https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...
Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.
That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.
And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?
Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.
The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.
Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.
So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.
Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.
Note this importantly doesn't include Scotland, Wales, Merseyrail (public) or TFL (public)
Rail subsidy jumped after railtrack was replaced with nationalrail, and the legacy of decades of underfunding in rail under BR was apparent. That underfunding is obviously going to happen under a tory government interested in cutting short term costs. You can see that as of 2015 subsidy per passenger mile was about the same as it was in the 80s and 90s[0]
Rail subsidy is split into two parts
1) Track costs 2) Service costs
Your figures are including major capital expenditure - specifically HS2 and Crossrail, so not really comparable with subsidies in the 70s and 80s when there weren't massive capital programmes and expansion.
I'm less concerned about track maintenence costs or track capital costs -- that's like the government paying for road maintenance or new motorways - it's good. It's the service subsidies that interest me. Basicalyl how much is the taxpayer using to subsidise rail travellers (who tend to have higher income and higher wealth than average), and during the 6 years I have data on, those dropped by £1.4 billion.
Remember that under BR there were competing sectors - intercity, regional railways, network southeast, all of which were shit. Now there are competing franchisees, some of which are shit, but we often get a choice (Virgin vs Chiltern vs London Midland for London-Birmingham, XC vs TFW for Crewe-Bristol, etc. This means more choice and cheaper fares for me, the passenger).
In 2015/16 the franchise "GTR (Thameslink etc)" pays £278m for the privilige of running trains through central London. Meanwhile Northern, which have very few routes that pay their way, get paid £122m from central government. You could argue that Grant Shapps would be better running these services, I'm not convinced.
Effectively Brighton->London commuters are subsidising rural travellers in Yorkshire. You could argue this shouldn't happen, and those commuting into London for high paying jobs should have cheaper fares, at the expense of fewer services in the North. That's a very Thatcherite view, but that's ok, everyone's entitled to a view.
APT predated privitisation by 2 decades so I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Virgin ordered the class 390s.
It sounds like you don't like the state of the rail industry in Britain in the 80s and 90s, which is reasonable. It's hardly the fault of privitisation didn't start until 1993 and didn't begin operation until about 1997
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
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Considering that this is about the same as inflation and less than the usual annual ticket price increase which is decided in part by the government, I strongly suspect that this number is an accounting exercise more than anything else.
There's also the profits made by the trains leasing companies as many TOCs lease their rolling stock
> There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling
There's no real competition for most commuters around London at least. The trade-off is rather with the cost of housing.
It makes perfect sense to complain about overcrowding for that reason and because pay a lot of money for their tickets, indeed.
People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.
If the number of trips has been increasing I think that the main drivers are the concentration of jobs within London and the booming housing costs: People live further and further away and have to commute by trains.
I'm no fan of the franchise system - especially when companies like Virgin East Coast get out of the obligations if they don't make enough money, but rail is stronger now (well 2019) than it has been since before the motor car was created, and the strength coincided with the franchise system coming in.
> People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.
We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though. And it's not just commuting into London -- long-distance travel has ballooned too - hence the need to build HS2.
In cities like Paris, public transport has huge capacity and is cheap (and in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket).
Lower growth there does not mean that we're doing better, it means that we're starting from lower... And the UK has had a robust population growth as well.
That sounds awful - so I effectively get a paycut if I walk or ride to the office?
If you buy a season ticket (at least a monthly ticket) to commute between your home and office you send a copy to HR and they have to refund you half of it.
What seems to happen now is the manufacturers e.g. Hitachi lease the trains to TOCs complete with maintenance plans built it.
Think Eurostar was the first model of this in the Uk
Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km
1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b
Since 1997 that's a 90% increase.
France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%.
Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on)
By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on)
It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.