Great British railway.

[Chippy_Tea]

I am lucky I don't have to travel by train my son does and they are often late, don't turn up and when they do they are overcrowded, I don't know if this will change things but if it does its a vote winner fot the tories.

Bbc news -
Since the privatisation of British Rail 25 years ago, rail reviews, reforms and reorganisations have come and gone with a steady regularity, operating to a frequency something akin to an elongated Olympic Games.
Successive administrations have felt the need to tinker with the original architecture of the system, which gave train operators a substantial degree of freedom to set fares, lease new trains and change service patterns.
Since Railtrack collapsed in 2001, however, the general direction of travel has been towards more control at the centre.
In 2004, the then transport secretary Alistair Darling considered a plan to unite the two big forces in the industry, Network Rail and the Strategic Rail Authority, into a single unit, to be called National Rail. This plan finally makes that idea concrete and reverses one of the pillars of the original privatisation, the separation of management of the track and the trains.
Great British Railways will have its say over Network Rail (the owner of the track and major stations) and will award concessions to private companies to operate services. If the plan is followed through and properly implemented, it should see an end to the squabbling over who is to blame when the trains are late, dirty or overcrowded. Everything will be the problem of a single body.
That concentration of power will also be a potential Achilles' heel. One of the successes of the privatisation was the freedom for train companies to do new things - a freedom that was a partial factor in the remarkable revival in passenger numbers in the past two decades.
If that spirit of innovation is lost - and if civil servants and politicians endlessly interfere in the working of the new authority - the railways risk sliding into stagnation. The fear among railway executives is that the Treasury, having had to pay dearly to support services during the pandemic, will seek to claw back spending, leading to cuts in services.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

People are phoning 5 live saying they have missed an opertunity and should have taken it over and not tied this half way approach.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The basic move away from franchising had been happening for some years, and franchising was officially killed off last September - this is more of a tidying-up exercise to fill in some of the governance gaps. And hopefully get some of the operational stuff out of the hands of the DfT who have been demonstrably useless in their role in the railways. As I said when we were talking about HS2 last year :

Crossrail is government run and is years late and way over budget. It was a government procurement that took >15 years to buy the 125 replacements. Most of the UK system is government run - Network Rail.

Government control is not a magic bullet, quite the opposite in fact - and when the system is as tightly controlled by government as in the UK then who actually owns the companies is a bit of a red herring. See this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, having run the east coast line :
https://www.railmagazine.com/news/network/nationalisation-a-dead-end-argument
The theory of franchising was that if service levels and most prices were fixed externally, then the only way for a company to make money was by increasing passengers, by investing private capital in order to improve reliability and comfort. And a doubling of passengers has happened as a result. The concern now must be that we'll go back to the bad old days of Treasury rules restricting investment.

It's worth noting that Grant Schapps is a Hertfordshire lad born and bred, and now represents Welwyn, so he and his constituents were among those badly affected by the Thameslink fiasco. I don't doubt he's genuinely committed to making things better for people who commute into London, but since the pie is only so big, that may come at the expense of rail users outside London eg by reducing the amount by which London commuters subsidise TransPennine/Northern.

Transport is difficult, expensive and long-term - anybody looking for quick fixes from shuffling nameplates in Whitehall is bound to be disappointed.