Let’s make Great British Railways great

10th April 2025 | Evidence / News

Demand Full Public Ownership

Demand full public ownership before the deadline on Tuesday 15 April 2025, 23:59

Last year saw a massive breakthrough for the campaign with the passing of Labour’s Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, to bring the remaining privately-run rail franchises back into public ownership when their contracts expire.

The next step is the Railways Bill which will create the new publicly-owned body – Great British Railways – to bring together various aspects of the railways (infrastructure and passenger services) under one “directing mind”.

The Department for Transport is currently running a public consultation called “A railway fit for Britain’s future”, which will inform the Railways Bill deciding what shape Great British Railways will take.

Whilst we support the general direction of the reforms, we have serious concerns about some of Labour’s proposals which aim to enable “An ongoing role for the private sector” in our railways (p.11).

These threaten to completely undermine the core aims of Great British Railways:

  • – To get rid of the “complex web of private sector operators, public bodies, industry groups, and parts of government… with competing interests, unclear accountabilities, and no overarching direction”,
  • – And to replace it with “a simplified, unified structure”, “that passengers can trust” (p.8-9).

We need all our supporters to respond to the consultation to demand full public ownership before the deadline on Tuesday 15 April 2025, 23:59.

Demand Full Public Ownership

To make Great British Railways great, Labour must ensure there are no competing interests in the system, by scrapping plans for “An ongoing role for the private sector” in our railways.

Instead we need our new Great British Railways to:

  • 1. Create one publicly-owned ticket retailer
  • 2. End all privatised passenger services
  • 3. Ensure new rolling stock is publicly-owned
  • 4. Always put the public interest first

We agree that this is a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity (p.6) – we need Labour to get it right!

Below is our suggested consultation response which sets out the main reasons behind each of these demands.

Email the Consultation Team

If you click on the ‘Email the Consultation Team’ link above, it will open a draft email addressed to: Railreform.bill@dft.gov.uk. Please read over this, edit as you wish and add your name and address at the bottom before sending.

If you have more time, please use some of our arguments below to complete the consultation questionnaire. The more you put things in your own words the better.

Our Suggested Consultation Response

Dear Rail Reform Consultation team,

I’m writing to respond to the “A railway fit for Britain’s future” public consultation.

Whilst I support the general direction of the reforms, I have serious concerns about the proposals aimed at enabling “An ongoing role for the private sector” in our railways (p.11).

These threaten to completely undermine the core aims of Great British Railways:

  • – To get rid of the “complex web of private sector operators, public bodies, industry groups, and parts of government… with competing interests, unclear accountabilities, and no overarching direction”,
  • – And to replace it with “a simplified, unified structure”, “that passengers can trust” (p.8-9).

Instead, I want to see a fully publicly-owned railway, which will:

  • 1. Create one publicly-owned ticket retailer
  • 2. End all privatised passenger services
  • 3. Ensure new rolling stock is publicly-owned
  • 4. Always put the public interest first

All four of these things are vital for ensuring there are no competing interests in the system, and that we can truly have “a passenger railway owned by the public, run for the public”, “that stands once again as a point of pride for modern Britain” (p.5-6).

1. Create one publicly-owned ticket retailer

In response to ‘Chapter 5: Fares, ticketing and retailing‘ – I strongly object to Labour’s proposal “to ensure a thriving and competitive rail retail market” (p.38).

We only need one publicly-owned Great British Railways ticket retailer which is run in the public interest.

Only this can provide a “one-stop-shop” for all passenger information and tickets – via the Great British Railways website/app, and in stations at well-staffed ticket offices and vending machines.

This is the norm in most other countries with successful state-owned railways (such as Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands and Germany).

This is the only way to fulfil Labour’s pledge to “do away with dozens of complex interfaces that currently hold the system back” (p.9).

Labour’s proposal “to ensure a thriving and competitive rail retail market” will completely undermine Great British Railway’s ability to simplify and reduce fares to encourage more rail use and help meet climate targets (such as introducing something similar to Germany’s ‘Deutschlandticket‘)

And it will allow for continued profiteering from the system by companies like Trainline – owned by private equity firms: Invesco Ltd, Baillie Gifford, JP Morgan, BlackRock and FIL Ltd.[1]

In order to rebuild trust in our railways, passengers want assurances that all the money we spend on fares is staying in the system and being used to run and improve services.

But the most crucial point is that Labour’s proposal “to ensure a thriving and competitive rail retail market” will be impossible to deliver.

This is because it will create a conflict of interest at the heart of Great British Railways – one public body simply cannot have the dual role of setting fares across the network, whilst also “compet[ing] on a fair and open basis with independent retailers” (p.37).

If the fares are set by Great British Railways there will be no competition – that is the whole point. It is competition that has created “the complex and fragmented fares landscape” that we have been dogged with since privatisation (p.36).

All passengers want is a simple, reliable, fair public retailer which we can always trust to give us the best value fare.

2. End all privatised passenger services

In response to ‘Chapter 3: Making best use of the rail network‘ – I strongly object to Labour’s proposal to allow private companies to continue to run passenger services under the ‘open access’ system (services such as Lumo and Hull Trains owned by First Group, and Grand Central owned by Arriva).

