The legal framework for Great British Railways has been unveiled at last, in the shape of the Railways Bill, which is to be debated at length during the Bill’s Second Reading in the House of Commons next Tuesday (writes Sim Harris).

There have been statements, reports, reviews and predictions about Great British Railways for more than four years, ever since the ‘Williams-Shapps’ Plan for Rail was published in May 2021.

More than two years earlier, Keith Williams, who had been appointed to conduct a review of the railways in 2018, told the Bradshaw Address audience in February 2019 that ‘Passenger growth can no longer be taken for granted and there is less certainty about how the economy is going to fare into the future.’

That was truer than he knew, because Covid struck in early 2020. The effects on the railways, as on many other industries, were little short of disastrous. The franchise model, which involved significant commercial risk for operators, could no longer function when passengers were being urged to stay at home.

The number of journeys in 2019-20 as recorded by the Office of Rail and Road was 1,738 million, but in 2020-21 it fell to 388 million as a result of the pandemic lockdowns.

All franchises were suspended and replaced by Emergency Measures Agreements in March 2020.

On 21 September, franchises were abolished for good. Under a heading ‘Rail franchising reaches the terminus …’ the Department for Transport said: ‘From this morning, franchising is replaced with more demanding Emergency Recovery Measures Agreements …’

The DfT could only refer to the franchises it had awarded, and in fact the ScotRail franchise, modified because of Covid, continued until March 2022, when it was taken back into public ownership by the Scottish Government. Caledonian Sleeper continued as a franchise until June 2023, when it was also renationalised. As far as franchises were concerned, that really was the terminus.

Keith Williams’ rail review had been commissioned because of chaos in May 2018, when new timetables had failed to work on the major franchises of Govia Thameslink Railway and Northern.

His final conclusion in 2021 was that the railways were ‘too fragmented, too complicated, and too expensive to run’. There was no single accountable body to take responsibility.

This was the first step on a trail which has led us to the Railways Bill.

But the Bill itself does not lift the veil on Great British Railways to any great extent. It is mainly concerned with the essential structure, rather than the details. We learn that the transport secretary ‘may by regulations designate a body corporate as Great British Railways’, but that it will not be part of the civil service and railway staff will not become Crown employees.

GBR was originally described as the railway’s future ‘guiding mind’, but in April 2024 that was quietly modified to ‘directing mind’ in a Labour Party document called ‘Getting Britain moving’. Neither phrase occurs in the Bill.

On the other hand, the phrase ‘may by regulations’ occurs no fewer than 16 times, in connection with government ministers. In other words, if you had been led to believe that this Bill would create Great British Railways you were misled: rather, it gives the Secretary of State the right to do so.

In particular, Section 3(3) appears to grant very wide powers indeed: ‘The Secretary of State may by regulations confer on Great British Railways such other functions relating to railways or railway services as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.’

In other words, GBR could start running tramways or heritage railways, or take charge of the National Railway Museum, but the SoS might be challenged if she allowed GBR to open a chain of fish and chip shops, except that even these might be legally acceptable if they were on stations.

Similarly, she and her colleagues in the Scottish and Welsh Governments may, if they wish, use ‘regulations’ (in other words, delegated legislation in the form of Statutory Instruments) to do such things as changing existing access agreements.

Section 71(1) reads (in part): ‘The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision about the operation of—(a) access agreements that were entered into before the date on which this section comes into force … so far as the agreements or rights have effect in relation to GBR infrastructure.’

This might be a yellow light further down the line for open access operators, who could be confronted in theory by this specimen of retrospective legislation.

In short, the Bill has a very wide range, even if it lacks detail. In Part 2, we will consider more of what has been left out – and what other clues the Government has provided.

(Part 2 will be published on Monday.)

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