The above financial analysis is not quite right. What follows is fairly broad-brush, but on the right wicket (I refuse to use the term ball park)
In the financial year 2018/19 (the last year numbers were published), fares and other non Government income was £12.8bn, excluding the railways of NI (£0.1bn) and the one off sale of NRs tenanted estate (£1.5bn).
Industry cost was £19.1bn (excluding franchise payments to Government, and NI again). The costs of HS2 and Crossrail are excluded, except for where NR incurred the cost.
That makes the pre Covid ‘farepayer’ / taxpayer split at roughly 67/33.
Note that the taxpayer share totals £6.3bn, but only £4.3bn was direct support from Government. The £2bn difference was made up by the receipts of the one off sale of NRs tenanted estate (£1.5bn) and Government sanctioned borrowing by NR.
It’s all in here:
It’s a common mistake to assume that the % of fares income received during this year matches the % of passengers travelling. It doesn’t. As we know from elsewhere on these pages, the busier trains have tended to be short distance commuting into cities, and long distance leisure. Notable by its absence have been the high yield markets: long distance commuters and premium business travel. Importantly these markets are also much more likely to drive to the station and pay for parking. So, even when passenger numbers peaked at the hugh 30s% a month or so ago, income would barely have reached 30% - my guess is that it would have been high 20s%. It won’t be that now, and obviously wasn’t from April to July.
Therefore, assuming the industry is, at best, receiving 30% of normal ‘farepayer’ income, the other 70% is missing, and that is a £9bn hole in the income. (Which is where my £1m an hour comes from). To make it easy let’s say it reduces from £12.8bn to £4bn.
Industry cost will have fallen a little with fewer trains running, but not much. 5% at best, say just over a £1bn, to make it £18bn.
That makes the current industry finances, very roughly, £4bn farepayer income for £18bn cost, ie £14bn taxpayer support.
That makes the current ‘farepayer’ / taxpayer split at roughly 22/78. At best.
Although that £19bn still includes the circa £4bn of enhancements spending, of that was paused (or excluded, for reasons why are below) and with the other savings you suggest then the costs fall to £14bn with £4bn of farebox income, that's then a 28/72 split.
However if we'd shut the railways down during lockdown a lot of the costs would have still fallen at the door of the government. For instance the ROSCO's would have still required paying, furlough costs would have been significant, as would have been the loss of tax take.
That's before you consider that NHS staff wouldn't have been able to get to work out other secondary impacts from the railways not running.
Even if there's enhancement spending (and this is why is suggest that is excluded) that's based on future benefits (reduces costs, income, etc.), meaning that a few bad years during the playback period would have an impact on their viability but may only "cost" a fraction of the total spend over the longer term. Anyway chances are that there's significant benefits to the government from that spending (like the £500 million cost of eat out to help out had already brought measurable benefits of 50% to the government due to reduced furlough costs, increase tax take, etc.).
Also within previous years (and I was looking at the last few years) there's been some NR spending on Crossrail. However I'd also highlight it depends on where you look at ORR as to what numbers they include. In their net subsidy reports they do include HS2 spending figures.
Whilst I agree that this year is a nightmare on terms of costs vs income, staying at 30% to 40% of passengers going forwards (unless we continue with Covid restrictions long term) is unlikely.
We can debate what level of passenger use there's likely to be, however I've previously suggested that 70-85% of pre Covid levels within a year to 18 months could well be likely and getting back to 90% or more within 5 years could also be likely.
By deferring enhancement spending for 12 months that brings a significant saving from the gross subsidy number whilst we determine what the future rail use is likely to be whilst not really having a big impact on the ability to deliver future schemes. However it could be argued that song so from the £27bn road spending over the next 5 years is probably a better user of resources, as peak road use is likely to be impacted by Covid-19 just as much as rail.
For instance, there's less need to travel to a second home as you could just work from there as well as you could from within London and the SE. Likewise there's likely to be an impact on peak hour travel and business' need to travel for meetings.
The impact may only need to be a few percent to mean that we could build new roads in 3 years time rather than now. That's enough to allow us time to see how rail use is doing in 18 months time rather than cutting services and then finding that we were rash in doing so.
As we could be back to 95% within 3 years, and so we'd almost be back to current levels of service. If we've scrapped a list of trains then they would likely need to be replaced fairly quickly to meet demand. As such a deal to reduce last costs by using trains less but still using them rather than the government but leasing then at all may work well and gives you the option to bring them back into service if demand picks back up in the next few years (although I'd look to scrap some trains these would generally be trains which were due to be scrapped within the next 5 years.
Anyway some of the road schemes are only going to push the problem further down the road. For instance, if we did Stonehenge, chances are there'll be bigger problems at the other single carriageway sections along the A303 or even cause problems on the M3 due to extra traffic generation.
The induced demand from Stonehenge could add 180,000 to 225,000 extra vehicle movements a year (+5% of the extra capacity, although more than this could be likely), at a time when we should be looking to reduce car use to help us meet net zero carbon emissions. Such trips are likely to be 50 miles or more, so potentially quite significant in terms of extra miles traveled (9 million to 20 million extra miles traveled a year).