he other day when my ETA on a campus visit was getting later and later thanks to the crumbling state of Britain’s rail network, a news item popped up in my feed on Labour’s plans to nationalise the rail network.
Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said that to fix “record delays and record cancellations” it will shortly unveil a plan involving bringing train operators into public ownership in a way that will bring “significant savings.”
Predictably, John Redwood, one of the architects of rail privatisation in the early 1990s, wasn’t pleased:
Passenger numbers fell away throughout the nationalised years. They didn’t make rail a popular and attractive enough way of travelling. There were too many delays, too many cancellations, poor service, poor catering, so it wasn’t attractive to passengers.
And Peel Hunt’s long-time transport analyst Alexander Paterson agreed:
It made railways even more focused on the employee and even less focused on the customer, and volumes collapsed. It took privatisation the best part of 20-odd years to get it back close to its peak.
