Michael Harrison: A Victorian solution to this modern crisis on the rails

The number of trains running late has hit a seven-year high and the rail regulator has laid the blame squarely at the door of the nationalised company that owns and operates the system, Network Rail. Jeremy Corbyn’s solution to this depressing state of affairs is to go the whole hog and take the remainder of the industry back into public ownership.

If you think that sounds counter-intuitive, then you would be right. Labour’s plans for the railways are no doubt politically popular but they are also economically illiterate.

Bringing passenger franchises under state operation is hardly a panacea and Corbyn seems to have overlooked the cost of buying back the rolling stock.

Network Rail is already state-owned. More nationalisation is not the answer. Nor is a freeze in train fares, the unhelpful suggestion the (Labour) Mayor for Manchester, Andy Burnham, made last week after it was announced they will rise by an average of 3.1% next year.

How does Her Majesty’s opposition think things will get better if train operators are starved of the funds to improve services? And who does Labour think will make up the shortfall in funding, if not passengers? The only other source of money is the taxpayer, so the Burnham strategy would merely result in Peter being robbed to pay Paul.

None of this is to say that the Government is making a very good fist of running the railways. Like Macavity the cat, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was, as usual, nowhere to be found when last week’s double-whammy of bad news on punctuality and fares hit the headlines. He did, however, turn up to face the music today after being blamed by MPs on the Transport Select Committee for last May’s timetable fiasco. Just as well.

Much as he may wish to, the minister cannot wriggle out of responsibility for the parlous state of the rail industry. It is also his discredited franchising policy that has allowed train operators onto the network who lack the staff, finances or management to run a service worth the name.

But back to Grayling’s favourite whipping boy. The Office of Rail and Road’s damning conclusion that there are “current systemic issues in relation to Network Rail’s performance management capability” does not bode well. In layman’s terms, the regulator is suggesting it is not up to the job.

This is a worry when it has been given £35 billion to spend on the railways over the next five years, £24 billion of that on maintenance and renewal and the rest on improvements to the network.

It seems that, pound for pound, it costs more to run trains here than almost anywhere else on the Continent. In a little-noticed report snuck out last month, HS2, the government-owned company building the new £55 billion high-speed line from London to Manchester, admitted that the scheme was costing more than double that of comparable projects elsewhere in Europe.