The catalogue of failures of the service he presides over are pretty impressive. One major scandal is the decision to take back into public ownership the East Coast rail service via the simple cancellation of the existing contract because it wasn’t profitable enough for the firm that had taken it on. This is a strange concept in business dealings. Any normal manager of a service would have said to their supplier that the contracted price and terms had to be met. A contract is after all a legally binding document. But Grayling came up with a whole new way of doing business. The one way bet. Now any rail company knows that if they win a contract at a high price and coin it in then they get to keep all the profits. If they struggle to deliver what they promised and look likely to lose a billion or two then not to worry. Mr Grayling will simply let them walk away from their commitments and ask the taxpayer and the customer to pick up the bill.
One major scandal isn’t however enough for Mr Grayling. When he is in a hole he likes to dig further. So he told a meeting of business people from the north that the reason their transport service was so bad was because of the legacy of nationalisation. Apparently, the problems are not really the fault of the government but a legacy problem from the bad old days of British Rail. Unfortunately for him British Rail was abolished in 1994. The wonder new solution of privatisation has therefore had 24 years to fix the problems. Instead they have continued to get worse.
Fares in the UK are amongst the very highest in Europe. The service is notably worse. Trains across the Pennines trundle along at a funerial pace. The promised electrification never happened. Staff have begun to walk out on strike with all the regularity of hard-pressed Southern Rail workers. No one from government seems to notice but the service users and the workers do when they look at their pay packets. Four different companies deliver rail services within a small part of the north of England. Another one looks after the track. Not surprisingly they offer an incoherent service.
What the north desperately needs is a plan to link up its economies via a single strong network of train lines. There are as many people living in the corridor from Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds/Bradford, and Sheffield are there are in London. Joining that economy up via a light rail service that speeds between cities would enable young people to stay in the north and pursue successful varied careers and allow employers in any one particular northern town to draw on a pool of employees from across the region. For example, there are a whole series of strong financial services employers in the north including the Co-op Bank in Manchester, the Yorkshire Bank and the Yorkshire Building Society in Leeds Bradford, two major building societies in Skipton and a head office of RBS in Halifax. These organisations are only a few miles from each other but workers cannot easily move from one to the other because of journey times. The result is that instead of developing into a powerful alternative to the London financial market they remain as disjointed separate enterprises each of them struggling to attract a wide enough pool of talent and each of them containing talented workers who stay too long in the same job because they cannot easily travel to the alternative employers. The same problem exists with medical services, science and digital.
Any rational Minister would be pressing colleagues hard to build up the power of those nascent employment opportunities by rebalancing investment away from London. It is the single easiest way to widen opportunities, cut costs, and avoid overheating one part of the country whilst leaving others to struggle. Grayling has chosen instead to do the exact opposite. He keeps on investing massively more per head in rail services in London then he does in the north and then denies that there is even a problem by comparing rail investment in the north with that in the rest of the south ignoring London. The neglect and mistreatment of rail users in the parts of the south outside London has become notorious and is not an excuse for inflicting similar neglect on the north. Nor was it clever for Grayling to go on to blame the failure of the service in the north on local northern politicians and businesses. In case he hasn’t noticed it is his government that makes the decisions and has been doing so now for quite long enough for the shortfalls of the service to be his responsibility.
Where is his plan? How much money has he actually allocated to fixing the service in the north? Does that funding remotely compare with even one phase of the London Crossrail Project? When will the key decisions be made and who by?
The Minister in charge seems to want to dump responsibility for strategic failure on bodies such as Rail North that his own government has created. That would be fine if he had devolved serious money and serious powers to the regions and let them get on with planning their future with equal investment per head to London. Instead he has set these bodies tasks without providing them with the budget to deliver. In effect he has gone for even more confusing reorganisation in an attempt to muddy the waters of responsibility rather than set about developing a really effective plan and cracking on with delivering it.
This is now becoming a familiar pattern across the whole of the UK economy and public services. Each new Minister creates new structures and introduces new pet schemes. Often they come with catchy titles such as Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse. Then the Minister moves on and a new one arrives and even more complexity is added to the problem. Instead of actually trying to solve important long term problems by developing sustainable and deliverable long term solutions Ministers stagger from sound bite to sound bite. Spin and propaganda replace solution.
What is really sad about the rail transport failures is that it is one of the few areas where Brexit actually does provide an opportunity. European regional policy has had quite high levels of funding for many years without really working. It genuinely is an area where the policy is over bureaucratic and largely ineffective. I have both won bids to attract significant amounts of European Social Funding and in a different job managed part of the allocation system for several millions of pounds. Neither side of the process was impressive. A lot more could have been done with the money a lot easier. It really would be easy to take the existing UK contribution to European structural and regional funds and use it to develop first class regional rail infrastructure along with a regional investment programme in emerging technology. This could provide a fantastic platform for future economic success.
Instead of coming up with a plan to do that we have a Minister who can’t seem to develop the most basic strategic vision. Beyond whining that it isn’t his fault and it can’t possibly be the fault of the mess of privatisation. So for blaming others for his own failures Grayling gets my award for worst Minister this week.
I wonder who gets yours and which of the talentless nonentities will win it next?