I use the Virgin Trains Service on the West Coast Mainline and so have first hand experience of what a disaster rail privatisation has been. Delays are commonplace, prices are sky-high, the trains are crowded and overpacked (except for the rows and rows of empty first class carriages) and there is virtually no communication and co-operation between the operators (TOC's). I constantly miss connections because of late running trains - and because the services are run by different operators there is never any chance that they will hold a train, even if it means one or two hundred people having to wait round for the next (hourly) service. All this despite massive public subsidies - which basically reward failure, and help the TOC's and others to keep paying dividends to shareholders despite their failure to deliver a properly functioning rail system.

Bringing the railways back into public hands should be a political no-brainer for the Government - and this report from Catalyst, which I received just before Easter, explains how this could be done in a potential third term...


THE RAILWAY IN A THIRD TERM
Catalyst pre-election briefing

Last year delegates at the Labour Party's annual conference voted to adopt a
policy of "introducing an integrated, accountable and publicly owned
railway". It has long been known that such a move would be highly popular
with the electorate.

Ministers have suggested that such a move would be too expensive and would
deprive the industry of private sector investment. Today Catalyst publishes
a special briefing paper showing that this policy could be carried out in a
third term without breaching the government's fiscal rules, and could
produce immediate cash savings for the government as well as delivering a
better railway.

Key points from the briefing include:

* any private sector investment in the railway must ultimately be paid for
by farepayers and taxpayers - with interest. Around £800m is taken out of
the industry every year as returns to private lenders and investors, a total
leakage of more than £6b since 1996

* the majority of passenger services could be taken into the public sector
by 2013 at no cost. Reductions in regulatory bureaucracy and in the
subsidies paid to private Train Operating Companies could save more than
£200m a year

* restoring network infrastructure and rolling stock to public ownership
would entail a one-off increase in public debt by, at most, 2.15 per cent of
GDP. This would not breach the government's Golden Rule or Sustainable
Investment Rule. This capital investment could produce immediate savings of
£300m or more a year in current spending

* rolling stock companies should also qualify for a one-off windfall tax
on excess profits. If this was calculated and applied in the same way as
Labour's 1997 windfall tax on privatised utilities, additional revenue of
£100m to £200m could be yielded

* overall, the most conservative estimates indicate that bringing the
railway system back into public ownership could produce immediate cash
savings of £500m a year or more through reduced bureaucracy and leakages to
private providers of finance. Over the medium and longer term, reintegration
would produce further savings and improvements as the post-privatisation
trend to waste and cost-escalation was reversed.


The full briefing is attached to this email and will be available to
download from the Catalyst website at http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/.

"Rail plan 'could save £500m'" - The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-1538899,00.html

"Public railways 'save £500m a year'" - The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?
in_article_id=342551&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=

"What are we waiting for?" - Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1443780,00.html