Transport Insights

As a former transport minister and now shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden’s questions to transport ministers are very entertaining and you get the sense that he knows where the bodies are buried.

He recently asked:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate her Department has made of the annual cost to the public purse for payments associated with rolling stock leasing agreements following the transfer of train operating companies into state control.

It’s not clear whether he was implying that the new arrangements will increase these costs.

But the gist of the reply from very junior minister Keir Mather is that they won’t:

It is expected that future transfers will see existing rolling stock leasing arrangements novate to the new public sector operator on existing terms as part of the transfer of operations into public ownership. Therefore, we do not expect changes to current cost estimates as a result of the transfer of operations into public ownership.

So huge amounts of money will continue to leak from the rail industry to the companies that own the trains.

The phrase about “the transfer of operations into public ownership” is an interesting one. Can you really own operations?

By way of a recap, before nationalisation, the infrastructure was already in public ownership and the trains will remain in private ownership.

It’s neither all change, nor a plan for change.