Delayed Repayment
Why the rail network isn't working for the passenger, only for the train company.
LC special 4
11 November 2022
This article is one of our occasional longer pieces provided to paid subscribers. If you’d like to support our work by taking a paid subscription, you can do so here:
The real problem with our railways?
Nationalisation as a policy has not been especially popular with the public since the 1950s. There is an exception though. The one service that more than half of Britons would like to see privatised, is the railways. In August 2022 the New Statesmen reported polling which suggested even 63% of Conservative voters wanted to see the railways in public ownership. Less surprisingly, among Labour voters it was 78%
The privatised rail network that we have is highly fragmented. It has minimal competition and, as reported earlier this year in The Leveller®, is largely owned by foreign state enterprises.
Yet it has had its successes. Before the pandemic it grew passenger numbers to record levels. Something essential to our progress towards Net Zero .
But the way the current system operates is often dysfunctional. After all, if it is working well, why do so many people want to see it re-nationalised? What is going wrong?
A journey
This article is itself a bit of a journey. It started out as a piece on Delay Repay but ended up in a very different place. But let’s start at the beginning.
Back in September me and my better half decided to go to Brighton for the weekend. There’s a through service from Westbury to Brighton so from Somerset it is relatively easy. You just make your way to Westbury and take it from there. That meant buying a ticket from GWR. So we did.