Labour announce plans for rail nationalisation

The last few years have certainly been interesting ones for transport in this country, from HS2 chaos to our Transport Secretary parroting bizarre 15 minutes conspiracy theories at last year’s the Tory Party conference. You could call the government’s transport agenda many things, and I have called it many things, but one thing it is not is boring. And we are all here today because we are passionate about transports and the people it serves and all too often people are lost when we discuss transport policy. But there is a reason that Train line is the UK and Europe’s number one most downloaded rail travel app, because you make it easier for millions of passengers to buy tickets, to use the railway and to find the best value fares. Train line success is driven by its relentless focus on passengers. It listens to the people who use the railways and it focuses on improving their experience. It is these lessons, and those from right across the best of the private and public sector, that we draw on in setting out Labour’s plans today. Now Britain was of course, the country that invented the railways and brought them to the world. Next year we will mark 200 years since the world’s first passenger railway ran from Stockton to Darlington. The innovation which followed transformed Britain, supercharged our industrial revolution and made travelling the country a possibility for millions. We deserve to be proud of that legacy. But under the Conservatives, our railways have become a symbol of national decline, of a country that no longer works and a government with no plan to fix it. Cancellations are at record highs. Fares have risen almost twice as fast as wages since 2010 and strikes are costing us £25 million a day. Today’s broken model simply doesn’t work. Decisions which should be straightforward, like timetable changes, new ticket types or fares, can take years to happen. And when things go wrong, like delays, armies of lawyers argue over whose fault it is and who pays for the mistake instead of how to fix it. Huge sums continue to be wasted on management fees and shareholder dividends. And despite 30 years of privatization, shockingly it is the taxpayer who still props up our failing railways to the tune of billions of pounds every year. That is why today I am setting out Labour’s plan to fix Britain’s railways. Now you may not know this, but my boss is keen on something he likes to call mission driven Government. The idea at the heart of this is that for government to succeed in making a difference and in making things better, it has to be focused, it has to set itself objectives and it has to be transparent and accountable. The alternative, as we have seen for much of the last 14 years, is drift, dither and dysfunction. Our railways underpin all of the five missions that Keir Starmer has set for an incoming Labour government. They are vital to achieving the growth that we need and to unlocking opportunity for all. They must drive forward our ambitions on green energy and the net zero transition. And we cannot keep people safe unless they feel safe to travel on public transport. Our railways are critical to making our country a better, wealthier and happier place. And we can only achieve our five national missions if we unlock the trapped potential of our railways to boost growth and opportunity, and to connect all of us with each other, with work and with leisure. But I believe that mission driven government also gives us a framework for understanding how to go about driving change within the railway itself. Under the Tories we’ve seen what consequences purposeless drift can have. Constant chaos and changes of direction, cancelled upgrades and half baked plans. The Conservative Party has achieved the worst of all worlds for our railways, partially privatised, overly centralised, expensive but unreliable, confusing in the extreme and shamefully unaccountable. And it is passengers who always pay the price, stranded at a station in the middle of the night when their train is cancelled, crammed into overcrowded and unpleasant trains with broken toilets and dirty carriages, unable to work as they travel because there’s no Wi-Fi connection. And they pay through the nose to prop up this failing system with huge amounts wasted every year through inefficiencies and fragmentation. Unlike most privatizations, that of the railways has never become publicly accepted because its failings have remained all too obvious. The fragmentation of the network has made it more confusing for passengers and more difficult and expensive to perform the essentially collaborative task of running trains on time. Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of Grant Shaps. Remember him? We’ve already had Keith Williams, the government’s independent reviewer of rail, endorsing our plans today, so I wouldn’t rule out Grant Shaps, or perhaps one of his aliases, endorsing us by tea time. Now, when Kier asked me to take on this role and to plan for how we will fix Britain’s railways, I set myself an exam question. Not how do I achieve an ideological outcome, but how do I place passengers back at the heart of how our railways are run? That is my mission, and it is the delivery of that mission, a railway network that is relentlessly focused on the passenger interest that underpins the policies I am launching today. They amount to the biggest reform of our railways for a generation. Labour will sweep away the broken model and bring private operators into public ownership. As their contracts expire. We will establish Great British Railways, a single directing mind to control our railways in the passenger interest. Yes, we’re keeping the name. I’m afraid I was overruled. I’m calling it Rail Britannia and if I am Secretary of State I won’t be running the railways day-to-day, but I will act as the passenger in chief, setting the strategy and objectives for Great British Railways and holding it to account on behalf of passengers and everywhere. But unlike current ministers, I will trust the experts, experts who don’t just come from the rail sector because we all know it can sometimes be a little inward looking but external experts in providing exceptional customer service. We will deliver simplified fares and ticketing a best fair guarantee across the network has as train Line has already managed to achieve. And we will roll out the kinds of innovations that you have trialled here, digital season tickets and automatic delay Repay so that they are available to all passengers. And we will create a tough new passenger watchdog that will hold great British Railways to account on behalf of the passenger both on performance and on the quality of the service they provide. Because we believe that customer experience matters and it matters to growing our railways. Now I know what some are going to say. Same old labour, always calling for public ownership. But the truth of the matter is that neither the passenger nor the taxpayer can afford for things to continue like this, throwing good money after bad at a system that simply isn’t delivering. And as part of our new approach, we will reset industrial relations on the railways, which have hit a new low under this government who have continuously and deliberately provoked these disputes. Labour will take a consciously different approach. We will see our workforce as an asset rather than a liability. We will work with them and where there are disagreements, we will get around the table and we will work them out. Now there are two stages to the reforms I am setting out today. Step one is urgent action we will take immediately. If we enter office, we will instruct the Department for Transport, Network Rail, the Rail Delivery Group and the operator of last resort to work together from day one to create a shadow Great British Railways. This will fire the starting gun on reform and make sure we don’t lose valuable time or momentum. Step 2 will see us pass the primary legislation needed to formally establish Great British Railways as an arm’s length body, ensuring that it’s structured around the needs of passengers and freight. Every five years the Secretary of State will issue a long term strategy which will set out how the railway must deliver against clear passenger objectives and Great British Railways will be incentivized to grow the number of people using rail and the revenues from it. And importantly, it will provide the clarity and certainty of outlook that the sector has been missing for so long. That will help address the boom and bust cycle our rail manufacturers like Alstom and Hitachi in Derby and the NE have been left in by this government, which has failed to set out a clear pipeline of rail investments for years. And to reassure both voters who worry that a railway run in their interests will cost to us, cost too much. And to reassure beloved colleagues in the shadow Treasury team, these fully costed proposals will save the taxpayer money through efficiencies delivered by eliminating duplicate costs across the network. This is an entirely new approach to our railways, and consciously so. There is no future in simply reinventing the past, and there is no hope if we remain wedded to the current mess. This is our plan. To put our railways back on track, to put passengers at the heart of our railways and to hold the railway to account, to make travelling by train accessible and reliable again, and to cut the waste and the short termism that has characterized the last 14 years of dysfunction. It isn’t going to be easy and it will take hard graft, but it will be my mission to get us to the right destination and to deliver for the great British passenger.