All a bit of a red herring when you factor in the fact that public spending has increased several times over since privatisation - it's our money which funded these improvements, the only difference being PLCs took a good chunk of it for themselves.
Agreed. Banged on about this before. Taxpayers money was used to fund the £9 billion WCML upgrade. How? Because we give Virgin trains £200 million per year in cash subsidies. In turn, they pay this cash over to NR who use the money to pay off the WCML cost overuns.
The TOCs are merely 'vehicles' for public money.
(From memory) in its last year, BR has £900 million in public subsidies. 15 years later, railways annual drain on the public purse is nearer £5 billion. Why does it cost so much more to run our railways ?
Simple. In the past, the government had one railway company and one annual cheque. Now look: it has mutliple railway demands on the public purse: 25 TOCs and annual grants to NR.
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Yes public spending has increased massivley (whether it would have been spent at all if it was still public is a different argument) but half of the money being spent is/was private money. You cant argue that the private money hasnt done good.
Yes, indeed private money has been raised to run our trains. The private money is ticket sales. Make no mistake, the TOCs have scarcely had to dip into their pockets. The TOCs have merely
spent money they get from ticket sales and money from the pubic purse.
