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Sunday 7 September 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

The Railtrack board — denounced by Prescott and others as the grossest of fat cats — had a total salary bill of £1.5 million. The board of not-for-profit, wholly taxpayer-funded Network Rail is on £2.5 million! What are we getting for our cash, O regulator? But before Tom can answer, I have another rail horror flashback, dating from only the other night. I had got on at Peterborough to find a scene like a suicide cell at Holloway prison. Everything was scorched, slashed and scarred, caked with gum or stained with violent emesis, and it was the same in carriage after carriage.

I think it had come from Scotland, I tell Tom. ‘Careful,’ says the Rail Regulator, ‘I also come from Scotland’; and he goes on to give an account of the slo-mo rail catastrophe of the last six years, and why things may now be improving. Winsor’s line is that Network Rail’s problems are at least partly a function of the inheritance from Railtrack, and Railtrack’s failure adequately to improve the tracks and the signals. In fact, he is pretty hard on Railtrack, and even supports the prosecutions of Gerald Corbett and others for negligent stewardship of the Hatfield rails. This seems curious to me, not least since safety improved, on the whole, under Railtrack; but before we can fall out over the doctrine of corporate manslaughter, we find grounds for agreement.

Tom and I are at one in thinking that the government grossly mishandled the whole business, principally for reasons of pure ideological spite. ‘I think the government hated Railtrack,’ he says. ‘They saw it as a symbol of the Conservatives’ privatisation programme. They couldn’t attack the sale of energy or water, but here was something that could be attacked.’ So when the Ladbroke Grove crash happened, in October 1999, Prescott and Campbell seized the chance to put the boot in, and undermined a company that, for better or worse, was trying to provide a public service.

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