teuchter
je suis teuchter
Yes, that's what I meant. Of course the individual bus companies make a profit or they wouldn't be there. Just like rural services.
Like I said earlier in the thread I argued strongly against privatisation at the time, and most of the things you describe above were amongst my reasons.
However - all these things - they are always brought out in arguments like this but the actual cost never seems to be quantified. It's presented as received wisdom that the contractual arrangements, bids for franchises, all this stuff, that it adds to the cost of providing services. But where's the evidence? If I could find clear evidence that it's really a significant problem in cost terms then I'd be behind getting rid of the franchise system. There are of course all the counter arguments about increased efficiency through competition, and so on, and they are equally difficult to quantify. You mention the cost of running the railways as being higher than under BR - but I'm sure you know that's just not really a meaningful comparison. The railway that exists today is very different from the railway that existed 20 years ago. Not just that it's much busier, but it provides different levels of service and access and safety. It runs with a much younger average age of rolling stock. There has been a long period of catching up on long-term investment and maintenance that was neglected during the latter part of BR's operation.
One way of trying to judge whether our railways are expensive to run is to compare them with other European railways. But as far as I'm aware, those comparisons don't seem to indicate that they are. For example, see the study here, the second one linked to -
Costs and revenues of franchised passenger train operators in the UK | Office of Rail and Road
There's no indication in there that UK TOCs suffer unusually large overheads. They don't seem to be spending all their money on management, and in fact they seem to be spending more on staff than many other countries. British train drivers are amongst the best paid. It does highlight the cost of rolling stock maintenance as a potential issue.
You mention jobs and terms of employment being cut - and everyone's heard about the DOO dispute on Thameslink/Southern. But when you go into that story, it turns out that the scheme to expand DOO is one demanded by the government, not an initiative of a private company, and in any case the management of that particular franchise are very restricted in the decisions they can make thanks to the particular nature of that contract (effectively they do what govt tells them).
In addition to all this, we are constantly being told that our fares are the most expensive in Europe and so on, which is largely nonsense. Commuter fares may be - yes - but they aren't subsidised to the degree that they are in most other countries! That's the result of govt policy, not the franchising system. I'm also constantly having to sit listening to people going on about how our trains are so unreliable and the service is so bad and it isn't like this in France and so on. This is also nonsense. I travel a lot on the railways both here and on the continent. People don't know just how terrible French rural services are, for example, because they've never tried to use them. Again, looking at the numbers, where one can, there isn't any clear indication that our trains do badly in terms of reliability or punctuality, compared to other countries.
There's all this misinformation going around, and it's easy for people to blame it on those private companies running our services down and taking big chunks of the revenue away in profits, and then there's this perceived wisdom about the enormous cost of the contractual arrangements that exist. I get frustrated with this because I just don't see the evidence that this a big problem. I do however see very clear evidence that we have a government set on shifting as much of the financial burden of running the railways onto passengers as they can. And which is cutting funding to local authorities meaning that they are having to cut bus routes in many parts of the country. Those bus routes aren't being cut because the private bus companies feel like it. They are being cut because funding for public transport is being withdrawn. So that's the point of this thread. What's primarily important is whether we have a national transport policy that supports the principle of public transport. Arguments about the franchising system can be had, but I see them as a distraction.
