ROLLING STOCK RACKET ROLLS ON

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2015 :: RMTnews 14 A chronic shortage of rolling stock on the TransPennine Express route, operated by Keolis and First Group, will worsen in April as TPE will lose nine of its 70 trains to Chiltern Railways in Oxfordshire. Chiltern struck a deal with the train leasing company Porterbrook for the nine Class 170 three-car sets. This is purely because the rolling stock outfit can make more money out of Chiltern on a longer-term leasing deal than TPE. This is despite the fact that the TPE franchise, which connects Newcastle to Leeds as well as Manchester to Liverpool, is the most overcrowded in the country which is already using diesel trains to pull around what are, in effect, heritage carriages. RMT general secretary Mick Cash said that train procurement in Britain was an expensive shambles locked into the fragmentation and profiteering that has been lumped onto the taxpayer through two decades of privatisation. “The companies using these trains get to privatise the profits while the public get to shoulder over £10 billion of risks, it is an absolute disgrace. “Even worse, the Inter-City trains are being designed to axe the guards and strip out buffet cars, an issue that RMT is fighting a full-scale battle over,” he said. Following rail privatisation in 1994 three rolling stock companies (ROSCOs), Porterbrook, Angel Trains and Eversholt, bought up the British Rail fleet and have been leasing them to the train operating companies ever since for enormous profits. In 2009 the Competition Commission found that the companies had ripped off the taxpayer by as much as £100 million. The Commission blamed the rip off on the franchising system and on the Tory government of John Major for selling the rolling stock for a fraction of its worth. The ROSCOs fiasco has not even delivered claims that the private sector would bring massive investment. The increase in rolling stock in use since privatisation is a paltry three per cent while passenger journeys have increased by nearly 100 per cent. Moreover most rolling stock currently in use still pre-dates privatisation over twenty years ago. Increasingly, the Department for Transport has been trying to bypass the profiteering ROSCOs – largely owned by financial institutions which use them to reduce their tax bill – and buy trains directly. However this method passes most of the risk entirely back to the taxpayer. A recent House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report published last month found that the DfT was transferring risk away from the rail industry back to government. Committee chair Margaret Hodge MP said that the Dft’s decision to buy the new trains for Intercity Express and Thameslink itself had left the taxpayer bearing all the risk. “The Department has no previous experience of running a procurement of this kind, let alone two with a combined value of £10.5 billion. “Yet it has chosen to break with its previous approach of leaving it to rolling stock companies and train operators to buy trains, transferring risk away from the rail industry back to government. “This means that if passenger forecasts are wrong and fewer new trains are needed in future taxpayers will have to pick up the bill,” she said. The committee found that the only way the Department could limit the risk was by requiring train operating companies to use the new trains to run their services regardless of whether they best fit the services they would like to offer. RMT welcomed the fact that the Public Accounts Committee had shone some light on the murky racket of train procurement. “This crisis has left us desperately short of rolling stock with the British public paying through the nose to travel in clapped-out, overcrowded carriages. “We also welcome the fact that they have drawn attention to the need to defend and develop train building capacity in this country. “The only real solution to this rail rolling stock crisis is full public ownership and an end to the greed and exploitation of privatisation,” said Mick Cash. ROLLING STOCK RACKET ROLLS ON Chronic shortage of trains in the North further exposes national rolling stock crisis caused by privatisation