Jeff Slee welcomes Louise Haigh’s proposals – with some reservations.

Last Thursday, Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh released Labour’s proposals for rail (“Getting Britain moving: Labour’s plan to fix Britain’s railways” – available on the Labour Party website).

This document is broadly to be welcomed. It gives a clear policy commitment to renationalise rail. It’s a commitment that separates us from the Tories, that is in line with Labour policy in our 2017 and 2019 manifestos, and that is popular. It’s also a commitment to a policy that the last Labour government refused to carry out – the statement in Louise’s document that “the last Labour government brought infrastructure into public ownership” is untrue – Network Rail went into public ownership in 2014 during the Con-Dem government.

Public ownership of rail has been campaigned for by the unions and by the left in the Labour Party. We should make sure that, when in government, the commitment is put into practice.

Louise’s proposals are along the same lines as the policy worked out by Andy MacDonald when he was Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Transport Secretary and published in early 2020. It is available on the website of the campaign group Bring back British Rail.

Louise’s document says Labour will bring the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) under public ownership and control within the first term of a Labour government. This can easily be done: all the contracts the Department for Transport has with TOCs expire between this autumn and autumn 2027, and when they do the Department for Transport can bring them in-house at no cost.

The document also says that Labour will end the TOCs’ contracts early if they fail to deliver for passengers. I hope that the Labour government will encourage and pressure the train operators to hand back their contracts before they expire.

Train operations will be integrated with Network Rail under a public sector body, Great British Railways, that Labour will create soon after it becomes the government.

Some reservations about labour’s proposals

While Louise’s document commits Labour to creating a publicly owned Great British Railways, it also says that some parts of the railway industry will remain private. Many will be disappointed by this.

One of these is the Rolling Stock Companies (ROSCOs). These three companies own most of the passenger trains that run on Britain’s railways and lease them to the TOCs.  They make big profits from doing so. In the five years to 2021, they made between them over £200m profit per year, much of which goes to their parent companies in low-tax countries such as Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands.

The document says that Labour will not nationalise these, because of the cost of doing so. Andy MacDonald’s paper, while also not committing to nationalising the ROSCOs, said that a Labour government should enable a publicly owned rail body to buy new trains itself, instead of leasing from the ROSCOs. It would use regulation to curb the ROSCOs’ excessive profits and would explore starting up publicly owned train manufacturing and supplying.

In Louise’s paper, Labour will also leave rail freight in the private sector. Here, again, Andy MacDonald’s document left open the question of whether to bring the rail freight companies into the public sector.

My third reservation with Labour’s proposals is on the Open Access train companies. These companies run passenger trains, but do not get contracts from the DfT and stand or fall on whether they make a profit. Anyone who uses London Kings Cross station will have seen, alongside the trains run by LNER – a publicly owned TOC – trains with the liveries of Grand Central Railways heading for Sunderland, and of Hull Trains heading (logically) for Hull.

Grand Central and Hull Trains are two of the biggest Open Access operators on Britain’s railways. The document says Labour will leave them alone. But it would make for a more efficient and reliable railway if these Open Access operators were brough into the public sector and integrated with the rest of the rail industry.

The other thing to say about Louise Haigh’s document is that it is only sets out the broad outlines of a policy. There is not much detail. The document has 26 pages, but much of that is taken up by a familiar critique of what the Tories have done to rail and lots of large glossy photos. By contrast, Andy MacDonald’s document had 99 pages of detailed proposals for a publicly owned railway. And no pictures!

There are two more areas where Louise’s proposals fall short.  While she makes some token references to the environmental benefits of rail travel over road and air travel, there is no commitment to expanding the rail network with more lines and stations to encourage movement of freight and passengers from air and road onto rail. And there is no mention at all of extending electrification of the rail network, which is advocated by many in and around the rail industry because it would reduce rail’s environmental damage by enabling the phasing out of the diesel trains which still run on many lines, and would make rail travel faster and more efficient.

Despite these reservations, in the context of a largely policy-free Labour election campaign, it is welcome that Labour has maintained its commitment to public ownership of rail, and we – the left in the party, the unions, and rail campaigners – should ensure there is no backsliding when Labour is in government. We should also put forward constructive proposals for extending public ownership of rail beyond what Louise has proposed and for extending and improving the rail network.

Jeff Slee is a retired rail worker and former RMT National Executive Committee member.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Rail_Class_374_%28eurostar_e320%29.jpg Author: ChilternSam, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.