Douglas Carswell

Network Rail isn't working

Could there possibly be a worse way to run our railways?

The companies that operate the trains are all private businesses. But the entity that supplies the operators with the track on which to run their trains – Network Rail – is a government-backed monopoly.

This means that the former are utterly dependent on the latter. Yet the latter seems to have few incentives to raise its game.

In my corner of Essex, we have seen a series of unacceptable cock-ups in recent weeks. Weekend engineering work overruns into Monday morning, resulting in cancellations during peak commuting times. Over-head lines that ought to have been maintained properly have apparently not been maintained properly, resulting in massive delays.

Of course, everyone understands that accidents happen from time to time. And when they do there is no one more stoic and understanding than the British rail commuter. But it is a sense of serial incompetence that is really starting to get people's back up.

At the same time, public attitudes are shifting. Modernity has elevated people's expectations of what good customer service looks like. Folk simply aren't prepared to be fobbed off by big corporations who fail to deliver like they might have been in the past. "Why do the signals keep failing?", a fellow commuter recently asked

Network Rail is supposed to maintain a railway network for a living. It is what it does. Yet time and again they seem pretty hopeless at it. They have a board of grandees that oversee it, but who is there to speak up for the customers.

"Re-nationalise it!" one of my constituents suggested. Part of the problem, surely, is that Network Rail is already a de facto nationalised entity. It is backed by taxpayer cash and has little incentive to respond better to its customers. I am not convinced that ministers running the railways would make things better.

I am not sure what the answer is, but the current corporatist configuration is simply not good enough.

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