Everybody must have heard about the tube strike in London, affecting millions of commuters, tourists and visitors alike. While the strike itself was unjustified, it has the merit of putting the light on one of Gordon Brown greatest failures, the Public Private Partnership for London Underground. For Labour politicians, PPP must look like the best of both worlds and there undoubtedly something deeply linked, to the infamous ‘third way’ in the idea of public and private finance working together.

As usual the facts are not to the advantage of the Labour Party, since Metronet as gone bankrupt it is fair to assume that the PPP is on the whole a failure. Separating train and track is not working on the railways and, there is no reason why it should be working on the Underground. In fact separation is even worse in the case of London Underground, mainly due to the fact that there is only one type of traffic using the track, as opposed to several on the railways. If one look at the history of the tube and also at other metro systems in the world, separation was never attempted and systems were and are integrated, may it be under a public or a private company.

Since Metronet is now bankrupt, Transport for London should take over instead its responsibilities, instead of paying administration fees and even for drawing another contract with a new provider. The contract with the other provider Tube Lines, could then be ended one their approbatory period ends in 2010, thence bringing back all maintenance and renewal works under the aegis of London Underground ltd, subsidiary of TfL. Heavy works like signalling renewals and new trains would be put to tender, and offered to the most competitive bidder.

I would even go further, and say that the opportunity should be used to completely revamp the existing structure of London’s transport. If projects like Crossrail or new tubes line are to be build, a healthy and well working structure will be needed, far from the bureaucracy which comes with PPP contracts. Several options are possible. The first one being the creation of a Transport for London plc, this would entail a complete reintegration of the buses and train operations into a single structure; economies of scale would follow and, opening up the capital of the company to private investors could allow billions of pounds in private money to be injected into the system. The second option would be as outlined before, for several subsidiaries to exist, London Underground ltd being one, as an eventual London Rail ltd, taking over the operation of Crossrail and Overground lines.

So far it seems that Labour transport policy is a complete failure since 1997, it is however not too late to end the current lunacy based on bureaucracy, lengthily contracts and micromanagement. This is providing of course that pragmatism triumph over ideology.

Judging from the announcement of the East Coast railway franchise being awarded today to National Express plc, it seems that the DfT civil servants did not understood what happened earlier last year for this franchise. Indeed if the current operator GNER was forced to stand down, that was because they were unable to pay a premium of £1.3 billion over the course of their ten years franchise. The new agreement includes this time, a premium of £1.4 billion in the course of eight years.

Apparently, it is clear that the DfT does not understand how a business should be run. In fact with yearly revenues of £600 millions; this premium would amount to an operational margin of more than 15% since some of the profits must be kept by the company. It is worth noting that this kind of performance, is not even achieved by the majority of businesses, except perhaps for very specialized companies. On the top of that, the agreement includes plenty of ‘targets’ whom Labour loves so much and as usual the taxpayer is set to foot the bill through higher than inflation fares.

Surely the time to end such lunacy on the part of the DfT must come to an end. Normal businesses do not need any targets, if they fail then they go bankrupt and everybody looses, if they succeed then everybody wins, customer feedback, shareholders pressure and external pressures are enough and are much more efficient than any profit target set by civil servants. The same thing should applies for the railways, thence scrapping the existing system of franchises, complicated arrangements based on contracts, to replace them with a few or even a single integrated plc independent of any governmental interference is the way forward.

What Ruth Kelly and the DfT only deserve is another franchise failure. As learning is by repetition, they will perhaps understand after a few more high profile failures, (the next one could very well be First Great Western) that they have to change something in their ways. But, I have some doubts as whether this will be enough for them. Moreover, if this ‘something’ means even more regulation, then the costs for cleaning up the mess are going to be pretty high and, guess who will have to pay the bill then? The taxpayer as usual.

