Rail unions have slammed proposals from transport secretary Chris Grayling to allow the private train operating companies and other firms to run sections of Britain’s infrastructure.
Plans for the operation of track and train across the rail network will be achieved through new rail franchises and the first to be let will be on the South Eastern and East Midlands lines, which will be expected to include integrated operating teams between train services and infrastructure. The franchises are due to be awarded in 2018.
Grayling’s plans include the creation of East West Rail, the first new integrated rail operation in decades that is separate to Network Rail, and the closer alignment of incentives between the management of infrastructure and the operation of train services.
East West Rail will deliver the design, construction and operation of the line between Oxford and Cambridge, which was phased out in the 1960s. It will be the first such operation since the privatisation fiasco of the 1990s.
The Department for Transport will also be inviting Transport for London (TfL) to be more closely involved in developing the next South Eastern franchise, through seconding a TfL representative to the franchise specification team.
Rail union RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: “This is the Tory government dragging the railways back to the failed and lethal Railtrack model of the private sector running infrastructure. There is no question at all that this plan represents the piecemeal privatisation of Network Rail which over a period of time will see both train operations and track run by the same bunch of companies who have failed so abysmally over the past two decades.”
Mick Whelan, general secretary of the ASLEF drivers’ union, said the proposals demonstrate what we have known for a long time: “government rail policy is bankrupt”.
He said: “It has done privatisation, it has done nationalisation and now it doesn’t know what to do with Network Rail. The failures and tragedies of the Railtrack era remind us that infrastructure should never be run for profit.”