Regional Operating Contracts in France

[LNW-GW Joint]

Railway Gazette has a piece on the first award of an operating contract for services in the Hauts de France (north-east) Region, centred on Amiens.
The contract went to incumbent SNCF, for 9 years, and beat a bid from private Transdev.
So we have a publicly owned operator for a local government body, but with decidedly private sector terms of reliability and punctuality, with fines for missing these and other quality targets.
There's also the threat of termination of the contract if standards are repeatedly missed.
The Region will own and maintain the rolling stock.
There are 3 other operating contracts being assessed by the Region in the current round.

This is public sector competition for rail services, compared to our current private sector competitions (with a public sector backstop of OLR).
It's hard to know what model GBR will use, but I imagine the new French model will be of interest to Labour in its forward rail strategy, as a form of "nationalisation".
But the idea of being able to sack the national operator is novel.
In the case of Wales and Scotland I haven't heard a politician make this threat for their in-house TOCs (TfW and Scotrail), or line them up for periodic competition.

https://www.railwaygazette.com/pass...gional-train-operating-contract/63879.article

FRANCE: Incumbent SNCF Voyageurs has beaten a rival bid from Transdev to win the Hauts-de-France région’s first competitively tendered contract for the operation of passenger train services.
The contract announced by the regional authority on March 30 runs for nine years from December 2024, and is expected to generate revenue of €500m for SNCF Voyageurs.
It covers the operation of Etoile d’Amiens services radiating from Amiens to Abbeville, Rouen, Saint-Quentin, Le Tréport (reopening a line closed in 2018), Albert, Creil and Laon, as well as the Creil – Beauvais, Beauvais – Le Tréport and Laon – Hirson lines. This represents 17% of the train-km operated in the Hauts-de-France région.
...
The région’s Executive President of Transport Franck Dhersin told Railway Gazette International that SNCF Voyageurs’ bid had been evaluated as the best in all aspects, notably for staffing.
The punctuality target will be increased to 98·5%, with higher financial penalties for delays and for short-formed trains; the penalty for operating short trains will increase at peak times.
Dhersin said the région would end the contract if the targets are not met for two consecutive years.

 

[Fragezeichnen]

True, SNCF is fully owned by the French government, but they also can and do get involved in entirely commercial profit-seeking ventures such as Ouigo España, so it's not a new thing for them to play the part of a private sector contractor.

I've never quite understood why the British are so keen to return a single government owned monopoly which faces no consequences for poor performance, although I guess it has something to do with British Rail being more forward thinking than SNCF ever was. The French regions are chomping at the bit to stop being forced to pay SNCF whatever they care to ask for in return for lacklustre service.

It's going to be tough for a private operator to get a look in starting from absolutely nothing, even if they don't have to deal with the train maintainence, but the targets and the threat of price competition is a start.

 

[Austriantrain]

Railway Gazette has a piece on the first award of an operating contract for services in the Hauts de France (north-east) Region, centred on Amiens.
The contract went to incumbent SNCF, for 9 years, and beat a bid from private Transdev.
So we have a publicly owned operator for a local government body, but with decidedly private sector terms of reliability and punctuality, with fines for missing these and other quality targets.
There's also the threat of termination of the contract if standards are repeatedly missed.
The Region will own and maintain the rolling stock.
There are 3 other operating contracts being assessed by the Region in the current round.

This is public sector competition for rail services, compared to our current private sector competitions (with a public sector backstop of OLR).
It's hard to know what model GBR will use, but I imagine the new French model will be of interest to Labour in its forward rail strategy, as a form of "nationalisation".
But the idea of being able to sack the national operator is novel.
In the case of Wales and Scotland I haven't heard a politician make this threat for their in-house TOCs (TfW and Scotrail), or line them up for periodic competition.

https://www.railwaygazette.com/pass...gional-train-operating-contract/63879.article

I don’t think the idea of being able to sack the national operator is novel at all. Such contracts, be they signed with the own national operator, subsidiaries of other national operators or real private companies regularly have such clauses; they are included in the terms of tender. In reality though, at least from what I can see in Germany, the national operator usually does not give rise to the need to cancel the contract - they tend to be more reliable (sometimes due to their inherent size advantage - enormous fleet which can be shifted around, much larger staff numbers; and they have a higher reputational risk too).

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 Apr 2023 ==

True, SNCF is fully owned by the French government, but they also can and do get involved in entirely commercial profit-seeking ventures such as Ouigo España, so it's not a new thing for them to play the part of a private sector contractor.

