All aboard Sturgeon Rail
First the SNP nationalised an airport. Then the ferries. Now it's the turn of the trains. Gulp.
IF you are somebody who relies on Scotland’s ferries to get you from your home on the islands to the mainland, or if you have simply been enraged by Nicola Sturgeon’s disastrous oversight of the two new replacement vessels which are already running five years late, then you may wish to turn the page now.
On Friday this week, Ms Sturgeon is nationalising the trains.
The omens do not look altogether great.
Perhaps the less said about the ferries for now, the better. Suffice to say that the SNP’s decision to nationalise the Fergusons yard which is currently building them has so far landed the taxpayer with a still unknown bill running into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Then there was the nationalisation at Prestwick airport, which was brought into public ownership by Ms Sturgeon in 2015. It hasn’t fared much better. Only last week, a cross-party committee of MPs at Westminster, chaired by the SNP’s Pete Wishart, criticised the £50m that has been sunk into the Ayrshire runway in the years since, never to appear again. No bidder is in prospect and Edinburgh and Glasgow Airport, which did not receive a penny from the Scottish Government during the lean Covid years, are understandably miffed.
ScotRail, however, is an altogether bigger beast: the franchise awarded to the private company Abellio in 2014 to run it was worth no less than £7 billion over ten years, the biggest cheque that Scottish Ministers get to sign. Given neither Sturgeon Air nor Sturgeon Ferries are challenging British Airways and Royal Caribbean as leaders in their respective fields, what chance Sturgeon Rail fair any better?
The first question to ask is why is this happening at all? The reason is pretty is simple. Back in the old pre-Covid days, Abellio found itself under enormous pressure over poor performance, cancellations and late services. This was the result of major upgrades in the way the service was being run, including a fleet of new trains, the company explained. But Scottish Labour and transport unions went ballistic. “This failed privatisation experiment must end now,” roared former firebrand Labour leader Richard Leonard in a protest at Glasgow Queen Street station. And ever sensitive to the charge of being on the side of Tory sounding words such as privatisation, the SNP yielded. In 2019, a “break clause” ending the contract was taken up. Abellio complained they would have offered an “improved service at a reduced cost to the taxpayer.” No matter: the then transport minister Michael Matheson confirmed that a new “arms-length” public company would be brought in to run it. It will do so this week.
In truth, many people who remember the rail service before the pandemic may well have sympathy with this decision – which is of course another reason why the SNP was keen to take it. However, those same people will now care less about who runs the service than whether it can transport them from A to B at a reasonably fair price. So, the second question is whether the decision to nationalise the trains will make much of a difference to the actual train you get on this weekend. The short answer is no. This is the view of Mr Matheson’s successor Jenny Gilruth. “There was a frustration from the public that public money was being used to fund a private company that wasn’t delivering a service that met passengers’ expectations,” the latest Transport Minister said at the weekend, explaining her predecessors’ decision to get rid of Abellio. Yet, she added: “From day one, you might not necessarily see anything that looks different.”
OK, so third question: if the train looks the same as the old Abellio version, what exactly is the point here for the long-suffering passenger? The big new bonus, says Ms Gilruth, is added “accountability”. Now that she owns the trains, there will be more scrutiny on her and her position. She also says MSPs will be more able to get information on what’s happening in their local area. “People should feel as though they have a vested interest in this and that the railways work for them,” she added. The Minister has launched a ‘national conversation’ on the trains, which seeks people’s views on how to run the trains in a post-pandemic world.
I wish Ms Gilruth well in this endeavour. There’s plenty to be gained from speaking and listening to people. And it may provide her with a battery of evidence that helps spur on reform of the rail service to the benefit of passengers everywhere. The sceptic in me, however, can’t help pondering over that word “accountability”. The question, of course, is to whom? In the case of our overdue and delayed ferries, the SNP’s answer has been primarily the workers in the Fergusons yard not the islanders who rely on the service. That may have been a good way to show off to ex-Labour voters in west central Scotland that the SNP were the new saviours of the Clyde but it is also the reason why people on Arran and the Western Isles are still waiting for a reliable way to get to the mainland. Similarly, on trains, will Ms Gilruth be accountable to passengers who want a decent service at a reasonable cost, or the vested interests blocking any hint of reform who will shout loudest about her decisions? Will the Scottish Government risk a scrap on behalf of punters, or take the easy option that helps keep things on the road over the short term?
For example, ScotRail is currently trying to shift staff who work in under-utilised ticket offices to work as ticket inspectors and track down fare dodgers. Yet the Unions are resisting. Will Ministers insist that in a post-Covid world efficiency comes first? Or take the timetable. Post Covid, more people now use the trains at weekends than previously. Yet on Sundays, there is still a skeleton service. Having listened to people, will our newly accountable Scottish Government take on vested interests who will dig in against any suggestion of reform on behalf of passengers who want to take the train rather than drive at weekends? Or take the constitutional cold war that hangs over all our politics. The UK Government is about to scrap Network Rail and create a new entity called Great British Railways covering the entirety of the UK. Will the SNP literally use their new train set to play the same old constitutional games, or will they seek to cooperate with this new institution on behalf of us all? Will they show once again that they are always primarily accountable to their own political obsession?
For most reasonable people in Scotland, the stink emerging from the Clyde over the ferries scandal has removed any benefit of the doubt they might once have given to the SNP when it comes to running just about anything. We are therefore entirely justified to be sceptical of the ScotRail nationalisation. Ultimately, Scottish Ministers are asking us to trust them more than the private sector experts they decided needed replacing. With the shadow of the Fergusons debacle hanging over them this Friday, that’s not something they deserve. Rail nationalisation in Scotland must have a purpose beyond the obligatory photo call later this week. Scotland’s long-suffering passengers – whether on air, sea, or rail – deserve no less.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail 30th March 2022