Ministers have scrapped the decision to award the West Coast franchise to FirstGroup, saying the bidding process was and is flawed.

Ministers have said 'there are significant technical flaws' in the bidding process, and the bid will have to be totally rerun.

Two independant reviews have been ordered, one for what has gone wrong and one into the Depertment for Transport rail franchise programme.

Long and short of it is (as a man in the know) the government saw dollar signs and Branson knows what he's doing and caught them out. (keep your eyes peeled for corruption/politcians changing jobs in this area)

What I don't understand is that exactly the same thing happened with the East Coast a few years back and no one learned anything.

Morons, well done Branson, you're making the Government look stupid by just being open and honest.

Two things - one solution.

Thing 1. The threat of legal action and the re-running of the bid process is just going to cost the national purse more, on top of the billion quid a year subsidy the franchise already receives in order to ensure a return for shareholders.
Thing 2. This episode proves that if free-market capitalism doesn't work in your favour, just stamp your feet and threaten to sue.

The solution. Take back ownership of our railways.

But the threat of legal action is the ONLY thing that has prevented a [ifait accompli.[/i The re-run of the bid process will cost, sure, but I doubt Branson would agree to toss a coin for it.


Nope, both sides have lawyers available, you will get nowhere with a mere "threat to sue", it won't work unless you have a strongly arguable case.


Amen to that.

Absobloodylutely.

Really? Even people who work on the railways know that when they were private it was a joke. Virgin Trains rival Japan and Germany on punctuation, run at a profit and have 98% customer satisfaction.

Why would you want to change that?

To save public money. BR wasn't great, but the current situation is worse. It costs more for less. Billions go into the system from each and every one of us and it is lost to us. We won't see that again. At the very least, under a nationalised system every penny is accounted for and accountability - for faults and successes - is clear.

How much of that profit is in the form of public subsidy?

I use Virgin pretty regularly. The service is not bad – at least not now the works around Rugby have been completed – but the ticketing is a farce and the prices are frequently bonkers.

And yet, as with others, this is a subsidised service, whereby the taxpayer helps ensure company shareholders get their money. It's utterly absurd.

Run it as a public service and either reinvest profits or give them to the Exchequer.

Probably because we are paying through the nose to ensure the private companies that run the trains (and the utilities for that matter) [umake a profit[/u. I don't see how they provide value for tax-payer money.

The fact you need regulators to stop private industries exploiting what are in effect regional monopolies ought to tell you there are just some things that make sense to be publicly owned.

Think about what privatization has meant. Instead of one board of directors we have several companies who's senior staff all take high salaries. There is duplication like this all over the place. Each firm has its own legal, HR and other departments and so on. This all costs them money that they all pass onto us. There is no economy of scale.

Work on replacing the sewers has been taking place, throughout the summer, on a street around the corner from where I work.

Spotted there have been vans for engineering company Murphy. On the side of the vans, it proclaims: 'Murphy a partner of Optimise, working with Thames Water'.

The latter, when a publicly owned utility used to have its own engineers etc.

Now, it seems that for a job, you require three different, private companies, with – presumably – three sets of directors, three HR departments, three finances departments etc etc. And three sets of shareholders needing an annual payout.

And people wonder why the cost of their utility bills has risen so much.

The railways were in decline in every way before privitization, it had next to no public investment, cost the government £1,5 Billion per year, passenger levels were plummeting. Now the railways get £3 Billion per year from the companies, passenger numbers are on the increase every year, not to mention the massive affect it would have on the freight industry if the railways went private again.

I'm not saying franchising is perfect, far from it, but one company has started to make money, pay it back and get a good service, maybe they should be the template for what the industry should work from. And now they are working on a more transparent bidding process so that companies like First Group and National Express can't pull figures from thin air to achieve a contract they can't deliver on.

This happens in all spheres now. Local authorities though public bodies outsource just about everything to private companies. My wife works as a school secretary and over the years she has done the job more and more stuff has been outsourced and the council provides less and less direct support for schools such as maintenance, refuse collection and so on.

This requires less council staff so the wage bill drops and the council can point to how efficient they are. What they don't tell you is the huge amount of waste as in wasted money working this way results in. No one in the council has a real handle on the costs because they are spread across so many suppliers. The people in my wife's position now have to organize the work she would normally just have called the maintenance department to fix for example.

It is now down to the efforts of all the individual staff like my wife to ensure they are not being ripped off and get the best deal. My wife does do this as she comes from a public service background where councils spent money in a very guarded way but I know for a fact most people in her situation either don't give a toss or have not got the time to do it. It is far easier just to pay the invoice then chase incorrect amounts or whatever.

The end result is councils are cash cows for private companies and it costs us all more.

Spot on.

