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UK Rail services to come under unified state control

bbc.com

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Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#131

Post by pydry »

Stranger43 wrote: post #97
JI00912 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer. Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.

Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.

The government already had to care about that. They were losing votes to promises of nationalisation under Corbyn in 2017.

This looks like an attempt to present a kind of Potemkin nationalisation to mollify the anger of people with £1k+ season tickets and cement their hold on voters drawn away from Starmer in the last election (who meekly dumped rail nationalisation as a policy).

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#132

Post by ClumsyPilot »

cirrus-clouds wrote: post #78

The flexible season tickets are welcome. However, missing from this news report is any mention of making the cost of rail travel more affordable for the public. The report quotes the former boss of British Airways about " greater flexibility in the way that fares are operated in the future " What does this mean? Can we expect less expensive tickets? The UK already has some of the most expensive rail tickets in Europe…

In fact we have foreign governments operating train service in UK and turning a profit:

Https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/trains-uk-railways-renationalise-countries-operators-companies-a9058961.html

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#133

Post by tomxor »

pydry wrote: post #121
tomxor wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but: > The government says the new system should look more like Transport for London, with multiple operators under one brand, offering greater accountability when things go wrong. If it introduces more accountability, it's basically doing it's job. Multiyear contracts do not mean no accountability. I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with…

I didn't see any promises about additional recourse. It seems to be more about bureaucratic consolidation than accountability. This is not the nationalisation and price freezes promised by Corbyn.

I don't see specific details either if that's what you mean, other than the suggestion in the statement I quoted above.

Perhaps i'm being naive, govt is not exactly my forte, though it feels reasonable to suggest accountability is implicit to consolidation here... currently they seem to get contracted to essentially go and manage themselves and their lines; whereas multiple operators under one government management structure of some kind at least has potential for accountability without relying on the operators goodwill (which seems to be as absent as the free market forces).

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#134

Post by jabl »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #39
rich_sasha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article with that question in mind, it doesn’t mention any changes to sourcing the contractors.

Here's the formal press release from the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/great-british-railways-fo... And this is the actual document weighing in at 116 pages: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Pages 52 and onwards: "Replacing franchising" details the exact vision on how those contracts are to be set up. It states: > TfL Overground services and many railways across Euro…

I still don't understand what's the difference between the old franchising system and the new concessions. Can you ELI5?

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#135

Post by GekkePrutser »

jabl wrote: post #103
audunw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the decision to do this is based on an outdated idea about how to do business effectively. Take car makers. It used to be that the winners were outsourcing everything except their core competence (engines and assembling/marketing vehicles). But these days it seems like vertical integrated companies are the winners, with Tesla being a good example in the car industry. I think politicians that have pushed f…

The 'vertical integration vs. outsourcing' seems to be largely a fashion thing. When giant vertically integrated conglomerates are the status quo, you have the self-appointed thought leaders writing business books and speaking at expensive dinners arguing for outsourcing and focusing on core competences. Then as the tides turn and 'outsource everything' becomes the norm, the next generation of self-appointed business…

I see the same in our company. Every few years we have a leadership shuffle, which then cascades as the new leaders replace all the layers underneath them in the months afterwards. Once things become stable, a new leader is hired and the whole things starts again.

All the new management hires will then want to put their own stamp on things which means doing things differently than before. So we've been going back and forth between different paradigms. Sometimes within months! We seem to be going back between role-based teams ("we have too many silo's, we need to join all technologies of a role in a team!!") to technology-based teams ("we have too little focus, we need to focus on all responsibilities for one technology per team!!"). Literally several times we've made this switch over the last years, back and forth.

It just feels like each new hire just has to change it just to be seen to be doing something by their bosses. No newly hired manager every wants to leave things the same even though they are working just fine.

The thing is that we are very versatile. We can deal with the drawbacks of each model. We collaborate even though we're not in the same team. We can't work properly with all this ongoing reorganisation though. It's like the chair is being pulled out from under us for no reason.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#136

Post by Skinney »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #129
Skinney wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t have to lease their trains from the government, they can bring their own trains if they’d like, but leasing is likely cheaper. The company maintaining the trains do have to bid on the contracts, as well, and can bid for contracts in other countries if they wish. The directorate of railway was there pre-privatization. It’s the infrastructure company that decides the timetables, not the directorate. The dire…

"Operators are free to decide the interior of the trains, and any additional products on top of the minimum fee." So by the sounds of it, you have tp hunt fpr tickets on different websites and exchequer looses out, but in exchange I get a different of seat, and packet of crisps? I am really not getting 'free market innovation' vibes here

If all you care about is the cheapest possible ride, you’ll get that through the government ticketing service.

If you travel the same distance often and want to pay extra for more comfort or whatever, you’ll benefit from using whatever ticketing service the operator wants you to use.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#137

Post by Reason077 »

midasuni wrote: post #114
Stranger43 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.

Hahahahaha Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. Efficiency leads to profits and thus dividends. The government cares more about politics than efficiency. Look the the problems southern have had because the government insisted on getting rid of guards - they effectively nationalised southern (GTR) years ago because they refused to let the private sector run it how they wanted. Compare with chiltern who co…

Chiltern Railways were great, and were one of the few TOCs that genuinely competed for passengers against other railways, as Chiltern, Virgin (now Avanti) and London Midland (now West Midlands / London Northwestern) all operated competing services between London and Birmingham.

Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#138

Post by varispeed »

OJFord wrote: post #48

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets. There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a p…

They privatised profits, but not responsibilities. I don't know why even a single person thought this was a good idea (unless they were on it for money).

I think the privatisation could work if multiple companies could bid for a given journey / timetable slice, rather than having entire routes for themselves with no realistic way of removing them if the service goes bad.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#140

Post by Skinney »

matsemann wrote: post #115
Skinney wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t have to lease their trains from the government, they can bring their own trains if they’d like, but leasing is likely cheaper. The company maintaining the trains do have to bid on the contracts, as well, and can bid for contracts in other countries if they wish. The directorate of railway was there pre-privatization. It’s the infrastructure company that decides the timetables, not the directorate. The dire…

I'm one of those (many) people that don't believe in that 12B figure. It is only based on "we used to pay X for this route in the old model, and now we pay Y", but that's two different things to compare and ignores lots of new costs as well. All the offers were also based on traffic growth, meaning subsidies for the tickets in 7-8 years would go down. This would have happened irregardless of the bids (except the cont…

Considering most train routes operate at a net loss, «we used to pay x but now we pay y» is really the only interesting metric, no?

Profits from subsidies aren’t really profit when you’re the one paying the subsidy.

Keep in mind, that before any profit, the government still makes money taxation (sales tax, employee income tax etc.) and several companies are going to operate at a loss for a few years until trafic picks up. I think government saving money on this isn’t unlikely.

That’s not the same as customers saving money, though.

I agree that time will tell. Until Norway has more double-tracks and can have proper competition, this could go either way.

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