Paul Salveson on the best transport secretary we never really had?

So, goodbye Louise Haigh, your tenure as transport secretary was all too short. I referred in a previous Chartist to her comments about P&O (“a rogue company“ or something to that effect) and the less than supportive responsive from Starmer. So now she’s gone, and as far as I can see, over “summat o’nowt” as we say up “ere. Her departure came within hours of her launching Labour’s integrated transport strategy, which most professionals in the transport industry welcomed as a good piece of work, and the sort of thing we’d been expecting from a Labour government for a very long time. Let’s hope her replacement, Heidi Alexander, will continue the good work Louise started. As a Swindon MP, a town noted for its great railway tradition, she ought to. There’s certainly a lot to do.

On rail, despite agreements with ASLEF on rest day working and Sundays, cancellations continue. Gazing out of my sitting room window at Station House (on the Furness Line between Barrow and Lancaster), as I write this column, I’ve seen three trains pass so far this afternoon running “empty” – in other words, effectively cancelled because there is no guard (or “train manager” in modern parlance). In case anyone thinks this will all be sorted out when the train companies move into the public sector, well Northern has been state-owned for well over a year and performance has, if anything, got worse. The problems are deep-seated and it isn’t about ownership; it’s for many reasons, relating to historic problems, including poor industrial relations but lots more – and it needs to be resolved quickly.

At a recent meeting with the city-region mayors Andy Burnham (Greater Manchester) and Steve Rotheram (Liverpool), the unfortunate Northern representative admitted it could take years before the problems were sorted out. Burnham’s response was, unsurprisingly, less than polite. You don’t have to be an old-fashioned Northern nationalist like me to think that if this was going on in London it would be sorted out next week.

This dire situation is coming at a time when the industry is preparing to celebrate 200 years of railways. The opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, while not the world’s first, in many ways marked the beginning of the Railway Age. Five years later, building on the experience of the S&D, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened as the world’s first inter-city railway, largely thanks to that illiterate working class Geordie called George Stephenson. It will be a time to reflect on the great achievements of the past, as well as the potential of rail to address many of our current problems – certainly around connectivity, but also larger issues around climate change. Rail could do so much, but until we get the basics right, rail will not reach its full potential. Poor old Stephenson must be turning in his grave.

Great British Railways? It could be, but just coming up with a silly name that Johnson coined, won’t solve the problems. Bringing a more focused approach to rail is certainly a good thing and we’ve a good man holding the political reins, in the shape of Lord Hendy, the Rail Minister. Network Rail, which will provide much of the input to GBR (though everyone has been told to say it isn’t “Network Rail Mk2′), has some excellent people at the top. But will it manage to avoid the pitfalls of being over-centralised and lacking in a detailed understanding of local needs?

This is surely where the likes of Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and the other city region mayors come in. Liverpool City Region already controls its suburban electric network, Merseyrail. It’s an efficient, well-run operation which happens to be operated by the private sector, but delivered to demanding standards set by the Labour-controlled city region. Why does it work? Because there’s a close (but not too close) relationship between the public and private sectors. The city-region is big enough to sustain a viable rail network, but not too big to be unmanageable. The same approach could work in other city regions including Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the North-East, even though the networks are less cohesive.

Meanwhile, there’s lots of interest amongst the big private groups like First and Virgin in developing “open access” services. What’s that you say? Essentially it’s a form of operation outside the franchised rail network. An operator can apply for rights to operate a train service where they think there is a demand and it is not deemed to be “abstractive” of the publicly-supported franchised services. Whilst it’s a classic form of “railway capitalism”, the results generally have been pretty good with operators like First-owned Lumo, Grand Central and Heathrow Express. Why do they succeed? Because they are small enough operations to have focus and community, plus employee, buy-in. Perhaps the most interesting potential open access operator is a co-operative – Go-op – which has just been awarded rights to operate a service in the west of England, linking growing towns such as Swindon, Westbury, Taunton and Weston-super-Mare. Speaking as a shareholder, I wish them well and hope we see more such ventures. But they will remain marginal. For now, efforts should focus on resolving the big problems facing the likes of Northern and other regional operators.