Works outside the old railway boundary.

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Successive governments often suggest a willingness to streamline & accelerate various planning procedures to help stimulate growth but to my knowledge haven’t so far delivered anything meaningful

Energy said:

For example BR got a patent on a flying saucer.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_flying_saucer has a link to the patent application

markymark2000 said:

Most of the issues with the railway are not things which nationalisation will fix. Infact, it risks making it all a lot worse and a lot more expensive (nationalised firms always have much higher wages and staff do less work as the unions are unrealistic. Also things cost a lot more. You can get things cheaper in a local shop but you can't buy that stuff as it has to be competitively tendered for and people put in stupid high bids to scam gov agencies). When will Labour and 'WeOwnIt' realise that?

The fares issue is one of the biggest things it seems. That is due to legacy issues of train operators controlling fares on certain sections of track, devolution meaning outside of the main area, TOCs fares rise drastically (TFW, i'm looking at you here!), or general fare increases dictated by government.
If NR sorted themselves out, things wouldn't cost as much and fare rises wouldn't need to be so much. They waste so much money having 100 meetings for a weekend blockade. Just get the job done and pay for the materials at the best possible price (not via tender as that leads to increased prices compared of if they went out to a local shop for example).

For those winging about connections, a nationalised railway will not help that. If we hold a train in Halifax so you can get home, 30 people behind will miss their connection at Bradford. That won't change.


I don't get what Labour thinks will be improved. All the possible improvements have a huge disadvantage meaning it's not worth doing.

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I doubt this will be at the front of Starmer's Labour to do list for a long time. Plus given the Williams Review is likely to suggest management contracts from all the rumblings, it'll be a while before anything like this can remotely be viewed as achievable.

Carlisle said:

Successive governments often suggest a willingness to streamline & accelerate various planning procedures to help stimulate growth but to my knowledge haven’t so far delivered anything meaningful

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Actually, the Brown government set up the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which was beginning to bear fruit before the Coalition government axed it. The idea was simple, take away from local authorities the ability to rule on infrastructure that was of national interest, instead do this at a national level. Local authorities were, of course, still encouraged to make representations but the idea was that a national project should be a national decision. Main railway lines were included in this, as were motorways, powerstations above a certain megawattage, 'super-sewers', etc.

SuperNova said:

I doubt this will be at the front of Starmer's Labour to do list for a long time. Plus given the Williams Review is likely to suggest management contracts from all the rumblings, it'll be a while before anything like this can remotely be viewed as achievable.

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If ticketing is addressed (in several stages as to big a mess to sort in one go, so a few years) then a lot of the need to do anything will have been removed from the Labour report.

There are plenty of ways of addressing problems without nationalisation.

markymark2000 said:

I fully support decent wages but do they deserve some of the wages? That is the bit I dispute.

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If you're worried about wage inflation I'm really quite surprised you support privatisation. They don't make a big thing of it, but it's has been brilliant for train drivers; they've been able to massively increase their pay without striking simply because they can quit and join other operators. It's not a question of whether they 'deserve' a certain wage; the current (semi-)privatised system gives certain workers considerable leverage in pay negotiation. And if you think that pegging back employees' wages to what they 'deserve' is a good thing, are you applying the same rule to the CEOs and owners?

markymark2000 said:

Privatised railways are better. Look at how well Virgin did on the WCML and Arriva did at ATW. It's all about who you give the franchise too. Give it to a shoddy firm and things go tits up and it costs more.

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Virgin only did a good job on WCML because the government stepped in to fund the WCML modernisation programme which had utterly failed under Railtrack's stewardship. Yes, some TOCs have managed to run a good service. The best was probably Chiltern, which was able to expand, although that was largely a continuation of a long term programme started under BR. GNER was really good for customer service, even the most die hard RMT reps acknowledge that. And yes, once the WCML modernisation was complete (thanks to £9billion from the government) Virgin did a decent enough job. But there are obvious counterexamples.

What you fail to acknowledge is that privatisation massively delayed or cancelled other planned infrastructure upgrades. Thameslink '2000' ended up being delayed by 20 years! BR were set to upgrade and electrify the Transpennine route in the mid to late 1990s and it still hasn't happened. Electrification of lines had been rolling on from the mid-80s but was stopped dead by privatisation. The hiatus in ordering trains during the privatisation process all but did for our train manufacturers. Only now is that capacity being rebuilt, albeit by foreign owned companies.

markymark2000 said:

Public agencies waste money on trivial things, wages go silly high with little justification for it and all of councillors start their unrealistic demands which also push up the cost of the ops.

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Huge generalisation and mostly not true. I've seen massive wastefulness within private companies. Disruptive reorganisations every 2 to 3 years just so management can show that they are doing something.

markymark2000 said:

Network rail and the DFT are perfect a examples of how bad public agencies are.

