THE ROLLING STOCK SCANDAL

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: june 2023 :: RMTnews 14 Rolling stock companies, known as ROSCOs, are sweating the UK rail industry for eye-watering quantities of money with the protection of the government and almost no public scrutiny. Recently the union scrutinised one of three main ROSCOs Eversholt and the huge profits it is making while passengers face reduced services and staff endure pay cuts and attacks on their jobs. Eversholt is one of three ROSCOs that own around 87 per cent of Britain’s trains. They were handed British Rail’s stock of trains on privatisation and have continued to dominate the train leasing market ever since. According to Eversholt’s latest accounts last year it paid a dividend of £40,700,000 to its Luxembourg-based parent company. In the last ten years, has paid £380 million in dividends to its Luxembourg- based parent, with an average annual dividend payment of £35 million. These dividends represent, on average, between around 70 per cent of the profits being made by the group of companies. In the last ten years, Eversholt has also paid £520 million in interest payments on inter-company loans from its parent company. Eversholt own 3,426 vehicles and they lease trains to Chiltern, East Midlands Railways, Greater Anglia, Great Western, Govia Thameslink, LNER, MTR, Arriva Rail London, Northern, Scotrail, Southeastern and Transpennine Express, as well as the freight companies Freightliner and GB Railfreight. The cost of leasing these trains from the ROSCOs has been growing markedly over the last few years. In 2013, rolling stock leasing represented 13 per cent of TOC spending. Now it has nearly doubled to 24 per cent. Rolling stock leases work in a similar way to PFIs. The government sets the requirement to build new trains, the ROSCOs raise money to buy them from train manufacturers and then the operating companies lease them back. Rolling stock companies would have us believe that they are innovative investors in new trains. Yet left to their own devices, the ROSCOs presided over an ageing fleet and failed to invest in new rolling stock, preferring to sweat old assets. This failure is why, in recent years, the government stepped in to mandate new rolling stock through franchises and to commission bespoke projects like the InterCity programme. Government has effectively paid for these purchases either in the form of the InterCity PFI deals or through franchise payments to TOCs that pay for the ROSCOs’ additional investment. As the ORR noted in its financial analysis of 2018-19, the growth in rolling stock charges does not reflect the upfront costs of buying trains but is instead ‘largely due to the increases in the on-going costs of rolling stock after the recent replacement of various trains’. These ongoing costs are ‘the increased cost of leasing and maintaining trains’. The ROSCOs are able to keep their lease costs high because the three companies THE ROLLING STOCK SCANDAL RMT produces case study of rolling stock company Eversholt