GBR: Don’t Fix the Structure. Fix the Focus.

It’s late at night.

It’s dark.

I’m at Bellano-Tartavelle Terme station waiting for the last train to Dervio.

There’s no-one else here.

The train is late.

According to the screen, it is 20 minutes late. According to the app, it is 32 minutes.

But that’s the least of my worries right now.

My main problem is that the screen is showing the train as leaving from platform 1, but an automatic announcement is telling me it will be from platform 2.

I’m baffled as to how this can happen.

But my main issue is what to do about it.

I decide to wait on platform 1. I can see the screen, whereas I might have misheard the announcement.

Now the train approaches the otherwise deserted station.

It’s coming towards...

Damn! Platform 2!

I’m wearing a white hat, so I wave it vigorously in the direction of the driver so that they can see they do at least have one customer, then make a dash for the subway.

A few minutes later, sweating and panting, I dive through the door of the train on platform 2 and we set off for Dervio.

The train stinks.

This doesn’t totally surprise me: it’s the third train we’ve got on this line, and both the previous trains have stunk too.

This is a true story from my time in Italy last week.

The reason I’m telling you this story is because Italy has a publicly owned, publicly operated railway. But it’s not perfect.

Nationalisation isn’t magic

It sometimes feels in the UK debate that there’s a sense that simply the act of nationalising the railways, as Italy did in 1905, is enough to make the trains run on time.

Last week, I travelled on trains operated by the state railways of Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland.

It will not surprise you to learn that the Swiss trains were superb. Clean, punctual and magically integrated.

My French and German trips were restricted to the high-speed networks and were good.

My Italian trips were on local lines, and generally pretty poor. If you want an incredible experience of Italian railways, you need to use the high speed routes between the major cities, where state operator Trenitalia and private open access Italo compete each other to ever higher standards of service.

In summary, European state railways vary.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. In London, the two bits of the rail network with the best reputation are probably the Windrush line of the Overground (formerly the East London line) and the DLR. Both have train services operated by private firms on tracks owned by the public sector. Not massively dissimilar to the model the national network is moving away from.

By contrast, the vertically integrated, fully nationalised London Underground is struggling. Customers on the Central line haven’t had a reliable service in years and the Bakerloo line operates trains now certain to hit their diamond jubilee year in service. It’s something to celebrate in monarchs, not in trains.

That doesn’t mean that nationalisation is a bad idea: not remotely. Just that we mustn’t see it as anything other than an enabler. When it’s finished, we’ll still have the same track, trains and people as we did at the start.

That moment on the platform - screens contradicting announcements, nobody around, a train that stinks - wasn’t a failure of rapacious capitalists or failed public ownership. It was a failure of focus. And that’s the risk we face in Britain, too, regardless of the model.

It Ain’t Broke

Contrary to perceptions, the British railway network is not broken. It’s expensive but – from my experience – the trains are more likely to turn up on time in Britain than in Italy or Germany. (I haven’t checked the stats to confirm this perception is right).

What Britain’s railway has suffered from is chronically misaligned incentives. The franchising system prevented operators from thinking long-term and forced long-term planning of fares, timetabling or rolling stock into Whitehall, who lacked the customer-connectedness to do it well.

Network Rail and train firms weren’t jointly focused on the same set of customer outcomes.

The good news is that this is something that nationalisation can fix.

 So if I could offer one bit of unsolicited advice to the team currenly working through the plans for GBR it is this: don’t embark on an orgy of restructuring.

The main issue is aligned incentives and this can be achieved by setting clear, agreed outcome targets.

Instead, keep it simple. Set clear targets for customer satisfaction (measured at the level of a local line) and net cost. Nothing else.

 Instead of asking management spend the next few years focused on restructures, ask them to spend the next few years focused on achieving these two outcomes.

The thing I like about this approach is that a restructure almost certainly is needed. The structure we have at the moment was designed for a different reality. But if managers are asked to focus on customer-centric outcomes, we can watch to see who ends up working with whom.

In effect, through personal relationships, the people on the ground will end up creating the new structure themselves. The structures can be built out of working relationships, not the other way round.

Long term GBR needs an accountability model to replace the existing system of contracts. I’ve written about that before.

But in the short term, the best way to avoid British rail passengers ending up stuck at dark stations awaiting late trains with inadequate information is probably to ask everyone to focus on the customer. As Italy shows, it’s not guaranteed that they will by default.

Late at night, standing on that dark Italian platform, I didn’t care who owned the railway. I just wanted it to work.

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