UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns
politico.eu
politico.eu
My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it's good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.
I'm surprised this guy got fired - in the rail network I know, they'd have addressed his concerns by adding even more posters and announcements.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240414153709/https://www.indep...
Don't believe it? Think about that credit card of yours. You can instigate the movement of money while so piss drunk you can't even walk! Amazing on how such care isn't put into other things.
Putting up a sign is not a free action!
Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.
Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries ... or maybe they don't, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.
Why are the pavements at crossings so bumpy?! It's political correctness gone mad!
...but only in lifts in the UK? No, that's not a credible hypothesis.
They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn't an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can't keep up when there's a lot of traffic. I've seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.
The "lift (elevator) going up / down" announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.
Compare to your average road in Poland:
https://motofakty.pl/co-5-metrow-znak/ar/c4-16143839
67 road signs on a 360 metre long stretch of road - and to me, what's shown in the picture is very typical, especially in big cities. There are soooo many signs it's close to impossible to read all of them and still look at the road.
This is not in line with my personal experience. Can you provide some examples of useless signs on typical roads in the UK?
Honourable mentions for "humps ahead".
Also strictly speaking, the restrictions, even if those red circles were combined with the tunnel warning, the tunnel warning is still irrelevant - you’d have to follow those restrictions whether or not there was a tunnel.
There's some funny videos online of trucks getting a haircut from these. So seems necessary to me.
It would be good to see actual data backing up this hypothesis.
The cynic in me says another equally plausible hypothesis would be that this is entirely about the owner/operator/landlord avoiding any legal responsibility for accidents than actually reducing the number of accidents.
The same author, Sidney Dekker, has a very good book about how to deal with someone like this whistleblower. It's called "Just Culture". Well worth a read. Spolier: It's not to silence them, not this way. You can silence the person by, you know, actually doing something useful. But that requires actual change, and more importantly, a change in attitude. And you need to convince the crowds that you are doing better by NOT putting up posters. You'll be surprised how many people really think the posters help.
Try to remove dangerous aggressive dog from transport, and see what happens.
The announcements are just there to sell more noise cancelling headphones in the on-station shops.
They seem to have built it with enough capacity that they can announce platforms at the last minute and send everyone scurrying without causing any great danger.
But that gate line you mention has loads of ticket barriers - there's zero crush risk.
As I arrived, they announced that due to a tree falling on the line all service from those platforms was cancelled, no trains predicted for over an hour. My train, due to leave in about half an hour, was now delayed "indefinitely" supposedly.
But I've seen this movie before, I didn't go far. Sure enough, as I was loitering near a food stand 10-15 minutes later they announced that "no trains" had a single exception, my train was in fact running exactly as scheduled.
So I went to that "loads of barriers" and of course there's an enormous crowd just stood there, motionless, because they aren't able to process anything except that they are at a train station and they aren't being allowed to board a train, so they're just stood there next to these handful of barriers. I try to fight my way through the crowd, but it's too far and after about five minutes the staff announce that oh, actually there's another of these non-existent trains going somewhere else now, we're boarding that train and the one has now left.
About an hour later, with the station continuing to announce both that there are no trains and service hasn't resumed, and yet periodically that in fact each of the scheduled trains has (miraculously?) arrived anyway on time and is scheduled to depart on schedule contrary to the message they've also read out, this time I am standing near the front of that huge crowd and can force my way through to board the next train to my destination.
I'm sure they've promised themselves there's "zero crush risk" because they've screened off the barriers. "Yup, nobody was crushed against the barriers. Good work senior management team"
When they announce the platform there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.
It's a hard problem to solve in the short term.
And no, there isn't always time to stroll to the train, I've seen some really, really late announcements. Couple this with very large countdown timers that they actually added recently to each platform and you can see exactly why people feel stressed and rush.
> They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.
The alternative is forcing them all to wait in the same cramped concourse area (with most space lost to retail units). During disruption, it gets genuinely difficult to move through this area. It has felt unpleasant in normal use for a while, but when there are cancellations and delays it feels positively dangerous. I am not exaggerating when I say that it feels very much like it's only a matter of time before something happens and someone gets crushed or trampled.
