Tendering for the East and West Midlandsand new Cross-Country franchises should be shelved and failing franchise GNER brought back in-house while ministers chart how to bring all the franchises back under proper public control, RMT said today.

"Gwyneth Dunwoody has hit the nail on the head by saying that franchising delivers only fragmentation and short-term thinking, and that no amount of tinkering can resolve the fundamental flaws in the system," RMT general secretary Bob Crow said.

"The Transport Committee's report highlights the utter nonsense of a set-up in which private operators keep siphoning profits out yet shoulder almost no financial risk.

"The current system has handed guaranteed, risk-free profits to private operators who are demonstrably less efficient than British Rail and incapable of delivering the growing railway that Britainneeds and our environment craves.

"Rail investment is now more than three times more expensive than it was in BR days, while train services are less reliable, fares are the most expensive in Europe and stations all too often left decaying, unstaffed and in darkness.

"Last week ministers rightly responded to the stark warnings in the Stern report by talking about setting statutory targets to carbon emissions.

"If the railways are to play their role in helping us to meet them we must have a growing, joined-up railway with affordable fares and attractive services that encourage people out of their cars and onto trains.

"The huge sums of taxpapers' and fare-payers' money already going into the railways should be spent on improving them, and bringing rail operations back in-house would be a massive step towards ensuring that that happens.

"The report should also serve as a warning to the mayor of Londonof the folly of going ahead with the privatisation of the East London Line," Bob Crow said.