Book Reviews

Rail privatisation was a controversial, widely unpopular policy whose implementation was not inevitable. This article employs counterfactual history methodology to examine whether the move to rail privatisation in Britain might have failed. It places the privatisation proposals in context by examining opposition within the Conservative Party and British Rail. The paper then focuses on three key counterfactual questions, including the significance of New Labour's reversal of its commitment to renationalise rail under its ‘third way’ policy and the possible consequences had the move to privatise rail failed. Based on the historical evidence available, it concludes that the move to rail privatisation could have failed, and that performance would have been better had rail remained an integrated, nationalised industry.     

NEW LABOUR, PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND RAIL TRANSPORT POLICY

The New Labour government has favoured the deployment of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) to provide investment in transport infrastructure. The results of this policy on the railways have, however, been disappointing in terms of cost and efficiency. Public transport PPPs require complex contracts underpinned by regulatory mechanisms in order to maintain performance and safety standards. Moreover, risk transfer is difficult to achieve, as essential infrastructure cannot be left to the ultimate market discipline of bankruptcy.     

‘A highly successful model’? The rail franchising business in Britain

A crucial feature of rail privatisation in Britain was franchising. Passenger services were franchised in competitive bidding processes to train operators which were meant to function with declining subsidy. The article adopts the framework of social cost-benefit analysis to examine rail privatisation’s impact on three key groups; consumers, producers and the government. It establishes that privatisation did not achieve all the supposed benefits. Further, franchising only appears to be profitable through the use of calculative accounting practices, whereby franchised train operators are portrayed as discrete business entities, whereas they are supported by very substantial, ongoing direct and indirect government subsidies.     

'A Lot of Friction at the Interfaces': The Regulation of Britain's Privatised Railway System

This paper examines the regulation of privatised industries, especially the railways. It focuses on the regulation of the infrastructure company, Railtrack, which collapsed into insolvency less than six years after its flotation. It analyses in detail the establishment of a key interface in the railway system, the track access charges, and discusses the extent to which Railtrack's collapse was a failure of regulation. The paper concludes that the key problem was not the regulatory system, but the fundamentally flawed concept of the rail privatisation, and discusses the implications for the success of privatisation and of Railtrack's successor, Network Rail.     

Network Rail – forward or backward? Not-for-profit in British transport

This article examines the brief and unsuccessful career of the privately-owned infrastructure company, Railtrack, and its part in the privatised railway system in the UK between 1996 and 2001. It discusses the decision of the British government to discontinue public support for Railtrack and to set up a new not-for-profit company, Network Rail, to replace it. The ongoing public debate over these events and the prospects for the new company are analysed. Two earlier, and broadly successful, examples of not-for-profit companies in British transport history, are briefly considered for comparative purposes – the Port of London Authority and the London Passenger Transport Board.