Blog post: Rail reform and the case for better railways

17 April 2025

Sitting on my desk at home is a Darlington Crystal paperweight inscribed with the following words: Railtrack Flotation, 20 May 1996. It’s an object I treasure for several reasons. For sure, it’s got personal historic interest for me – a souvenir of a long civil service career, much of which was spent in and around the Department for Transport. But, just occasionally, I use it as a reminder that organisational change doesn’t always deliver a better world.

Yes, back there, 29 years ago, I was a junior member of the large team (well it seemed large then, though there are far more civil servants working on rail issues now!) which was responsible for the privatisation of British Rail. My own unit was charged with restructuring the industry – moving the network operator, the train operating companies, the rolling stock companies, and other parts of the industry, into separate entities, then into the private sector, connected via the magic of an immense network of contracts.

We were challenged but optimistic. We felt that the monolith which had been the British Railways Board had failed to stand the test of time – from its uninspiring cheese sandwiches to the lack of innovation and dynamism in its ticketing model. Railways could be so much better, and our work on industry structure would help make that so.

Anyway, we did what we set out to do, we restructured the railway, we set market forces alight and waited for things to get better. And here we are, in the blink of an eye, 29 years later, responding as London TravelWatch to a government consultation aimed at putting it all back together again – Great British Railway’s trains running on Great British Railway’s tracks calling at Great British Railway’s stations. Our response to the government consultation.

Looking ahead to a new world for railways

With the benefit of hindsight, I’m going to suggest a few things to think about as we move into the next new world for our railway.

First, let’s not all fetishise industry structure. It’s not all that. Of course, looking back, what we put into place in 1996 was excessively complicated. But it’s not clear that any of the attempts made since then to improve things have made much of a difference to the fundamentals of reliability, accessibility, price etc.

Reducing industry complexity is a necessary, not sufficient, move to make things better. Monoliths can be good. By and large, even in our role as watchdog, we think that the TfL structure (absolutely a monolith) offers a coherent and cohesive service to London’s travelling public. London’s model of integrated ticketing remains world leading. But monoliths can also be bad. They can over-focus on internal dynamics and become resistant to challenge. It’s how they are funded, the values of their leaders, the rules they work to, and the people they employ, that really make the difference.

Second, not everything that’s happened on the railways in the last 29 years has been an absolute disaster. Of course, our railways are too expensive for both users and taxpayers, too unreliable, and need to do a better job of supporting the economic growth we need. They must do better. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. For sure, people need to be able to trust that the tickets they are buying are not being artificially inflated. There should be zero tolerance for scams. But different channels for buying tickets are attractive to different people. More differentiated pricing has filled up trains. Let’s fix what needs to be fixed but not demonise 30 years of history for an entire sector.

Third, while we are planning for tomorrow, let’s not take our eye off the ball of today. If you want to see a prime example of how that can go wrong, just look at Euston Station. Euston probably has an exciting future as the London terminal for HS2, bringing together multiple transport systems within a single space. Many brilliant people in the government and the industry are currently working hard to create an exciting vision for the future station.

Well, I’m sure it will eventually be amazing. But right now, it’s just a bit grim, and many of the people who need to tolerate its inadequacies as they go about their daily lives will have retired by the time the full transformation has been delivered.

So, at London TravelWatch, we’ll be supporting rail reform from the sidelines and very much hoping that it works. But that shouldn’t be a reason not to get on with the improvements that can be made to the rail system right now. There are too many days on which London’s rail users are let down in ways that they just don’t need to be – by poor workforce planning, lacklustre service culture, inadequate communications. These are things which are fixable now. Jam tomorrow won’t do.