In a country understandably gripped by a feeling of autumnal doom, the 11th-hour cancellation of the latest burst of train strikes may look like a welcome outbreak of calm, and of tentative optimism. Though some sources whisper that the rail unions may be adjusting to the fact that the industry has very little money, the RMT’s Mick Lynch says the industrial action “has made the rail employers see sense”, implying concessions that have yet to become clear.
But from the perspective of the average passenger, even if the unions’ disputes with Network Rail and the train operating companies are somehow resolved, everyday life on the lines will still be a trial. The government, let us not forget, is on to its third transport secretary in not much more than six weeks, and the confounding mess now overseen by the freshly promoted Mark Harper almost defies description.
Besides the strikes, the most vivid example is the awful chaos currently gripping trains in the north of England and Scotland. Thanks to the train company Avanti West Coast, journeys between such cities as London, Manchester, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham and Glasgow have been cut back, only to be further plagued by cancellations, delays, overcrowding and grim customer service.
TransPennine Express (TPE) trains, which serve a huge range of towns and cities including Hull, Manchester, Glasgow and Sheffield, are in an even worse state of disarray. What both stories have in common is the involvement of FirstGroup, the multinational transport giant that claims to be in the business of “making travel smoother and life easier”. To an almost surreal extent, the current reality suggests the exact opposite: people peeing in Pringles tubes, lying on train floors and – particularly in the case of disabled travellers – enduring nightmarish experiences.
What is going on here? For a very long time, train companies have kept services running via drivers working on their official rest days and being paid overtime: a cheaper option, in the short term, than recruiting and training more staff. The result has been a precarious system kept running by goodwill – which, at Avanti and TPE, seems to have long since dwindled away. Rail experts say that the government has serially ignored FirstGroup’s failures, and carried on handing it fees and favours it simply doesn’t deserve. Tellingly, the Department for Transport’s solution to the west coast mainline’s meltdown has been to extend Avanti’s contract, a move that the train drivers’ union Aslef curtly sums up as “a slap in the face to passengers and staff”.
One thing is now clearer than ever. The recent history of Britain’s trains is much the same as that of the country itself: a hare-brained plunge into privatisation and crony capitalism, followed by endless underinvestment, chronic short-termism and that achingly familiar approach to industrial relations that regards partnership and consensus as suited only to wimps. Worse still, as with so many of the constituent parts of everyday British life, the pandemic delivered a shock from which the system shows no signs of any convincing recovery. The World Economic Forum now places the UK 29th in its global rankings for the quality of its railways, in between Kazakhstan and India. Compared with the rest of western Europe, what we now have to put up with is not just unacceptable. It is not normal.
In response to all these woes, the government has wriggled and writhed but not come up with anything that meets the scale of the railways’ problems. Two years ago, it began a shift away from so-called franchising arrangements with train companies to more straightforward contracts: instead of keeping revenue from tickets, the companies now get fixed fees and performance bonuses, and risk has largely been transferred to the state. On paper, that looks like a step in the right direction, but it might actually entail the worst of all worlds: trains still largely run by private firms on short contracts, which are therefore reluctant to invest for the long term; and a suddenly nervous Treasury eyeing a financially fragile railway system that it sees as yet another thing to cut.
In May 2021 the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced a policy change centred on a new body called Great British Railways – which, it was said, would oversee “the backbone of a cleaner, more environmentally friendly and modern public transport system”. The plan is now nowhere to be seen. Last week’s apparent shelving of a new line connecting Hull, Leeds, Bradford and Liverpool arrives in the midst of other proposed improvements that are either uncertain or very late (a long-promised upgrade to lines used by TPE, for example, is only just beginning, after a decade-long delay). In that context, the government’s belligerent approach to the strikes – now seen in “minimum service levels” legislation aimed at weakening the impact of stoppages and curtailing basic employee rights – has just been a desperate distraction from a long record of torpor and inaction.
The only viable alternative is plain enough: the Labour party’s plan to renationalise the railways as train companies’ contracts expire (which would largely happen in the first term of the next government) and institute what the shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, calls “an integrated national system, with passengers as a proper priority, rather than shareholders, and long-term investment”. This sounds roughly like what we need, but make no mistake: given their dire and broken-down state, bringing the railways up to modern standards will take decades.
Last week, I travelled from my home in Somerset to the north-west. It used to be a simple enough journey, largely taken on a direct hourly service between Bristol and Manchester, which has now been cut to only two trains a day. This trip, by contrast, took the best part of six hours, and entailed three changes. Thanks to a cancellation of my final train owing to a “broken rail”, I spent a particularly joyous 45 minutes at Crewe – where, as the latest Avanti service arrived at the station, there came a striking announcement: “This train is very busy today. Customers with flexible tickets may want to travel on a different service for a more comfortable journey.” Where, you could only wonder, were these options of space and comparative luxury? Thanks to logic worthy of communist eastern Europe, the same incantation seemed to greet every Avanti train that stopped at the station.
On the platforms, there was a mood that seemed to mix fatalism with fury, as befuddled passengers asked for answers from staff who seemed to have no more clue than they did. The branch-line train I finally boarded was filthy, smelly – and, judging by its juddering motion and shabby decor, at least 30 years old. Here, once again, was the dullest, most everyday proof of failure on an unimaginable scale, and the evidence for a question we ought to be asking ourselves: if a 21st-century country cannot move its people from place to place, what kind of state is it in?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