There's none of this nonsense at some other London termini, and Birmingham New Street manages to let people wait on the platforms. Why can't Euston?
And for anyone who isn't in the know, that's Realtime Trains[1]. It isn't correct 100% of the time; it uses the public record of train movements (TRUST) to predict which platform a train will arrive at, but is prevented by National Rail Enquiries from using the live status and delay data which official departure boards show (Darwin). That means that if the platform is changed at the last minute it is not certain that Realtime Trains will be able to detect the change.
Those will show a copy of the train describer data, which is the same thing that the actual signallers use to keep track of which train runs to which timetable, so they (or the computer, where available) can route it accordingly.
I'm someone who used to frequently catch the last train north to Birmingham on a Saturday night (9:40pm), and it was usually full and so some people were without a seat. Of course we all rushed to try to get a seat. IMHO, it's foolishness to think people would do otherwise in that situation - after all who wants to stand for over an hour and a half when you've paid over £30 for the ticket?
Now most of it has been cancelled and the benefits will be minimal.
> partly due to inability for the U.K. to run large projects
But like, now I assume if somebody is not very fit, they don’t really have the option, right? There will be a race either way and of course the people who most need a seat are least likely to win. (I will keep standing on trains in the hope it’ll keep me from ever needing to sit, haha).
Considering there's no 'crush risk' in this scenario, what even is the point of it? In the end I just used any of the myriad of online sites that list flight data to know which gate I needed to head to 1.5 hours before everyone else, and got to enjoy some peace and quiet.
This is a good—albeit shameless—business model. They could probably do the same thing in San Francisco’s MUNI stations.
But it does not need to be in four languages, nor should there ever be a single message played back that isn’t exactly the stop information and maybe some transfer information. Every single other message from “please stand clear of the doors” to “sexual harassment sucks, don’t do it” doesn’t need to be in there.
Here’s the data on the ordinance: https://www.sf.gov/data/san-francisco-language-diversity-dat...
But, with regards to the article, he's 100% correct, Euston is dangerous. And it's currently one of the worst central London stations for things going wrong. It's pretty much every other week at the moment. London Bridge used to be as bad with overcrowding until they rebuilt most of it.
Then again, Euston was supposed to be redeveloped for HS2, and that's been kicked into the long grass, even though all the hard work has been done. I don't think there's anyone truly as stupid as the UK government.
For the benefit of readers not versed with UK regulation, an improvement notice is a formal instrument under the powers of the Health and Safety Executive. Whilst short of a prosecution notice, it definitely indicates that the powers that be are Officially Not Happy with, in this case, Network Rail.
There are over 4 million tube journeys a day[1].
[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/novemb...
But affording to a train company there is "no upper limit on the number of passengers in a given train carriage". I did point out that the laws of physics, and basic human physiology would refute that assertion.
So, maybe safety theatre rather than patronising levels of safety.
I don't think there is a shred of evidence that being bombarded with neurotic fretting improves safety - here in the states this is usually recognized as limitation of liability. Juries will accept "we warned you," as a counterbalance to their universal tendency to want to side with the little guy against the giant corporation.
But, falls are basically the only way people get injured at DC's Metro so it seems to make sense to have significant signage about that. I'd have to imagine there's nothing unique about DC so it's probably the same story for the UK.
"96% of the customer injuries were related to slips and falls within rail stations, and about 52% of those were on escalators." [1]. The stat for employees was 40% with being struck by an object in #2 at 25%.
[1]: https://wmata.com/about/calendar/events/upload/3A-Metro-s-Sa...
Seems like things like making sure floor transitions are mild, adequate drainage, textured floors would be more effective. (polished stone and concrete are a nightmare with some shoes that I own in wet weather).
Warning signage may be helpful, but I am skeptical of its effectiveness (especially as implemented). For example, "ice-warning signs do not have a statistically significant impact on the frequency or severity of vehicular accidents that involve ice." [2]
(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own.)
[0] https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/solutions/enablon/bowtie/ex...
[1] https://www.nata.aero/data/files/webinar_documents/preventin...
It's clearly working, because the British railway network is the safest large network in Europe, despite some pretty dilapidated infrastructure.
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat...
It haunts my dreams.
