Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways doesn’t add up

Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways is not much of a plan at all. Rather, it is a list of goals: to eliminate ‘fragmentation, waste, bureaucracy’, to ‘bring down costs for taxpayers’ and to ‘drive-up standards for passengers’. All lofty ambitions, all lacking a strategy.

What little detail we do have points to significantly more bureaucracy. The party plans to set up two more quangos – Great British Railways and the Passenger Standards Authority – which are unlikely to do much to create the more ‘efficient’ system Labour is promising passengers.

Still, the announcement has been popular. And it is likely to stay popular until commuters are forced to reckon with the realities of a nationalised service again, which has, in the past, seen passenger numbers plummet when services are under the control of the state.

Why is there so much support? It strikes me that calls to renationalise the railways – just like growing calls to bring water back into state ownership – stem from the assumption that if the public want to see improvements in this sector or that, politicians are more likely to listen and fix the problems than chief executives.