RAIL FRANCHISING remains a fundamentally flawed system that delivers profits to private train operators out of proportion to any risk they take, Britain’s biggest rail union says today.

As the National Audit Office reports that the government has squeezed ‘better value for money’ out of the system, RMT warns that if rosy predictions of passenger growth fail to materialise then both taxpayers and fare-payers will have to make even bigger handouts to private rail bosses.

“The government has made franchising look more efficient because it has been shifting the burden of subsidising franchisees’ profits from the taxpayer to the fare-payer with inflation-busting fares increases,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

“The prediction of a huge fall in subsidy is based on sharp and sustained increases in passenger numbers, but if they fail to materialise in the current economic climate it will be passengers and taxpayers who will have to fork out.

“The agreements many TOCs have with the government mean that if passenger numbers don’t rise in line with the predictions it will be the government that picks up the bill for up to 80 per cent of the shortfall.

“That means the public will continue to be exposed to the risk while the private operators get to cream off the profits – and if it all goes wrong they just walk away leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab.

“The audit report makes much of the increase in capacity to be brought by 1,300 extra carriages, but that is nowhere near enough to cover existing demand, let alone the increase in capacity the economy and environment need to see.

“Less than two years ago the Transport Select Committee concluded that rail franchising delivers only fragmentation and short-term thinking, and that no amount of tinkering could resolve the fundamental flaws in the system.

“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.

“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,” Bob Crow said.