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It may look innocuous but the SRA's case for rail is a scary document
At the press launch for Everyone's Railway the wider case for rail SRA Chairman Richard Bowker got a hard time from the nationals over his latest offering. The next morning they mocked its statements of the blindingly obvious, to quote at random, ‘For non car users rail also provides important options for regular trips to work or services and also for occasional long-distance social and recreational journeys'.
Then there were the full page artful portraits of, one imagines, members of the public with their sound bites, accompanied by place, time and date. There is also a fascinating map from the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit relating ‘business clusters' to London's main line stations. But nary a photo of anything to do with railways, nor any mention of the amounts of money the railways consume.
All this earnest, worthy, touchy-feeliness, had me foxed, until I was preparing our showpiece flower bed to take 192 (count them) wallflowers which should delight passers-by with a sea of colour in the spring. As the professional part of my brain sorted the week's data in background mode the penny dropped. I was making the very mistake that I have been warning others about for some time – I was overlooking the fact that the railway has been privatised.
A quick mental check confirmed that that the section of grey matter responsible for evaluating plans was still running old BR software. Not only that it was Prospectus Evaluator V15.2 with the scepticism patch introduced in 1985 as counter to all the whizzy schemes being put forward by Chris Green , John Prideaux et al.
In this Pauline moment among the compost and fertiliser I saw exactly what Everyone's Railway was about. It was not saying ‘this is what the railway could do with more money'. The frightening message is that the SRA is explaining to Government and opinion formers why we need a railway, full stop.
Put it another way, while to Modern Railways readers it is full of humdrum factoids, what we take for granted as the role of the modern railway may, to the target audience, help make a case for maintaining an expensive status quo while costs are brought down and performance improved.
Now is the time to reaffirm commitment to the railway, not to lose faith Richard Bowker |
Will it convert the sceptics? Well, it doesn't need to turn them into pro-rail fans, but it should make them think again. With the election fast approaching Ministers are facing the nagging possibility that the performance of the railways will come back to haunt a party which has asked to be judged on improvements to the public services.
Already we can see Transport Secretary Alastair Darling and his Minister Kim Howells taking an increasingly hard line on Railways. Mr Darling told a conference the day Everyone's Railway was published, ‘There are occasions where it is not clear that the money we are spending is getting extra benefit for the railways'.
Too right. And he also pointed out that the Government was spending more on Railways than Motorways and A roads, which, intuitively, sounds unlikely, but worrying if true. Kim Howells at another conference made the same point, saying ‘We put huge amounts of money into the railways but the tax is taken from people who mostly never travel on railways'.
Mr Howells also opened a second front on the railway's environmental credentials. ‘I am certainly not a person who equates public transport with greenness' he said, adding ‘We are hauling a lot of fresh air around this country and we are spending a huge amount of money on it'. Was this a coded attack on Operation Rio I wondered?
Mind you, I an not sure whether the Minister might be one pinion short of a full set of Deltic crankshaft phasing gears. According to Mr Howells, ‘There are 200,000 registered trainspotters and they have enormous influence on transport policy'. You can see some modern day form of the McCarthy ‘red scare' hearings. ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of the Ian Allan Locospotters Club'?
Apologies for that bit of levity in such a serious situation. While Richard Bowker is adamant that he will never go round with a begging bowl, Everyone's Railway reads to me like a railway on its knees pleading for its existence.
Our current railway is unaffordable if costs are as high as predicted Everyone's Railway |
But hang on a minute, who is responsible for our industry's current plight? Certainly not the railway industry. Shouldn't Richard Bowker include some old fashioned John Welsby style table thumping when he makes the case for rail?
Of late it has become politically correct in the leader columns of papers like the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph to refer to ‘a botched' privatisation. This is a way of reconciling a fundamental belief that the private sector is inherently better than public services with the experience of railway privatisation.
Now who botched privatisation? Not the railwaymen. It was the politicians and civil servants in the Department and the Treasury who devised the loony structure.
That they have virtually quadrupled the support the railway needs from the taxpayer is not the railwaymen's fault. Old BR Railwaymen look on aghast at the sums of money going in and ponder on what they could have achieved with half as much against a background of ten years of sustained economic growth.
So Richard Bowker is right to reject the begging bowl. But he should also be making it absolutely clear that those responsible for the botched job must carry the responsibility for putting it right.