“John Major’s decision to privatise British Rail in 1994 was foolish, ideologically-driven, and doomed to fail.”
South Western Railway, C2C, and Greater Anglia will be the first rail operators to return to public ownership, the government has announced.
South Western Railways will be renationalised in May 2025, C2C in July 2025, and Greater Anglia in autumn 2025.
This comes after the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 received royal assent on 29 November.
The services will initially be operated by DfT Operator Limited, with Great British Railways (GBR) taking over control once it has been set up.
“For too long, the British public has had to put up with rail services that simply don’t work”, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, said in a statement.
Alexander, who took over the role from former transport secretary Louise Haigh on Monday, said that starting with South Western Railway, “we’re switching tracks by bringing services back under public control to create a reliable rail network that puts customers first.”
She added: “Our broken railways are finally on the fast track to repairing and rebuilding a system that the British public can trust and be proud of again.”
The Department for Transport statement said that the move will “clamp down on unacceptable levels of delays, cancellations and waste seen under decades of failing franchise contracts”.
Commenting on the announcement, Mick Whelan, general secretary of ASLEF, said: ‘Keir Starmer, Louise Haigh, and Heidi Alexander have delivered on the Labour Party’s manifesto commitment by bringing Britain’s railways back into public ownership.”
Whelan stated: “This is the right decision, at the right time, to take the brakes off the UK economy and rebuild Britain.”
He described the prime minister John Major’s decision to privatise British Rail in 1994 as “foolish, ideologically-driven, and doomed to fail”.
“It was described even by that arch-privateer Margaret Thatcher as “a privatisation too far” and so it proved.
“The privateers have taken hundreds of millions of pounds from our railways and successive Conservative governments have pursued a policy of managed decline which has sold taxpayers, passengers, and staff short.
“Now we are going to see the wheels and the steel put back together, an end to the failed fragmentation of our network, and a railway brought back into the public sector, where it belongs, to be run as a public service, not for private profit.”
The RMT released data last year estimating that railway privatisation has drained at least £31 billion from the system over the past 30 years, which has mostly gone into shareholders pockets, while passengers are paying 8% more to travel.
Labour has not indicated whether it will renationalise lucrative freight services and rolling stock companies (ROSCOs), which own and lease trains to rail operators.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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