Rail reform – approaching our final destination?

The rail reform consultation has closed last night. But are we any closer to knowing what the future of the railway is?

When the consultation came out, a lot of people were struck by the variations in tone. The executive summary was very political in tone, with a heavy focus on the passenger; the rest was magisterial civil service prose, filled with technocratic ideas about institutional architecture.

The same was true around devolution. The question of what to do about devolution had been conspicuously unanswered in the previous seven years of rail reform; the consultation was the first time government had formally set out a plan. That plan in turn was at odds with some of the fundamental principles of the model – most dramatically offering to let devolved bodies own and run track.

These questions aren’t resolved – though hopefully the consultation will be going some way to moving things on. The consultation itself suggested that DfT wasn’t yet of one mind, and key figures like Andy Burnham have been working to move the debate in their favour in the meantime

That may be a good thing. The elephant in the room about rail reform is that it is old – formally underway since 2018, and drawing heavily on the Highways England/National Highways model developed in 2012-14. A lot has changed since then, and old ideas may not necessarily meet new goals like growth; or serve new powerbrokers like the new generation of city mayors.

The impact of mayors in particular still needs to be resolved. In 2018, no one knew what to expect of people like Andy Burnham or Andy Street. Now, we are in a world where transport is being decisively decentralised – with transport and growth as key measures of mayoral success. The bar is set high, and a politician on a four-year term is unlikely to wait patiently to be consulted.

How do you ensure mayors have quick, flexible options to improve rail services in their area? GBR is designed to make the railway run better, but a price of that is that it may have to be more deliberative; and there is no obvious workaround if it decides to take its time. But no one is reforming the railway just to bury it in a bigger silo.

There is an obvious answer to this in the old model. Open access providers were meant to be the swift entrants who could swoop in and make services happen faster where there was an opportunity. This might be a match for mayors’ needs, and more broadly open access isn’t a bad mental model for understanding the devolved services already promised in Scotland, Wales, London and Liverpool But government has so far been cold towards open access, given the perception that it is ‘taking’ the business of established operators.

And the model needs to really think hard about growth. NR always puts the railway first; but mayors want regeneration and development more. Andy Burnham wants to move Manchester’s freight yards to open up the redevelopment of Old Trafford. GBR would never do that by itself – indeed proposed legal duties on rail freight might even prevent it doing so – so we need to figure out how to make it play in a bigger team.

The clock is ticking to see whether anyone can reconcile these viewpoints, and more broadly how the whole rail reform model is going to work. Not to mention all of the other reforms being made to buses, taxis, public transport coordination, local government and more. It’s not for nothing we’re talking about the ‘year of the four reforms’ in the Stonehaven transport team.