Work together to give the railway a fighting chance

No one owes the railway a living, says PHILIP HAIGH, who argues that the Department for Transport, operators and unions all have a part to play in ensuring that rail’s bid to win customers is a successful one

Philip Haigh Transport writer

TWO of Britain’s train operating companies are living on borrowed time. Greater Anglia and West Midlands Trains have contracts that contain core term expiry dates of September 15 2024. To bring them into the public sector, Labour Transport Secretary Louise Haigh need only serve an expiry notice that gives at least three reporting periods’ warning. Each reporting period is 28 days, so that makes 84 days. Such an expiry notice cannot take effect before the core term expiry date. But as we are now within 84 days of September 15, the Transport Secretary can trigger the end of private operations for those two companies whenever she pleases. Yet nationalising train operators is not a silver bullet, as the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has shown with its cancellation statistics,…

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RAIL (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 1014

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