Playing the woman's voice version at every station started about 15 years ago.
Everything wrong with the UK today can be summarized as society going from "Mind the gap" to this insanity.
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat...
My favourite is how the classic “mind the gap” (worthy as some of those gaps were quite big and it varies from station to station) has been replaced with “mind the gap between the train and the platform” as if some people are too stupid to know where the gap is? (And no sign language videos for that, so presumably it’s a slaughterhouse for the hard of hearing!).
And what is the “it” that we’re supposed to be seeing and spotting anyway? Maybe they could solve that problem instead.
Several of the stations on my local line (SWR out of Waterloo) have sliding gates that are prominently labelled "Warning! Sliding Gate!!". But they are manually operated, so they're never going to move of their own accord.
The place is a bit overrun with "don't run with scissors" warning notices, but they don't fix the things that are actually dangerous, like the terrazzo flooring that's like a skating rink the moment it gets even slightly damp.
This is exactly the problem why the world sucks so hard.
The engineer, certainly knowledgeable in this field, made a measured public remark, which could have saved lives. He has done nothing wrong, because he didn't claim to speak on behalf of his employer, and has the right to speak his mind as a person. In public, and with a lot of reach.
The government official, however, applied unconstitutional pressure to get the engineer fired and threatened his employer to lose business. Humanly very low and damaging to future public rail infrastructure, if a capable company is not allowed to provide services anymore and therefore most likely to increase prices through diminished competition.
If anyone should lose their job over this matter, it clearly should be the UK rail minister.
There is a body of constitutional law. There is extensive law governing what powers ministers have - powers are granted to them by legislation.
There are human rights granted by law and treaty. Everything from some clauses of the Magna Carta that are still in force https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofp... to the European Convention on Human Rights.
In that sense, Britain does not have a constitution. Obviously it has a constitution in some sense, because there is always some set of laws, norms, traditions, and historical precedents that constitute the basis of government. But this is a much weaker sense of the term. For instance, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was a “constitutional” law that supposedly made it impossible to call a snap election, but a snap election was nonetheless called in 2019 via the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, which only required a simple majority because it had equivalent authority to the FTPA itself.
As for the trial of Charles I - that was anything but a kangaroo court. Great care was taken to give him a fair trial, while establishing the principle that no-one was above the law.
Much better than it is for the UK. Most of the rights protected in the Bill of Rights was carried over from English common law. Britain has since explicitly abolished some of them and openly carves out exceptions to the others. How many people in Britain have been jailed for mean tweets?
> You have a supreme court which has just decided that the president is effectively outside the reach of the law.
That’s a false oversimplification of that ruling.
> As for the trial of Charles I - that was anything but a kangaroo court. Great care was taken to give him a fair trial, while establishing the principle that no-one was above the law.
Charles I, the king, was charged with treason, which was defined prior to that trial as disloyalty to the king. The king was disloyal to the king? It’s complete nonsense and they were clearly making it up as they went along.
The English Civil War was a violent revolution that overthrew the previous system of government and imposed a new one by force of arms. I’m not against that in principle but at least the American revolutionaries were honest that that’s what they were doing.
Well, that's not actually in the US constitution.
And, the Executive branch is free to ignore what the Judicial branch [1] does since ya know, it's the Executive branch that would execute any decisions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia#Aft...
It's a rather simple application of the premises that (a) the Constitution supersedes other statutory laws and (b) the courts have jurisdiction over disputes about the application of the law.
This is called "English common law" and it is a feature American law shares with many other English-speaking countries.
It is very odd that after 200 years of independence they realised that they had failed to realised that the constitution granted a right to have an abortion, and then a few decades later realised that it did not after all.
It feels very much that you have a different arm of the government (the judiciary) making laws in place of the legislature.
Historically it also took a while to get the thirteenth amendment so the constitution was pretty seriously flawed for a very long time.
On the other hand the free speech protections are something I envy.
No. Originalism is just a form of textualism; it’s based on the “original public meaning” of the law as written. This is a common misunderstanding. The point of originalism is that you can’t interpret a law written in the 18th century as if it was written in the 21st century because language usage changes over time. There’s no good faith reason for it to be the sort of bogeyman it’s become.
https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-convention/landmark-...
