Unfortunately my post was too long for you to understand a little bit of why that might be.
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[Travel] Rail nationalisation.
- Thread starter Leekbrookgull
- Start date
Curious Orange
Punxsatawney Phil
The most profitable bit is the stock leasing companies, which aren't getting nationalised, so some siphoning to shareholders and overseas companies will continue.
A profit of £13.85m on £1.1b of income. £11.75m was paid in dividends, 1.07% of income.
Operating costs including payroll were effectively £1.1b too.
Machiavelli
Well-known member
This and the brilliant contribution from @Shins illustrates just how short-sighted the previous government's scaling back of HS2 is.
Strange. When I was working in Government departments we were introducing accrual accounting, precisely to prevent this "We've got a budget and we've got to spend it" mentality - it mucked up your budget something cruel if you persisted with this.
I looked up the accounts of a random one of these ROSCO's, Angel Trains Limited. £339m annual income from leasing charges, £110m paid in dividends effectively for 2 years.
You can see the expiry of dates of leases eg 2025 and 2031.
Crikey it's hard to follow the trail of companies and ultimate owners, I'm suspicious that they've illegally overstepped that smoke and mirrors.
But the bottom line is that it appears a handful of British individuals from that one group are minting it.
Guy Fawkes
The voice of treason
- Sep 29, 2007
- 8,313
All came down to how empty the public purse is, and the ever increasing costs to deliver such a scheme (always the case with public projects) not helped by high inflation increasing the borrowing costs and amount of tax revenue needing to be diverted to service the national debt.
Surely the waste in previous decades is just as, if not more relevant here which made this difficult to afford, from wasting money on cars (all of which were sold at a loss) when parts of the car industry was nationalised, to paying staff to carry out roles that no longer existed (thanks to powerful unions preventing them from being sacked or retrained and moved into other roles) so we had things like stokers on electric trains.
Add in how budgets work, they have no way of carrying money over to the following year without running the risk of being penalised, so spend it all regardless of whether there were things actually needed or not) and all that accumulative wasted tax payers money adds up and has to be serviced, adding further cost to that waste. Net result, less money available years later to spend on things like HS2.
Sadly the public are happy for the national debt to be built up and that will only make it harder for future generations to afford schemes like HS2 (or even some everyday services)
- Apr 5, 2014
- 26,331
The problem there is that the profit margins are small and will have little impact on fairs. This is the false ideal folk have.
The rail network, despite being private, still has government subsidy. That's why, as much as I believe in public ownership, I'm not thinking that good old days that never were will return.
The only thing that will make our railways cheaper and more efficient is government investment, and they can't afford it. The network is old and frail and the original lines were never really built for passengers anyway. The problem goes back nearly 200 years.
If the government borrowed £200b to invest £100b in HS2 and circa £100b on other railways, it wouldn’t make railways cheaper. Even in the long term.
In addition there no’s free lunch with increased government borrowing for capital projects or any reason, as we learnt with Truss or more gently with Reeves …. UK interest rates have firmed up, as a direct result aren’t now likely to fall in the short to mid term. Because we operate in global money markets.
Corbyn said the UK state should borrow an additional £0.5T “to invest”, he called it peoples quantitive easing. At low cost with no disadvantages to the UK. Just printing paper money. But the QE started by Brown and carried on by Tory chancellors was done in concert with other major economies, so we weren’t unduly targeted by the markets and powerful US credit rating agencies. Acting alone we are and were.
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I feel that you've blown the surprise
clapham_gull
Legacy Fan
- Aug 20, 2003
- 25,968
Don't forget the billions we taxpayers have lost because Major sold off British Rail cheap, and allowed foreign private companies to soak the British public for 30 years.
- Feb 22, 2014
- 2,865
It's worth your time!
An unfixable mess for all routes into London, apart from the high speed from Ashford/Ebbsfleet, which is amazing.
Water, gas, and electric to go...
Certainly not great now but have I have my doubts because can remember old days. Hopefully will get round stupid system where cheapest ticket can be got by buying 2/3 tickets to one destination. Always felt managers find it easier to spend public money then private money.
How old are your old days? Are you thinking of the 1980s when BR was deliberately starved of funding and subsidies because Thatcher hated public transport and social good? Even then, I used the trains constantly - and they were much more reliable than they are now. And cheaper.
Bound to be a far superior service as the drivers will have had at least one 25% pay rise in the first few years.