The recent actuality is full of news concerning UK’s air industry, whose symbol of Heathrow airport is again under the fire from critics. This time it’s almost look like everybody is guilty in the affair, BAA for its management failures especially since its recent takeover by the Spanish firm Ferroviara and British Airways for having an appalling record when it come to delivering luggage.

Yet behind the scenes the current government is also guilty in the affair. Guilty for not having a clear policy toward airport expansion, guilty for granting Heathrow terminal 5 planning permission a few years late, guilty for supporting the ‘ecologists’ arguments that air travel is bad for the environment; when in fact it only account for at best 2% of the UK’s carbon emissions.

While it is very easy to lambaste British Airways when it comes to the lost luggage, when an airport such as Heathrow is completely saturated, understaffed (clear failures from BAA here) and mismanaged. There are clearly other factors at play, undercapacity being one of them. Thence, since air travel WILL increase in the future no matter what the green lobby twats think, we need to plan future needs in advance.

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The DfT recently published its transport strategy for the next 30 years in a tone quite similar to a similar strategy launched by John Prescott in 1999 for the next ten years, whose results were non-existent to say the least.

Rail is as expected at the heart of this strategy, calling for a 13% increase in capacity by 2014, when forecasts for the same period anticipates at least 20% of increase in passengers numbers. This single sentence already says everything, but wait there is more.

As most of newspapers already announced, commuters will bear the brunt of the planned ‘service improvements’, railway fares in Britain are already the most expensive in Europe, yet they are set to increase even more. Carbon emissions are also at the heart the agenda as one might imagine and while it perfectly possible to reduces the carbon footprint of railways even more, the ‘solutions’ proposed by the DfT bureaucrats are very optimistic at best. When cars are still not running on hydrogen, it seems possible for them to have trains running on hydrogen, biofuel is also mentioned, when in fact biofuel engines costs more to maintain than classical diesel engines. As far as capacity increases are concerned, there are mentions of a ‘new signalling system allowing a 50% increase in train paths’, the last time the government talked about installing a new signalling system on the network, the price was a few billions for almost nothing as a result.

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On the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph, one can find a title which says everything, “Millions to pay more for train tickets”. I had highlighted in a past article, the policy of the DfT to meddle with timetables and the like. Yet where some kind of regulation is necessary for the sake of clarity in the rail industry, none is made and the results can be seen everyday. Bath residents know how expensive it is to travel to London by train, indeed with a single fare of more than £70 in standard class; it is one of the most expensive train journeys in the whole world. And now the DfT is considering removing the capping of Saver tickets, potentially scrapping them altogether. Since a saver return from Bath to London costs £47, one can easily see the consequences of this policy.

The government has always claimed that “promoting public transport was our priority”, yet the actions of the DfT are doing precisely the opposite, potentially preventing millions of people from using trains due to excessive fares. I would not mind paying a lot for my train journey, but only if my ticket would undoubtedly offer value for money. If I believe the last figures, published in a well know railway magazine, the impression of value for money is falling among customers and the recent stories about overcrowding only confirms this fact.

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Sometimes in this country and not only in Britain, but anywhere else in the world where governments desire to promote public transportation; I think that it is worth asking if bureaucrats in the Department for Transportation are ever using “their” advocated types of transport instead of their own private cars? Considering the not so infrequent scenes of overcrowded trains with standing space only in the South East, but also on an increasing scale elsewhere in places like the West Midlands, the North West and now the Bristol-Bath region.

If passengers numbers are exceeded to the point of people not showing valid tickets to conductors as a mean of protestation then I think that comparing them with sardines in their box is fairly correct. Some readers might probably comment that “it’s the Tories who privatised the railways” and Major government certainly bears a responsibility by fractionating the systems into 27 different operators, three companies owning and leasing the rolling stock to the same trains operators and dozens of contractors for renewals and maintenance work. The creation of Network Rail was a very wise move in that respect but apart from this, the railway of today is already vastly different from the one of ten years ago when the last BR service ran in Scotland. Changes were made by previous Labour governments and the “benefits” of some of them are currently being reaped.

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