BRITAIN'S INTEGRATED TRANSPORT NETWORK: NOTHING MOVES
Strikes by the Rail Maritime and Transport Union members on South Eastern trains stopped Londoners from going back to work after the holiday season. The press used the stoppages to attack government aloofness as transport minister Stephen Byers holidayed in India. The Unions were made the scapegoat, as commentators sought to shift the blame onto the other, train-drivers' union, Aslef, for opening up pay-differentials with by winning stronger deals than support staff from rail companies.
The collapse of Britain - and especially the South East's - transport network though, is hardly the work of the trade unions. In 1997 Prime Minister Blair was elected on a platform of creating an 'integrated transport policy'. The results are remarkable. Peak time traffic in central London now travels at just ten miles per hour (Office of National Statistics, Focus on London, 2000, HMSO, p117). Underground train journeys have been increased by eight minutes due to the thousand scheduled peak time services that do not run each month (Guardian 26 February 2001). Train companies like Arriva and GNER are fined for failing to meet schedules.
The poor performance of the railways is all the more surprising, since the government's explicit policy is to increase rail travel by as much as fifty per cent, a target the Strategic Rail Authority will announce on Monday is unlikely to be met. But the government's apparent commitment to rail was never that serious. Instead the preference for rail was largely a rhetorical gesture designed to compensate for the refusal to build new motorways. In 1998, an act was even passed empowering local authorities to force traffic off the streets by extending pedestrianisation, cycle lanes, congestion charges and other 'traffic calming' (sic) measures. All of this while car ownership is increasing (the percentage of UK households without a car fell from 38 in 1986 to 30 in 1998, Focus on London, p116). The government's announced bias towards rail flies in the face of the European trend to reduce rail-track (down from 170000km in 1970 to just over 150000km in 1998) and increase motorways (up from 2000km to 5000 km over the same period).
But this week Europe minister Peter Hain acknowledged that Britain's rail network was amongst the worst on the continent, putting new pressure on transport minister Stephen Byers. The New Labour government blames the failure of the rail network on the previous Conservative administration's privatisation policy. But in fact the railways were never privatised - if privatisation means that they were to be run as independent private companies on a profit-making basis. On the contrary, the conditions under which administrators were recruited from the private sector to run the rail network were so hedged with regulations, that they were rightly described as being more closely run by government after privatisation than before (see Simon Jenkins, Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalisation of Britain, 1995, p212). Though nominally independent, the rail companies were franchised by a government appointed Strategic Rail Authority. Fares and profits were subject to government control. Companies were liable for fines according to the quality of service.
These stringent rules surrounding privatisation give the game away: nobody in the outgoing Conservative administration, any more than the incoming Labour administration ever thought that private enterprise could be trusted to provide a dependable rail service. Such doubts were more than justified. City investors were not remotely interested in getting people from A to B, but in raiding British Rail's assets, whether its valuable real estate, or its large pension fund. Obtuse Railtrack chief executive Gerald Corbett regularly complained that the company's obligation to provide railway lines was damaging its profitability.
In fact the railway companies have demonstrated that providing a rail-service is unlikely to be a profitable industry. Companies like GB Railways and National Express have announced big losses. And last month Railtrack was brought under administration after continuing to lose money (GBP 534 million in 2000). If rail were to function as a private company, those losses would be the companies' own to bear. But the political cost to government of overseeing the failure of the rail network ensures that the companies can always rely on the government to bail them out. Five years after rail 'privatisation', government was still budgeting one billion pound sterling a year for upgrading the railways.
Such subsidies, though, meant that the price mechanism ceased to be any kind of restraint on the rail operators. Increasingly the regulators had to create artificial mechanisms, like fines, to discipline them. Last year transport minister Byers got the Strategic Rail authority to reduce franchises from the twenty-year contracts envisaged to two-year contracts, in an attempt to threaten them into providing a better service. Unfortunately, like the decision to bring Railtrack into administration, such measures frightened off what little private investment there was. It is in this context that the government is seriously contemplating re-nationalising the railways. The only real restraint is that it knows that permanent responsibility for rail will only raise public expectations that it has no expectation of meeting.
Finally, the strikes have suggested to some a return to the old days of union strength. While it is true that Mick Rix at Aslef, as well as the RMT have been quite bullish, all things are relative. It is in the context of a lack of clear leadership from the employers that the unions' stance looks aggressive. The supposedly exceptional pay awards are quite modest given the responsibility of drivers. And in their broader strategy the rail unions have been explicit that they would happily restrain the wage demands in exchange for government recognition of the unions' right to negotiate a national pay award.
Britain's railways have been stymied by the ambiguity of relations of ownership and control that are neither private enterprise nor a public service. Combined with the government's irrational disdain for road transport, the result is a disintegrated transport network. -- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP3.26 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org