Thread by @seatsixtyone

I think it's a tough call to claim privatisation didn't boost ridership. Sure, it increased costs and it might have increased fragmentation in certain areas too, but I'm dead sure it boosted passenger numbers. Here's why 👇🧵

https://twitter.com/christianwolmar/status/1783373921565184249

To win a franchise against the competition, you needed a gee-whiz idea. This couldn't be based on cutting costs as your track & train costs are fixed. Or raising fares (except at margins) as key inelastic fares were regulated. Or cutting services as service levels were specified.

Many successful franchise bids were based on increasing revenue by increasing passenger numbers. The process literally focused minds on this, and bidders could leverage investment BR arguably wouldn't have got, at least from any typical UK government...

You can increase passenger numbers with soft issues, such as better information & nicer trains, but a sure-fire way is to double train frequency. It's a known thing, it's real, it's predictable, it's in the Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook...

So many of the early franchises did exactly that, doubling hourly services to half-hourly, or half hourly to every 15 minute metro services: London to Cardiff, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds, Norwich. Coupled with favourable economic circumstances, it drove passenger numbers up & up.

Difficult to prove the conterfactual, but would BR have had resources to carry out Chiltern's Evergreen projects? BR modernised & doubled service, Chiltern quadrupled it & made it 100mph. Suspect we'd still have the 1990 75mph service, 2 trains/hour to Risboro', 1/hour beyond.

In fact, I once shared a taxi with Adrian Shooter & bitterly regret not asking him (as head of Chiltern before & after privatisation) whether there was a snowball's chance in hell BR could have done what he did. I assumed the answer was so obviously 'no' it was a stupid question!

However, with all the easy wins done and predicting the economy becoming harder, franchising became increasingly difficult. Pandemic accelerated this and franchises were replaced with contracts. The private operators are now just contractors.

In other words, the government specifies everything, pays for everything, all fares revenue goes to the Treasury, with private operators paid 1-2% management fee to run things. So the network is already nationalised in all but name, just (mostly) delivered by private contractors.

There's now no point in operators investing, any revenue increase isn't their money, it's the government's. I'm no longer sure what the point of private involvement is, I don't see private contractors doing anything that publicly-owned LNER isn't.

You can ignore 'private firms profiteering' nonsense as 1%-2% management fee is neither here nor there in the scheme of things. Nor does changing ownership magically produce lower fares: You can have lower fares if you pay more subsidy, whether in a private OR a public scenario

I'm old enough to remember BR putting fares up above inflation, and we even sometimes ran trains late (yes, really). People complained about the same things then and thought privatisation would fix it, that they complain about *now* and think nationalisation will fix it.

But you have to question what the *point* of private involvement now is, and whether a less fragmented better-integrated network would be cheaper to run and nicer to travel on. And it probably would...

The over-riding need is for an arms-length body, a BR 2.0, to take over running of the network from DfT, a government department should not be micro-managing a railway. And it probably needs to be more command/control than mere guiding mind.

In summary, simply changing ownership isn't a plan in itself. We still need one of those!