As you know human rights existed long before somebody decided to sign away our interpretation of them to a foreign body.
Weird how the right to liberty and security doesn't apply to native populations.
Even self defence is a dubious right here.
People are sacked all the time in the US for bringing their employer into disrepute, and it doesn't even matter whether they actually did or not, since the employer doesn't have to give a reason anyway.
Id also point out that the UK is generally an extremely poor country, living standards for the majority are low, income is extremely low after taxes, especially compared to the states.
Britain compares itself unfavourably to the US on almost every metric that matters.
Gareth Dennis has been a public figure for a while, appearing on BBC News a few times. So there was apparently a provision for this in his contract with Systra: https://x.com/GarethDennis/status/1829053692508623154
> [Gareth's] passion and enthusiasm for all things rail are well-known across the sector through his weekly #Railnatter podcast and as a regular national press rail commentator
Most Ministers are just political appointees anyhow - the actual work is done by the Civil Service.
He's way, way than more than just some guy who has been rail minister for a month, he's one of the most respected, perhaps the most respected transport executive in Britain(at least until yesterday). He's not an elected politician, he has worked professionally in rail transportation since 1975.
For 10 years he was Chief Executive of Transport for London which runs all public transport in London. Following that, for the past 10 years he was and still is Chairman of Network Rail, the organisation which is responsible for the entire British Railway Network. It's in this capacity that he sent the letter, not as a minister.
Unless this turns into some huge scandal, which seems unlikely, he'll be fine.
______________
[1] More specifically, a Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Except it doesn't really have a constitution.
To become a minister, that person needs to be an official politician. Part of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. So if a sitting UK government wants an expert in their cabinet who is not an MP, they ennoble them. They make the person a Lord to get them to be able to operate officially as a minister in the government.
For a fuller explanation see: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/direct-m...
[1] i.e. a seemingly weird thing that the British do because of old traditions
Absolutely. He's guilty of precisely what he complains about. He suggests that this engineer is implicating the "safety of Network Rail" whereas he's just implicating the safety of a _single decision_.
Instead of reacting to a single statement the minister has decided to implicate his entire job. Which is madness. He should be deeply ashamed of how he abused his position, and quite frankly, for his inability to accept and react appropriately to criticism.
A giant baby if I've ever seen one.
This is what a current official did prior to him becoming the minister while an executive of a rail company.
So the analysis and the discussion below all stem from a faulty premise
Over his life, he will almost certainly earn less.
Shouldn't have spoken out. Had he kept quiet, a crush would have happened, a few people would have been pushed off a platform and died under a train, and it would be a "tragedy" - but he'd get to keep his livelihood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
> Boisjoly sent a memo describing the problem to his managers, but was apparently ignored.[8] Following several further memos, a task force was convened to investigate the matter, but after a month Boisjoly realized that the task force had no power, no resources, and no management support. In late 1985, Boisjoly advised his managers that if the problem was not fixed, there was a distinct chance that a shuttle mission would end in disaster. No action was taken.
> After President Ronald Reagan ordered a presidential commission to review the disaster, Boisjoly was one of the witnesses called. He gave accounts of how and why he felt the O-rings had failed, and argued that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, was an "unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation."
> According to Boisjoly, Thiokol unassigned him from space work, and he was ostracized by his colleagues and managers.
The whole case strikes me as odd. Not only did the higher ups know about the problem, they also left a paper trail about keeping a lid on it and getting rid of the guy. This opens them up to a lot of scenarios, like:
- As demonstrated by this case, the information came out because of the wrongful termination
- If an accident had happened there's a fairly high chance that the investigators would uncover it, either because the engineer in question came forward or because they think they should have known about this, and cracks appear when they start asking questions.
An unspoken rule in a lot of fields is that you make sure that this kind of information never reaches the people that could be held liable for it. The people that are likely to be held responsible at least have to make it appear that they're not trying to suppress information like this. You quickly lose that ability if you actively try to get rid of people that tries to raise an issue. So they surround themselves with middle management that knows to not bring things up to them, without being explicitly told so.
It's okay for you to disagree. That's just my belief system.