Although these services currently only make up a small percentage of the network, allowing them to continue alongside Great British Railways will have many negative consequences that will completely undermine Labour’s core aims to create “a simplified, unified structure”, “that passengers can trust” (p.8-9).

I support the plan to simplify the role of the regulator – the Office of Rail & Road (ORR) – so that it has “a more focused role centred primarily on safety and efficiency” (p.9).

However, maintaining the ‘open access’ system would mean that the ORR would also have to oversee a complex appeals process to ensure that private companies wanting to run open access services are not being “disadvantaged or discriminated against” (p.30).

This appeals process would distract the ORR from its core duties of maintaining a safe and efficient railway, whilst also giving private companies the right to sue Great British Railways if it won’t grant them access. This is obviously a really bad idea which would see millions of pounds wasted on pointless legal challenges.

Private companies are already making “record numbers of access applications” (p.25) – allowing this to continue would create a huge amount of unnecessary administration that would further waste public money.

With private companies being allowed to sell their own tickets, ‘open access’ would simply serve to maintain “the complex and fragmented fares landscape” that I have raised concerns about above (p.36).

It would also enable profit to continue to leak out of railways by permitting private companies to ‘cherry pick’ services on profitable routes: busy mainlines such as London–Edinburgh.[2]

If there is passenger demand for more services on these lines, then Great British Railways should be running them. That’s the only way to ensure that the profits from these busy routes can stay in the system and be used to cross-subsidise less busy parts of the network.

Labour says it wants “to maximise the benefits of public ownership and operation” (p.12). One of the most important of these is the ability to create a national unified timetable that works for passengers, similar to that in Switzerland and other countries.[3]

This is what will make journeys with changes so much quicker and easier and help to deliver integration with other transport modes – something that has been impossible since privatisation.

Maintaining the ‘open access’ system – giving private companies the right to sue Great British Railways – will undermine Labour’s key aim to manage “the network in the public interest on a strategic, whole-system basis” (p.10) and deliver the national unified timetable that we need.

In response to ‘Chapter 6: Devolution‘ – I support Labour’s proposal to devolve power over suburban rail networks in metropolitan areas to the new Mayoral Strategic Authorities. This must also happen in Scotland’s metropolitan areas (particularly Strathclyde) with power over suburban rail networks being devolved to the Regional Transport Partnerships.[4]

This will make it much easier to deliver fully-integrated public transport networks, across bus, tram, underground and rail in Britain’s big city-regions.

However, it is vital that safeguards are in place to ensure that devolved services cannot be re-privatised. The 2024 Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act contains these safeguards for services devolved to the Scottish and Welsh Governments, which can now only ever be run by a “public sector company”.

It is therefore a glaring oversight that services devolved to regional transport authorities (like Transport for London, Merseytravel or Transport for Greater Manchester) are not included in this Act. This must be amended or devolved regional railways could easily end up back in private hands.

It must also be the role of Great British Railways to ensure that there is coherent planning, branding and standards across devolved regional services, so that the current issues with fragmentation do not persist and that rural areas are not left behind.[5]

3. Ensure new rolling stock is publicly-owned

Another glaring oversight of the consultation is the issue of who owns the trains themselves.

This is barely mentioned at all, yet it remains one of the most dysfunctional elements of the current privatised system, with private Rolling Stock Companies (ROSCOs) making millions of pounds in profit every year.[6]

Whilst I appreciate it would be expensive to buy all the trains back in one go, we need a commitment that Great British Railways will ensure all new rolling stock going forward is publicly-owned.

This will gradually address the final part of the failed privatised system which allows significant amounts of profit leak out to shareholders overseas.[7]

Only then will Great British Railways be able to develop a much-needed rolling stock strategy and ensure that we have high-quality trains with the best accessibility standards on all parts of the network.[8]

Great British Railways can also ensure that new trains are built in Britain creating local jobs.

4. Always put the public interest first

In response to ‘Chapter 1: Leadership for Britain’s Railways‘ – I have serious concerns that Labour’s insistence on trying to enable “An ongoing role for the private sector” in ticket retail, passenger services and rolling stock will lead to the public interest being side-lined.

In fact, research by Association of British Commuters has shown that the headline promise of the previous Conservative government that Great British Railways would be “a guiding mind… responsible for running the railways safely and efficiently to maximise social and economic value” has been shamefully scrapped from Labour’s plans.[9]

This must urgently be addressed – with social and economic value, accessibility and the environment all reinstated as statutory duties that Great British Railways must deliver.

The whole point of having a publicly-owned railway is so that it can be run in the public interest – not as a business in its own right, but as a vital tool to help our country meet our social, environmental and economic ambitions.

We must be striving to make the railway accessible for everyone in Britain, and expanding its capacity so that more and more people can use it every day.

With pressing climate targets to meet, it’s essential that we truly maximise the benefits of a fully publicly-owned railway to help shift more of our daily journeys onto public transport.

I hope that your team will take these comments on board.

[Add your name and address]

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