Labour's recently announced policy on rail renationalisation would, if enacted, be an improvement on the current state of affairs.
It would also be an improvement on the Tories' proposals, which never reached Parliament, (the "Rail Reform Bill", based on the Williams-Shapps Plan). The Tory plans conceded that the structures of rail privatisation are flawed, but proposed to fix the problem with more privatisation, replacing the broken franchising model with Passenger Service Contracts, which would still allow private companies to profit from running the trains. In contrast, Labour plans to take passenger operations, currently in the hands of private Train Operating Companies (TOCs), back into public ownership as existing TOC franchises expire.
In many ways, Labour's plan is a continuation of the Tories' Rail Reform Bill. It even borrows the Tories' jingoistic branding, and promises to carry on the plan to set up "Great British Railways" as a statutory arm's length body through an act of Parliament. Under Labour, GBR will take on many of the functions Network Rail currently performs as owner and maintainer of railway infrastructure. Labour will continue a lot of the Tories' plans by bringing timetabling and station management, for example, under GBR.
Whereas the Tories would have kept privatisation alive by awarding Passenger Service Contracts, Labour will transfer expired TOC franchises to GBR. Within five years, Labour expects all TOC franchises will be absorbed into GBR. This will be a massive step towards creating a publicly-owned rail industry that is run in the interests of workers and passengers.
However, it is not clear how the transition period will operate. There will be a time when some trains are run by franchises and others by GBR - presumably the operators currently run by the Department for Transport as Operator of Last Resort (LNER, Northern, TPE, etc.) will move directly to GBR. How will the structural division between infrastructure and operations, which is hard-wired into the industry after decades of privatisation, be unpicked? Will Labour change the structure of rail timetabling, where TOCs "bid" to operate on Network Rail track? It's hard to see how freight, which will remain privately-owned, will coexist alongside the publicly-owned TOCs, without some form of pseudo market in track access. Will it bring an end to the concept of "delay attribution", where Network Rail blames delays on train crew, for example, and TOCs blame delays on track faults, and all parties exchange fines in fictional money (known as Schedule 8 payments)?
Labour makes reference to the wasteful system of delay attribution, saying "300 people are currently employed full time to argue over whose fault delays are". This implies Labour intends to bring it to an end. But the problem with this system is more than waste and bureaucracy, it's that it promotes adversarial, commercial interests within an industry that should be run with public interest at its heart. Labour quotes the Government in saying that the current industry model is inefficient. Labour estimates it's costing the public £2.2 billion a year.
The main concern about Labour's document is that it frames its proposals primarily as an efficiency drive rather than a political drive to bring a public service into public hands. The document says that, "Consolidating the operations of 14 separate train operating companies into a single, unified organisation could lead to savings from.... reduced duplication of management and marketing". It sounds worryingly like these plans spell job cuts for a lot of us in the industry who are currently working in communications, timetabling, train performance data analysis, etc. We're not talking about people on high salaries. We're talking about people who might be in a union, probably TSSA because it tends to have bargaining rights for office and lower management staff.
Labour's document talks about encouraging "modal shift" and the growth of the rail industry. It also talks about putting industrial relations on a less adversarial footing than under the Tories. In the era of climate crisis, under a Labour government, plans to bring rail into public ownership cannot be used to reduce "waste", i.e. reduce staff. This is coming at a time when the Tory Government has already cut Network Rail's maintenance and renewals budget in real terms for 2024-29. The industry is massively under-staffed. Funding for the industry needs to be increased.
The move to public ownership will mean a major re-organisation of the industry and our unions will have to fight so that no one is at risk of unemployment. Rail jobs are climate jobs and our unions must argue that no-one will face redundancy when the rail industry needs to grow. We are for a publicly-owned rail industry that is run in the interests of workers and passengers. In our unions, we will have to make Labour listen to shape what that will look like.