The legislation tends to protect the paper entity 'the corporation' rather than the living breathing human.
what a f..d up world we live in
He's no whistleblower with inside information. His engineering role is to design track geometry and nothing to do with stations or passengers so he has no professional authority to speak on the subject beyond that of an ordinary rail passenger.
The problems at Euston are well known and obvious to anyone who uses the station.
In fact, the UK rail safety regulator issued an improvement notice with legal force requiring the operator to take steps to change the situation: https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/rail-regulator-requires-c...
Then you should be ashamed to even try to impune his credentials and say he had no "" professional authority"" to comment on the safety issue. What the fuck!
I'm not sure about the UK, but in the USA, most lawyers would take this case speculatively and they would charge 30% of the winnings. It's an amount calibrated to just barely be acceptable but it typically isn't as bad as you suggest.
Management: - 3.6 Röntgen, not great not terrible.
Good CEOs are good at being CEOs. That doesn't mean that they're good people.
Steve Jobs was pretty famously an a-hole, and did a number of morally questionable things.
But he also took Apple from the verge of bankrupcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world.
OJ Simpson was a fantastic football player. And he murdered (my opinion) Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
It's OK to acknowledge that some people are good at one thing and are also terrible in other ways.
Exactly. There's plenty of examples of people we consider great engineers in history. Does it matter that some of them may have been terrible marriage partners? When we're discussing their engineering accomplishments, no. When we're talking about someone as a great scientist, engineer, business leader, etc., we're not also claiming that they're literally a saint. Of course they have flaws in other parts of their lives; everyone does.
This is one to hang on the wall as an office poster!
> During 2014, Hendy reportedly spent over £1,200 in taxpayer-provided money on lunches and dinners, including on one occasion more than £90 in alcohol.
And that despite a 650k salary - as if he couldn't afford to get wasted on his own. What a disgrace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Hendy&diff=...
Where do you go? What do you do? Unless you have an Engineer Association or an Union to back you up, you are doomed to be crushed by your upper management and beyond...
because most times they aren't really usable if they even exist
and raising concerns on such channels can often get you in as much trouble as doing so publicly -- but without you concerns being pretty much guaranteed ignored
> In September 2023 the government regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), had issued an improvement notice to Network Rail about overcrowding at the station, warning: “You have failed to implement, so far as reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station.”
It's concerning to me that Hendy was the chair of Network Rail from 2015 before becoming Transport Minister, and here he is sacking someone after a comment about his former workplace. Should definitely be an investigation into his motives/incentives IMO
https://news.sky.com/story/network-rail-failing-to-stop-unac...
A bit of a Streisand effect going on here.
But yes, not exactly a fan of people this senior sticking their nose in misconduct matters, but also, if you're employed by a company, you probably shouldn't badmouth their clients in the national papers and not be aware that's risky. It's not exactly whistleblowing.
Since railways through Europe are a state monopoly, it's not like there are tons of people in the industry that do not work for said 'client'. Who is supposed to pull the alarm in this case? No One? That's how you end up with Boeing-adjacent engineering.
The situation is much more stupid than that: there's a set of "private" companies, some of which are substantially owned by states and some are not, all of which are quasi-monopolies.
The engineer in question was sacked for stating 'You’re talking about thousands of people squished into that space. It’s not just uncomfortable, it’s not just unpleasant, it’s unsafe.' in a media interview (see https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/euston-trains-stati... looks like the unsafe part of that quote made the headline).
Here he was just amplifying already public information that the Office of Rail and Road had raised concerns and issued an improvement notice (which is reference in the article before he is quoted). I guess they hadn't actually declared it 'unsafe' though.
I think it is reasonable for employers to require employees don't go making negative comments in the media, though that is tempered by the public interest in raising the profile of safety concerns. Perhaps here the engineer felt no-one was taking the improvement notice seriously and needed more incentive to do so? Could also be he felt he wasn't trying to cause any upset at all and was simply stating what was already public known.
It does feel here that the minister that triggered the sacking was just being thin-skinned. He saw a newspaper headline that angered him and sought to take it out on someone. Perhaps some disciplinary action was warranted (maybe improvements were indeed underway and the engineer shouldn't go causing extra needless public alarm) but sacking him looks to be a big overreaction.
