On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 05:00:42PM +0000, James Heartfield wrote:
> The WEEK
> ending 13 January 2001
>
> 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
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu