Another very interesting expert appointment via the Lords (this time someone already in there): Peter Hendy, former head of TFL, to the Department of Transport. Makes sense as TFL an excellent model for how to run a nationalised* railway.
*Let's not open the 'is TFL nationalised or not?' debate.
Yeah - one of the many examples of Sunak being rubbish is that Grant Shapps basically did want to do this (it's what Great British Railways was) and then he moved him and instead we've had...no transport policy for two years AFAICT.
I really just hope that Starmer sees sense and decides to do something about the ROSCOs situation. ‘Nationalising’ the Railways doesn’t matter if there’s a rentier class of Train Landlords.
But if you own the rolling stock, then you end up like the London Underground, where there are still 40 year old trains in service! How are we going to pointlessly fritter away money and carbon on shiny new toys for transport ministers to pose in front of without ROSCOs, huh? Even think about that?
(But seriously: one way I feel the Hendy appointment is indicative is that I'd guess they will want something like TFL from top to toe, in part because they will surely want to extend what TFL runs and it makes it easier if you don't suddenly change whether rolling stock is a cost or not.)
TfL runs almost all its services on a rented-rolling-stock and contracted operational model though - it was a big point of friction between Khan and national Labour before the election that the latter wouldn't committ to extending TfL on its current model because of their public operation pledge
Yeah - sorry I was being too facetious for my own good. I think essentially TfL shows that the problem with the DfT isn't that they don't own the rolling stock, it is that they are poor commissioners of services and poor at running them.
100%, and I fully agree that bringing in Hendy to the DfT as a transport ops expert with a lot of industry goodwill is going to hugely help the DfT deal with the transition it's already de-facto made to running services, badly, under a government that specifically didn't want it to