On the other hand he doesn't handle bad press well, let's see how this goes.
Some in the industry think the next such accident isn't too far off. Stampedes at Euston are a manageable problem by comparison.
"More trains" mean they need to radically improve service/repairs and/or purchase of new trains.
"Expand the station" would mean that they would have to shut down all-of or large-parts of it while works take place. I remember being impacted of the London Bridge train station de-spaghetti-fying the tracks. I moved out of the area I was living so eventually I was impacted for only 4-5 months.
I will not touch the matter of costs.
One surprising good thing the gov did at that time was insist on the rebuild of the station itself, it was particularly grim, and just a mess.
I've lived nearby the whole time and the new station is a nice space, generally efficient with good throughput for the trains.
I'm pessimistic, but really hoping they don't stick with plans to build a too small terminus in London for HS1, not too optimistic as we have Rachael Reeves as a continuity austerity Chancellor - lets see.
You're talking about HS2 and Old Oak Common, right? Yeah that's a peculiar choice of terminus
According to [1] nineteen national rail trains will depart from Euston in the next hour. And according to [2] Euston has 16 platforms.
Can a station platform really only dispatch 1.2 trains per hour? Fifty minutes per train? Seems kinda low to me.
I guess they need time to clean the trains, and space for trains that arrive well before their scheduled departure time. But still, it seems like a lot of platforms for the number of trains.
[1] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/live-trains/departures/london... [2] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Eus...
5 Minutes for disembarking, 10 minutes cleaning, 10 minutes for boarding and you have 25 minutes platform occupancy. But on top of that the tracks will be blocked by the train going in and out for a few extra minutes, you need to find a slot on the line itself, and you need to allow for disruption.
It's all very inefficient in terms of occupying scarce and inelastic inner-city track capacity, so modern practice is to build through stations if at all possible and send trains off to sidings to be cleaned, but that wasn't practical 100 years ago.
The station itself is probably running the maximum number of trains possible. The plan for increasing throughput northwards is HS2, which the previous government put on hold.
The obvious next question is whether platforms _can_ be announced earlier - to which the answer is, as I understand it, yes. The platforms are known about much further in advance and the reason for the delay appears to be a combination of intransigence by Euston management and a lack of sufficient ticket gateline staff by the train operators.
When the gov runs services there's a massive conflict of interest in regulating them properly: its embarrassing for the gov, there's no accountability for profitability/sustainable-use-of-resources/etc.
So whilst centrist (and center-left on some matters), I'm largely in favour of a gov which runs via contracted services with significant regulation and oversight.
Lots of cover-up stories have come out recently which show that political control over key services undermines their accountability, not improves it.
Privatisation of the rail in UK is a nightmare, the government is not holding the private sector to a high standard at all. High profit and High standard are barely compatible, I'm not sure they are even good examples in the world.
1. Compare and contrast the privately run phase of rail service with the public version before the early 90s. It was low-use by the public and in a decrepit state.
2. The form privatisation took in the UK kept the most expensive, old, difficult to maintain etc. parts of the rail networks under public control. You saw what happened (HS2) when that public control was actually used to improve the infrastructure.
... We'll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies, and whether you think you'll get what you want. I doubt it.
What we saw with HS2 is a large (and frankly completely necessary) engineering project getting fucked around with and repeatedly chopped down until it no longer satisfied its original plan (providing greater capacity for both local and national services by providing a new North-South line that happened to be "high-speed") and became exactly what those wielding the axe that killed it accused it of ("just a way for some to get to London slightly faster").
Good rail outcomes were obviously impossible under a Tory government regardless of how the control worked, but they might be possible under a Labour government. We'll have to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
> Drivers for JR West face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, "dayshift education"), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash. This program consisted of severe verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Many experts saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as punishment and psychological torture, not retraining
Also that derailment was truly caused by surpassing the speed limit, which shouldn't even be possible (even more so today). Enforcing a speed limit by block is trivial. Which it looks like is what they did after.
If you look at the Wikipedia on it, rail use dropped off under nationalization and then pretty much doubled after it was privatised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
My local line / stations have been hugely upgraded over the period though I'm not sure you can put that down to privatisation. (Thameslink/Kings Cross St Pancras)
Also lots of things that came together by privatization had been developed at BritishRail.
And anyway, it was only really private in the slights way. After just a few years networkrail had to be created. This was hugely costly and the infrastructure during the private time degraded.
After that the government had even more diect control over routes and timetables then they had under BritishRail.
Having the services themselves being run by private companies isnt all that interesting. The can only really innovate on underpaying employes and some user experiance.
And to get this part to be private, you have to have a whole army of lawyer on both sides. And then again between the service companies and the train rental companies.
The user experiance gain is completly negated by having a system that is so much harder to use in general. Every company with their own branding. Changing all the time when provider change.
Harder to do proper ticket integration and so on and so on.
Not to mention that during that period almost no new fleets were ordered so the majority of UK train manufacturing is gone. And the one that still there makes subpar trains that don't compte with the trains from France, Germany and Switzerland.
In summation, I would say privatisation didnt really save the UK much money, arguebly it cost them money.
And now privatisation is done anyway because all the franchises are simply controlled by the government anyway.
Allowing BritishRail to continue to develop into something like the Swiss SBB would have been much better for Britain.
Comming from Switzerland travling by train in Britain felt like time travling to an earlier age. There is some fancy knew stuff on the most important routes. But travling the country side in 40 year old trains and stopping at stations that look like nature was in the process of consuming them.
In Switzerland is expensive, but you get something for money. In England its expensive and so much worse in so many dimensions.
There are a mountain of restrictions on the franchisees because having an interconnected system of railways with the management of different parts delegated to separate private companies makes no logical sense.
The only way it makes sense is as a vehicle to extract wealth from the state and the people (ticket prices); and transfer it to the private owners of the franchises, and the private professional services companies via all the consultancy fees and red-tape the system generates.
Owning rolling stock is where it is at now for wealth extraction. As far as I know this is not something that is going to change with the current plans to expire franchises and bring the management back into public ownership.
Infrastructure like public transport and utilities are not, and never will be, functional markets, and regulation is always captured or ineffective in the long term. Privatisation is only a method to let financial markets pillage public goods.
I would certainly make it illegal to do share buybacks, and to issue dividends on credit.
Privitisation doesnt really work with the private equity model that has been developed over the last decade, ie., buy a biz on credit and raid its resources.
But i think it's easier to get these laws passed than require a politican investigate resource waste, bad service, etc. in services they are responsible for. The UK gov is structured to disable accountability at every level -- that's a much harder fix.
Then when the government tries to reign them back in the excuse is their company is "neither financeable nor investible" without customers footing the bill. No shit, it was loaded with debt and money syphoned out of it for 30 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/28/tha...
Exactly the same happens with private train companies in the UK, though hopefully not for long.
Thankfully MPs are incentivised to publish this stuff against private companies.
You're inventing a hypothetical nightmare scenario while ignoring a very real and positive one because it's inconvenient for your "privatisation = good" argument.
My view is that it is easy to accuse government services of being dysfunctional because there is far MORE transparency than for private companies. Bankrupting a water company can happen in plain sight by a private company because money that was supposed to be used to, you know, build a functioning sewage system is fed through a maze of offshore accounts for years.
PPE Medpro?
The fundamental problem with this kind of neoliberalism is that if you don't trust government to manage something directly, then outsourcing it doesn't help, because the management oversight still has to be done, but now it happens indirectly.
It only works if you can have an actual market with actual market forces. What tends to get built is a "fake" market, where instead of individual service users picking their preference you get a tendering process. The rail tendering process is a fake market: the trains are owned by ROSCOs (banks), the rails are owned by the state (Network rail) because the private operator skimped on safety then collapsed, and the TOCs transfer all their staff through TUPE every time the franchise changes. All that changes is the livery.
Specifying through contract is a lot less efficient than direct management (see Coase, theory of the firm). This is why Tube privatization failed; they got up to hundreds of thousands of pages of contract before realizing it wasn't going to work.
No, it's way worse than most of the others. Anywhere in the Anglosphere or other parts of Europe is better. Most of Asia is better. Most of South America is better. Even some African countries are probably better. I would definitely move to Uganda, Botswana or South Africa before I ever set foot in the UK.
> The population keeps going up here
If you promise anyone who arrives at your shore free healthcare, accommodation, food and some spending money, then of course your population will go up. Not sure how that makes anything better.
Dunno. Are you a Brit? Think of moving anywhere?
But I would also like to make sense of what the actual risk alleged to exist in Euston is, and how Gareth Dennis or the ORR inspector thinks it should be mitigated. And I cannot figure it out, at all.
In Dennis's comments quoted in The Independent, for which he was fired, he attributes the risks at the station to the increased number of trains coming in and out of the station. That seems to imply that the crush or trample risk he perceives to exist is in the main lobby area of the station, not on the platforms or the ramps leading down to the platform gates, since if it were the latter then the risk would exist regardless of the number of trains coming in and out of the station.
This seemed surprising/implausible to me because all the dense crowds I've ever seen (and felt concerned about) in Euston have been on the ramps or the platforms, NOT in the lobby area which is massive. I struggle to imagine how a crush or stampede could ever happen anywhere besides the ramps and platforms. So I dug a bit further.
The press release associated with the improvement notice (https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/rail-regulator-requires-c...), on the other hand, says that over summer 2023, there were three instances of "crowding reaching unacceptable levels and a lack of crowd control in place" resulting in "minor injuries" with potential for worse. They also complain of a lack of risk assessments for two unspecified "pinch points" in the station "where crowding is most concentrated", inadequate "control measures", and unacceptably poor "layout" and "signage" to help with flow control.
The actual improvement notice, meanwhile, contains essentially no detail (https://orrprdpubreg1.blob.core.windows.net/docs/I-NWM-20230...), just some fairly meaningless boilerplate. The entire explanation of the problem is "You have failed to implement, so far as is reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station" and the remedy demanded is that the station needs to do a risk assessment and then implement whatever measures they come up with in the risk assessment.
My best guess at what this is all about, possibly completely wrong, is as follows:
* the two "pinch points" are two of the ramps, probably the one leading down to platforms 8/9/10/11 and the one leading down to platforms 12/13/14/15, which in my personal experience of the station are where most of the big surges happen
* the injuries happened due to crowds running down the ramps to the platforms once the platform number for their train got announced, either to beat other passengers to the seats or out of fear that they would not get on a late-arriving train before it departed at all
* the risk assessment concluded that the station should put up signs telling people not to run, and then they did that (I can't find any reporting about it, but if my memory serves me right, then those signs on the ramps at Euston appeared late last year which fits with the timeline)
So, IF I'm guessing correctly, there's probably a real stampede risk, with minor examples having already played out, but it's totally unrelated to the number of trains or the crowding in the lobby, the fired "whistleblower" is basically full of shit for suggesting a problem stemming from a larger number of trains, and the supposed "fix" is also meaningless compliance bullshit that will have no effect.
Of course, again, I could be guessing totally wrong; there isn't enough detail in the public documents or reporting for us to tell. So I publicly asked Gareth, the guy who got fired, to explain his concerns in more detail or point me to somewhere with detail. He... responded with indignation and contempt, pointed me to the Improvement Notice for one reason (the document with no detail about the problems, just a one sentence description that is probably copied and pasted boilerplate and makes no reference to any of the specific circumstances at Euston), then suggested I was mentally unwell in some way and blocked me. What a dickhead. Here's the end of the thread; I'd be grateful if someone not blocked by Gareth would stick it into Threadreader and post a link here so people not on X can read it: https://x.com/GarethDennis/status/1829179489043226778
I find it hard to fathom why someone sincerely concerned with safety would behave in this way - making unactionably vague complaints that a station is unsafe, then refusing to elaborate and lashing out at anyone interested in the detail for daring to question him. After the displeasure of interacting with the guy, it seems to me that this story has no heroes. But still, no matter how much of a dick he is or how useless his criticism was, it doesn't justify the firing. If you want a culture in which people feel safe speaking up about concerns, you have to indulge even stupid and incoherent concerns made by dicks; if you don't, everybody with something substantive to say will quite reasonably fear they will be viewed and treated in the same way you treated the dick.