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So what would you do, bring back Railtrack? I agree DfT need removing from any operational control of the railways but the current privatised structure leaves the railways without any guiding mind, requiring DfT to assume a role which it is not suited for.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant. Covid 19 has accelerated what was already happening - franchising has been dying for years and it's now dead. It will not be resurrected. Maybe we'll see concessions like TfL rail and Merseyrail. The railway (and a good deal else) is going to require massive government support over the next few years.

mikeg said:

Actually, the Brown government set up the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which was beginning to bear fruit before the Coalition government axed it. The idea was simple, take away from local authorities the ability to rule on infrastructure that was of national interest, instead do this at a national level. Local authorities were, of course, still encouraged to make representations but the idea was that a national project should be a national decision. Main railway lines were included in this, as were motorways, powerstations above a certain megawattage, 'super-sewers', etc.

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But we do now have a National Infrastructure Commission and the concept of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects that are 'determined' by the state. Surely the concept has been implemented?

(I know that we can quibble about the effectiveness of the change but the principle has been established.)

quantinghome said:

Huge generalisation and mostly not true. I've seen massive wastefulness within private companies. Disruptive reorganisations every 2 to 3 years just so management can show that they are doing something.

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Are you aware of how many reorganisations Network Rail have had? Generally speaking TOCs may have one when the franchise changes hands, but is typically only minor. Not sure what TOC has had disruptive reorganisations every 2-3 years; please elucidate.

Complete devolution for railway in Wales would be a bad idea as too many of the services cross into England even ones between destinations in Wales.

the sniper said:

Only if you ignore that the likes of GWR, Cross Country, TPE, West Coast and LNER serve either Wales and/or Scotland in addition to England.

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It's not uncommon for state-owned operators to change their names either. ÖBB (Österreichische Bundesbahnen) used to be BBÖ (Bundesbahn Österreich) as a case in point. Then of course you have DB pre-unification etc...

the sniper said:

If re-nationalisation were ever to happen I see adopting the 'National Rail' name for it as an entity being a no-brainer. It's already used in common parlance. Going back to using 'British Rail' seems like such a retrograde step.

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If, and only if re-nationalisation were to happen, all of those franchises (plus Caledonian Sleeper, EMR (Intercity) and the open access operations out of KGX & EUS) would probably (read: ideally) be brought back under the INTERCITY brolly.

HH said:

Are you aware of how many reorganisations Network Rail have had? Generally speaking TOCs may have one when the franchise changes hands, but is typically only minor. Not sure what TOC has had disruptive reorganisations every 2-3 years; please elucidate.

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I'm speaking of the companies I have worked for, all of which were private sector, none of which were a TOC. Yes NR have had reorganisations, as did BR. The problem affects both public and private sectors.

But that's the point: the idea that 'inefficiency' somehow uniquely affects public sector organisations and not private ones is for the birds. It's a perennial notion on the political right wing, but there's no real evidence for it. Certainly when it came to rail privatisation, it became clear rather quickly that BR had run a fairly tight ship and there were no easy savings.

Another more general point is that striving for efficiency often comes at the expense of adaptability and ability to respond to change.

markymark2000 said:

I fully support decent wages but do they deserve some of the wages? That is the bit I dispute.

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What the media never tell you is the productivity improvements that come with pay deals. Which is what they often are by the way - deals; negotiated agreements beneficial to both parties. This is different to a 'pay rise', which is being given a pay rise.

For example, LNER drivers are now more than twice as productive as under British Rail. Not only that, but the basic wage they were paid under BR, was only about half of what they took home, because they got paid loads of enhancements on top - mileage payments was a big one, Irregular & unsocial hours payment, DOO payment if they fetched a train from the sidings or depot. Two drivers were needed above 110mph.

Things are a lot more flexible now with regard to being allocated a duty when spare, one driver over 110mph, no mileage or any other payments - it's all wrapped up in the salary.

This is why whenever the media compare the £11k BR salary with the £68k now doesn't tell the whole story at all.
Which is two drivers were needed who were actually taking home about £22k each, are now 25 years later replaced with one much more flexible worker who is carrying around more heavily loaded trains- so is in fact EVEN MORE productive. That's right, £44k is the real figure to use in this comparison - MASSIVELY different from £11k.

Funny how it's never put across like that isn't it?
Perhaps it doesn't fit the media's agenda?

Four day week is other one. Like it's working less than five days.
If you don't have to have unproductive 'booking on time' to read safety critical notices at the start of the shift or a PNB (physical needs break) on a fifth day, then that is time that can be used productively instead in a four day week.
So actually - it's more work!

Again, it's never put across like that though is it?

whoosh said:

...Two drivers were needed above 110mph....

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Was this still the case in the last year or so of the BR era?