What have the Romans ever done for us, ranted John Cleese in The Life of Brian. His audience then went on to list the aqueduct, roads, education and so on. What can we take from privatisation?
Spoiler alert – it wasn’t worth it. But that’s not to say nothing can be learned from the most expensive experiment in railway history. The bad things are easy to find, but what about the good things? They are real and don’t have to go.
THIS COULDWORK
Back in the early 1990s staff briefings started going out preparing us for privatisation, in the form the British Rail Board expected – InterCity and so on. I thought‘this could work’, but nobody guessed the shattering degree of fragmentation which was to come. Most people in British Rail thought it was wasteful and could be more efficient, but we had no idea. I think what we failed to realise was that competition means doing everything many times over, and could the savings from that competition cover the cost of all that extra bidding?
But who cares what I think? I was being briefed, not briefing, I was a project engineer in theTech Centre, running Pacer re-engining, so I was just another straw in the wind. While I don’t normally let that stop me writing…
