The Transport Manifesto

Elections are won and lost on bigger and sexier things than transport, despite the fact that most people will feel the effects of transport policy, good or ill, far more than they will notice a penny on National Insurance or a windfall tax on inept yet well remunerated bankers. The following potted history will not help you to make up your mind on which lot to vote in tomorrow, but perhaps something about the billions of pounds of your money which has been and is being squandered in transport will make you demand better from whoever turns out to be your MP in a couple of days’ time.

Despite being widely and more or less justifiably ridiculed for the rudeness of its customer service and the limpness of its sandwiches, British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s was the most efficient railway network in Europe, costing the taxpayer an average of £1bn per year in direct subsidy. The Tory privatisation of 1994, which was considered a step too far even by the rabid Thatcher, has left us with a network which today costs between £4bn and £12bn per year in direct subsidy, though the figure is hazier than it used to be because “commercial sensitivity” in dealing with contracts between government and the private sector is more important than taxpayers finding out how exactly how much of our money lines private pockets.

In opposition, Labour made it clear to the purchasers of BR’s rolling stock that a Labour government would renationalise the railways, driving down the price of the stock. When Labour won power and did not renationalise the network, the new owners of all Britain’s rolling stock realised they had got themselves a bargain. The fragmented structure of maintenance and poor communication between competing railway companies led, in varying degrees of directness, to fatal accidents at Ladbroke Grove, Potters Bar and Hatfield. For all this, rail passengers are paying up to 240% more for their tickets than BR charged them, and British railway pricing today is directly modelled on the airline industry, pricing people out of the peak travel times instead of coaxing car drivers on to public transport with a pricing structure which rewards peak time travel as is standard practice in Europe.

On London Underground, Gordon Brown’s beloved PPP saddled LU with a cumbersome contractual arrangement with two profit-hungry firms, one of which collapsed costing LU (i.e., the taxpayer) between £140m and £200m, and one of which is still shutting the Jubilee line for whole weekends at a time when it should have been finished in December 2009. LU cannot refuse these closures but it can fine Tube Lines for every month that it is late – except that it can’t, because the risk of Tube Lines going under is so great that the fines could in the end land LU with another cleanup bill in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon’s cock-up, Boris had to make the ever-popular decision to put up fares despite shedding over 1000 staff after LU and Metronet merged, though since his party started rail privatisation it is hard to feel any sympathy for the blonde loon.

The Liberal Democrats had no hand in any of this, though their manifesto pledges regarding rail cannot stand up under the weight of their own absurdity. A 1% per annum cut in regulated fares sounds nice, until you realise that any loss of revenue in regulated fares will be more than made up for by the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) in massive unregulated price hikes. Reopening closed rail lines and building new tracks for existing lines by drastically reducing the road budget, while paying for all of this using road and fuel duty, is so far from a vote-winning formula that it would be dropped as soon as any LD government or coalition took power. Forcing Network Rail to refund one third of a passenger’s ticket price if they have to take a rail replacement bus will make maintenance so prohibitively expensive that corners will be cut, or Network Rail (funded by you) will be forced to pay, meaning that we all pick up the cost in the end anyway.

The Lib Dems just do not understand transport, at all. Could there be any clearer sign that they are ready for power than that?