Agree on that.

Even I think taking back ownership of the railways is a reasonable idea, so long as we don't go back to the old British Rail days of late, old, uncomfortable trains, with no facilities, no investment and total disinterest from rude and incompetent staff.

Hate Northern Rail with a passion, but it has to be said, their trains are by and large on time, even if they are old, smelly, too small and garish looking. They're the rail equivalent of the local council.

Virgin Trains have shown how train travel should be done. After a shaky start, they're now pretty much always on time. They've introduced pendolinos, shortened journey times and added excellent customer service into the mix. Trouble is, they're bloody dear unless you book three months in advance.

No, if we're going to renationalise the railways, then nothing less than the standards you get with SNCF in France will do. But even that's not perfect. Their TGVs make a lot of money, but most of that profit, plus a lot of public money, is diverted into their regional services that lose silly amounts.

And then you have the problem that rail travel isn't always massively convenient. It's great if you live in towns and cities, as you can walk to the stations, it's no good for those who live in the suburbs or in rural locations. Surely there needs to be a massive programme of station building out of town, with lots of car parking available, so people can drive to their nearest station, and get the train the rest of the way? I'd certainly do that, especially if the cost of parking was modest, and added to the cost of the rail ticket, and even better if a nationwide Oyster-style system was implemented.

If the government wanted the railways, they'd take them back, but I'm sure that successive politicians have looked at the books, and looked at the kind of investment that would be needed, and shut the book very quickly.

The sad fact is it will probably take 30 years or more of solid investment to turn the railways into a proud network that is modern, on time, fast, convenient, frequent, fare-dodger proof and reasonably priced. Even if the country had the money, what government is going to instigate this kind of project, with it in the back of their minds that the 'other party' might cancel this investment when they get in power?

No they were not, they had been largely sorted out, just in time to sell them off BTW.

Sorted out? How?

Apart from being divided into "sections", ready for those sections to be taken over by private companies, I don't see how.

I can't help but notice that my ticket from Leeds to Birmingham on the 8.11 on Monday morning has just arrived priced at £53.

The last time I used the service about six months ago, and previous to that, the price was always around £41, same service, same operator, same time train.

Thats not a bad price increase to get away with and I'll bet my seat is occupied again.

Just booked a Hull/London KX return.
Still only £20 when booked in advance and prepared to travel off peak.

Doesn't matter what time you book the Leeds/Brum route, its the same price, even the 03.15 train is the same price

(and I'm NOT getting up that early).

The other thing thats tweaking my tail is that my usual hotel is fully booked because the Conservative Party Conference is in town next week - bloody good news that is, my train arrives in Leeds from Darlington which means it'll be full of North Yorkshire landowners in tweed on their way to cheer on Panface - I'm having to stay in a poxy Travel Lodge out of town which has 83 reviews on Trip Advisor the best of which says "I suppose it was ok", look out for my Facebook updates on Monday

Back in the "bad old days" poor old Peter Parker had to run a railway with very low investment from the government.
He always said that if he was allowed to raise money in the same way that any company could, he could revitalise BR without the need to privatise.
Successive flavours of government wouldn't allow it.

Then it got privatised and loads of investment flooded in, in the form of subsidies, that could just as easily have been provided to BR without the need for loads of it to flow straight out again in the form of dividends and "profit".

On ticketing, the three months thing is wonderful – if you can book that far in advance. But I cannot often do that, so end up paying an incredibly varied range of prices. Crazy.

Robinson mentioned the French system – it's the only one outside of the UK that I've now had fairly extensive experience of travelling on, and it's brilliant.

Although I would say that the local services are also good and every bit as valuable as the big ones.

If you're interested, there's a little bit [url=http://thevoluptuousmanifesto.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/stage-6-la-tour-de-carol-to.htmlhere[/url about the effect of maintaining such small, local lines – and indeed, how it's funded.

I always thought, perhaps wrongly, that privatisation was introduced to allow for competition, and therefore customer choice. It was a surprise therefore to me that railways were privatised, as it's pretty impossible for competition on a route that is fixed on steel rails (all this praise for Virgin makes me think I'd love to use their trains between Sheffield and London, but I can't as East Midlands trains have the monopoly on that). A flawed model from the start for me and time to take back railway ownership.

It was rushed through by John major as well as he didn't think they would get it done before they lost the next election. He freely admits this himself. It was done for ideological reasons, not to give us choice.

The same is true with the utilities. While we can switch providers unlike with rail where we are stuck with the local franchisee the utilities are in effect a cartel whatever anyone says about the regulators powers.

Quite.
The London underground never made real profits when in private hands with different lines owned by different companies, and provided a much better transport system when eventually it was all linked up.
Competition and "the market" isn't always the best solution.