The vertiginous pace of events since Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory has been such that pledges made only a few years ago seem almost to belong to another era. “I am a great believer in rail,” said Mr Johnson in 2021, announcing a major programme of reforms to the country’s network, “but for too long passengers have not had the level of service they deserve.”
Travellers habituated to late-running, overcrowded and over-expensive trains knew how right he was. But to reprise the famous assertion of Mr Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, three years on “nothing has changed”. This week, the last word on successive Conservative governments’ incompetent handling of the railways was delivered by the House of Commons public accounts committee. The MPs’ damning report concluded that since the “root and branch” Williams review was commissioned in 2018, following timetabling mayhem in the north of England, “very little” has been achieved, and that “no one is putting the needs of passengers and taxpayers first”.
Taken in the round, the multiple failures of recent rail policy betray a staggering level of strategic incoherence, contradictory priorities and misguided short-termism. The hapless handling of HS2, and the wilful neglect of northern England’s dated network, amounted to a masterclass in mismanagement. For a while, the west coast mainline went into almost total meltdown. The MPs noted that, while the Department for Transport worked constructively with the rail unions during the pandemic, that approach didn’t last. And the creation of a much-heralded new public body, Great British Railways (GBR) – intended to act as a guiding mind overseeing services and infrastructure – was allowed to fall off the parliamentary agenda by an uninterested Rishi Sunak. Shunting GBR into the sidings has led to stasis and inertia, as key stakeholders wait to see what happens next.
Perhaps most damagingly of all, the report suggests that cost-cutting ordered by Whitehall risks shrinking industry revenue by making rail travel less attractive. This would be boneheaded, myopic economics at the best of times, fuelling a depressing spiral of decline. In an era when investment in green public transport of all kinds is an environmental priority, it is also a deeply irresponsible approach to take. Meanwhile, the delays and no-shows continue to stack up; almost 14% of trains were late in 2022/23, while cancellations were at record levels earlier this year.
A new parliament will offer an opportunity to turn the page on this dismal record. Journeying from Johnsonian empty rhetoric to the counterproductive and shortsighted bean-counting of the Sunak premiership, successive Conservative governments have taken our railways down a policy dead end. The Labour party’s commitment to nationalise the network during a first term in office suggests an overdue shift to viewing our train services primarily as a vital public good, rather than as a business like any other.
The ferocious recent backlash against plans to close station ticket offices underlined the extent to which that perspective is shared by the British public. But Westminster policymakers, beguiled for decades by marketising rhetoric, have failed to keep up. After a period in which the shambolic running of the railways has become an emblem of national dysfunction, this week’s public accounts committee report should be seen as a full stop at the end of a sorry chapter. Time for a new departure.
