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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Bring back Railtrack

Tom Winsor, the Rail Regulator, tells Boris Johnson why he has hopes for a privatised future — in spite of unwarranted political intervention

There we all were on the concourse at Euston, thousands of us, jackets over our shoulders, ear-sweat gumming up our mobiles, staring upwards like some brainwashed crowd expecting an alien visitation. After half an hour of lies and evasion the electronic voice told us that Silverlink had abandoned any intention of taking anyone north of Watford; Virgin trains had expired as one. The entire station had been knocked out, as if by the Luftwaffe, and if any of us had any hopes of making an after-dinner speech in Wolverhampton, then we were invited to find what means we could of getting to Marylebone, where it was believed that there might be a locomotive capable of breaking through the ring of incompetence that encircled the capital.

To call the experience Third World would be to do an injustice to the comparative excellence of the Bogota Bus Company or the Delhi-Karachi express. So it is with this memory in mind, and a fresh indignation in my lungs, that I arrive at Winsor’s office, and I conceive that my role is to speak up for the travelling, or non-travelling, public, and to ask him, as we MPs are paid to do, just what the hell is going on. Winsor is an affable lawyer, with blondish hair and pinkish cheeks, and the air of the kid who was exceedingly good at algebra and who earned additional marks for the neatness of his handwriting. He keeps asking whether I am going to ‘stitch him up’.

My dear Tom, I feel like telling him, I wouldn’t dream of stitching you up. This office exudes calm and competence. I especially like the crest of the crown inside a giant cogwheel. Around Tom, in his room high in the old Pru building, there are 150 under-regulators busy regulating away, and I have no reason to doubt their, or his, talent and seriousness in the matter of regulation.

I just want to look at the results. When Tom began to regulate the railways in the middle of 1999, Railtrack was still in what some of us would sentimentally call its prime. Delays on the railways — that statistic by which all governments are judged — had been halved from those obtaining under BR to 7.5 million minutes per year, and 91 per cent of trains were arriving on time. Last year — four years after the Hatfield crash! — delays were still almost double, at 13.5 million minutes per year, and only 82 per cent of trains arrived on time; and all the while the taxpayers’ subsidy to the railways spirals ever more vertiginously out of control.

Railtrack, that defunct and unlamented private company, managed with about £1.2 billion of state subvention. Network Rail, its ‘not-for profit’ successor, is now swallowing more than £4 billion per year, and when Tom recently decided that the company needed a staggering total of £29.8 billion over the next five years, the Strategic Rail Authority was itself amazed. It was, said a spokesman, like plying an alcoholic with whisky.

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