I've never quite understood why the British are so keen to return a single government owned monopoly which faces no consequences for poor performance, although I guess it has something to do with British Rail being more forward thinking than SNCF ever was. The French regions are chomping at the bit to stop being forced to pay SNCF whatever they care to ask for in return for lacklustre service.

It's going to be tough for a private operator to get a look in starting from absolutely nothing, even if they don't have to deal with the train maintainence, but the targets and the threat of price competition is a start.

Hmm… it really depends. If SBB is your national operator, you wouldn’t want a private one SNCF on the other hand… good riddance.

 

[AdamWW]

I've never quite understood why the British are so keen to return a single government owned monopoly which faces no consequences for poor performance, although I guess it has something to do with British Rail being more forward thinking than SNCF ever was. The French regions are chomping at the bit to stop being forced to pay SNCF whatever they care to ask for in return for lacklustre service.

Happy to be corrected but it seems to me that there are rarely consequences for poor performance in the current system.

(Or rather the consequence is to have your contract extended...)

 

[Gag Halfrunt]

It's hard to know what model GBR will use, but I imagine the new French model will be of interest to Labour in its forward rail strategy, as a form of "nationalisation".

EU railway policy is based on British railway privatisation. The only big difference, AFAIK, is that incumbent national operators have not been liquidated and are allowed to bid for franchises. (Plus incumbents' fleets haven't been transferred to ROSCOs, although Norway, not in the EU, has established a state-owned ROSCO for the current and future passenger fleet.)

If Labour decide on re-nationalisation it would make sense to do it in a clear, straightforward way. There wouldn't be any reason to pursue any kind of stealth or backdoor nationalisation that conforms to rules that the UK is no longer bound by and which might not be visible to the general public.

 

[AdamWW]

EU railway policy is based on British railway privatisation. The only big difference, AFAIK, is that incumbent national operators have not been liquidated and are allowed to bid for franchises.

If Labour decide on re-nationalisation it would make sense to do it in a clear, straightforward way. There wouldn't be any reason to pursue any kind of stealth or backdoor nationalisation that conforms to rules that the UK is no longer bound by and which might not be visible to the general public.

In my experience different countries have gone about it in rather different ways and the major difference is not just getting rid of the national operator though maybe you could argue that the other significant differences are all natural consequences of having done so.

For example in the UK we retained interavailable ticketing as the default and I think having even open access operators accepting such tickets is unusual in Europe. Likewise we don't have separate ticket offices for different operators.

 

[U-Bahnfreund]

Transdev already did win one contract for regional train ops, for trains between Marseilles and Nice, starting mid-2025.
And there's also the two Grand Est to Germany tenders for various Cross-Border services, which are supposed to start in December 2024, but no winner has been announced yet.
And I believe there's a tender currently open for some Intercity trains subsidised by the state.

 

[Matt P]

I know that France enabled regions to tender for regional and local services to comply with EU legislation. However I am sure that I read somewhere that many regional authorities had been quite envious of what was going on over the border in Germany and had wanted to tender for quite some time before they actually could. I can't remember where I read that though!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 8 Apr 2023 ==

EU railway policy is based on British railway privatisation. The only big difference, AFAIK, is that incumbent national operators have not been liquidated and are allowed to bid for franchises. (Plus incumbents' fleets haven't been transferred to ROSCOs, although Norway, not in the EU, has established a state-owned ROSCO for the current and future passenger fleet.)

If Labour decide on re-nationalisation it would make sense to do it in a clear, straightforward way. There wouldn't be any reason to pursue any kind of stealth or backdoor nationalisation that conforms to rules that the UK is no longer bound by and which might not be visible to the general public.

I think EU Legislation is far closer to how Sweden reformed their rail sector and also aligns quite closely with what Germany has been doing since the mid 1990s. To some extent France is behind the curve by permitting regional service tendering.

As has been mentioned already, other EU countries have opened up their rail markets to enable other operators to compete with the state owned operator, whether that is for contracts for regional or local services, or on track competition for long distance passenger traffic and freight. They have been relatively pragmatic in how competition has been introduced. Furthermore, more often than not, contracts for tendered services are awarded by local or regional authorities. Authorities that also either own and operate or award operating contracts for bus, light rail and metro services.


The UK took a more radical and ideological drive approach to completely destroy the state operator. The role of local government in public transport provision has also been systematically undermined. The 1985 Transport Act being a good example. Despite devolution of rail services in parts of the country central government has a far greater role in rail service provision than in many equivalent sized European country. Although this is true of many other policy areas as well.