Devolution always sounds like a nice idea - local influence/control sounds like a positive slogan (hey, "take back control", that worked...).
But really, franchises come down to two things:
- How much money is being thrown at them (e.g. sufficient money for brand new trains and increased frequencies like London Overground? commitment to infrastructure improvements to go hand in hand with the new TOC - e.g. signing up to electrification, redoubling, investment in stations)
- How carefully managed the franchise is by Government (e.g. the Scotrail Service Quality Incentive Regeime - "SQUIRE" - meant the TOC had to sign up to a kind of zero tolerance approach to minor defects, even little on platforms) - are there penalties for short-formed services? Does the TOC have an incentive to keep posters at stations up to date/ broken lightbulbs replaced/
You could have a devolved franchise (e.g. setting up a "Devon & Cornwall" franchise to take over the branch lines in that part of England, or a "Lincolnshire" franchise to take over the rural bits of the EMT/EMR operation), but without guarantees of money (increased subsidy, promises of new trains, guarantees of Network Rail investment) then it'll just be another "zero growth" operation that bumps along without any improvement.
The OP mentions Merseyrail and London Overground as examples of successful devolution. London has worked because it's had huge sums of money thrown at it. That seems like justifiable investment to me - eight 378s per hour on the NLL can carry more passengers in one hour than some stations manage in a year - the ELL and WLL are transformed beyond recognition - it's the kind of mass transportation that justifies the investment.
Merseyrail has been an independent operation for over twenty years (under slightly different names) and soldiered on with the same 1970s trains until now - but they have been run with a focus on the little details (e.g. feet on seats, smoking), given the anti-social nature of elements of the passenger base* - similar to SQUIRE. So if you set the franchise up so that the winner agrees to a fairly draconian/ tightly managed regime - great if you can get the TOC to sign up to it but potentially complicated to administer (with scope for argument between the TOC and Government about all of the fines)
There's a few obvious problems with "devolution" though:
1. Which body do you devolve things to? There's no obvious candidate in the Devon&Cornwall or Lincolnshire examples I mentioned earlier. Some places have devolved Mayors but these aren't necessarily suitable to manage train services (e.g. Andy Burnham is Mayor of Greater Manchester but a stand-alone Manchester TOC would be a nonsense). Do you set up more layers of Government (like Transport for the North)?
2. How do you protect passengers over the border? In the case of Merseyrail, they've clearly improved frequencies at Chester, so I don't have any problem with their handling of the land outside Merseyside. But would a devolved Transport for the West Midlands be any better running a route from the West Midlands to Leicester/ Nottingham/ Liverpool (than a non-devolved TOC)? Shrewsbury to Birmingham isn't a "Welsh" service, nor is it a "West Midlands" service, so are those passengers treated as second class citizens (unable to elect/influence the people in charge of TOCs?
3. Do you accept cutting services to fit a neater map? (e.g. the Liverpool - Norwich service is long distance, but if we can chop it back to Liverpool - Nottingham then we can justify giving it to a TOC controlled by TfN - is that worth disrupting passengers for? Some Scottish politicians wanted to chop "English" services so that ScotRail would have a monopoly on daytime services from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and Inverness)
4. What is the best size for a franchise? This seems to be a cyclical one, where we've gone from tiny operations like Valley Lines and Island Line to mega-franchises like GWR and TSGN but then also Caledonian Sleeper.
5. How do you avoid the mistakes of the Wales & Wales franchise?
6. Given the argument about nationalisation, is it better to have more political interference/ influence on operations of a franchise? Will we end up with a fudged service pattern that tries to tick lots of boxes with a complicated timetable (rather than letting a TOC distribute resources to the busiest lines and build passenger numbers rather than disproportionate attention to backwaters? Are people looking at the DfT and thinking "yes, more political interference works well"?
7. Where's the money coming from? Local Government seems pretty starved of cash at the moment - devolving rail budgets might sound nice but could politicians take money from a devolved budget to use for pot-hole repairs instead?
8. How will longer distance TOCs (e.g. XC) be treated?
9. Do you want to keep franchises, or move to "concessions"? Is "devolution" intended to just leave the business of the franchise tender to a political body or will the politicians have day-to-day influence and control the purse strings? i.e. is this a change in the bidding process or are you trying to change something more substantial?
10. If there's lots of extra money available then are there better ways of spending this (without needing to take over franchises)? e.g. you could fund improvements to TOCs without needing to manage them
11. England isn't a neatly divided country and a lot of people are resentful of bigger nearby places. People in the Home Counties may not want their trains controlled by a TOC beholden to the Mayor Of London, but there's no Mayor Of Kent to devolve Kentish services to.
12. Is this a way of separating the subsidy hungry "Provincial" services from the lucrative "InterCity" services, so that we can starve local trains of funding and focus attention on the longer distance stuff? e.g. if you split up EMT/EMR then will this see the "devolved" services in the East Midlands stagnate whilst the proper money is spent on services to St Pancras. Be careful what you wish for.
* - common to any urban TOC, I hasten to add
