“Bluntly, we have to get the government and the Department for Transport out from running the railways” – so says Richard Brown CBE, one of the leading rail figures in the UK for four decades.
Mr Brown spoke to The Independent travel podcast as ministers prepare to take rail firms into public ownership.
The transport secretary, Louise Haigh, told the Transport Select Committee last week: “We have wasted no time in getting to work fixing our broken transport system and getting it working for the public.”
Legislation for taking back train operations from private companies is going through Parliament.
But Mr Brown said that, since the Covid pandemic, ministers had stipulated every aspect of rail operations.
“The railways have been nationalised for a number of years in practice,” he said. “All the key decisions have been taken by the Department for Transport with secretaries of state too quick to pretend that it’s the train companies that have been running stuff.”
Ms Haigh’s eventual aim is for the rail system to be run by a new organisation, Great British Railways (GBR), originally proposed by the last government.
“In setting up Great British Railways, we have to establish an entirely new organisation, and, crucially, it has to have a completely new culture and a new approach,” she said.
But GBR will not begin operations for at least two years. Meanwhile, Mr Brown said, civil servants will take “more and more of the decisions – how many trains to run, where are they to stop, what should the different fares be?”
He said: “Sitting in an office in Whitehall when you’re a civil servant with no practical experience of running a transport operation, let alone a railway. They’re out of touch with passengers, frankly.”
One of the key problems facing the railway is the tangle of different agreements on rest-day working: whether or not staff are required to work on Sundays.
Each weekend state-owned Northern Rail makes wholesale cancellations in the northwest because staff employed at depots west of the Pennines are not obliged to work on Sundays.
Mr Brown said few changes on employment conditions were negotiated during privatisation “because frankly, if you were a train company, if you had a seven-year franchise, it really wasn’t worth your while to take the short-term hit and strikes”.
Ministers, he said, must take on the rail unions: “Talking to a number of ex-colleagues about the recent settlements with the RMT and Aslef, they were very disappointed that government just – as they see it – caved in and gave the unions everything they asked for without any strings attached.
“The government will actually have to wise up and be a little bit harder and look for genuine reform, genuine cost savings in a way which respects and takes the workforce with it.”
In September, the transport secretary told the Evening Standard that after settling the long-running dispute with train drivers’ union, Aslef, “we can tackle the hard yards on workforce reform and modernising our railways”.
The Aslef charter calls for “the elimination of institutionalised overtime” which would involve seven-day working becoming the norm.
The former Eurostar boss said the twin fundamental challenges facing the railways are “getting the cost down, attracting passengers back”. He described the current fares system as “not fit for purpose”.
“The railways are costing too much for taxpayers at the moment,” he said.
The Independent calculates that the rail industry is currently being subsidised to the tune of £240 per second – or £7.5bn per year.
Richard Brown was speaking at the launch of his book Changing Times Changing Trains: Memoirs and Insights on Running Railways (New Generation Publishing, £14.99).
