| Topic: | Ruth Cadbury's Call to Nationalise the Railways | |
| Posted by: | Francis Rowe | |
| Date/Time: | 29/01/20 13:05:00 |
| On the face of it these seems to be a reasonable enough suggestion. South Western Railways performance has been pretty terrible and the company's financial status is questionable. However, given that the transport minister himself has said that he is considering this option it could be that our MP is walking into a trap by making this call. South Western Railways two main problems - reliability and the unions will not go away when they are nationalised. If anything they will get worse. The delays on local trains are usually not caused by the train company but Network Rail - a nationalised company and the unions will feel obliged to strike even more if a Tory run government has direct control of the service. The Johnson administration has made no secret of saying that it wants to make the hard decisions early on and nationalisation of SWR might be one such example. By bringing it under direct control they can deal with the issue of the new fleet which is designed for drivers rather than guards to open and close the doors. The RMT will go ballistic but a resolution to the matter would be hugely popular with commuters and once it is done a substantial improvement to service standards will take place. SWR has really served the purpose of being a lightening rod in this dispute and its financial difficulties are probably being quietly underwritten by the government already but they may be reluctant to take the level of abuse that will fall on them if they were the ones pushing through operational change. Once the issue is resolved the government could then reissue the franchise and given that the service would be more efficient and less prone to strike disruption would get much better terms than before so any nationalisation would be temporary. This probably would be a good outcome for commuters and taxpayers but I'm not sure it is how Ruth Cadbury would expect things to play out. |