A summer of power failures, heatwave speed restrictions and derailments has left UK rail passengers facing high cancellation rates and steep fares — just as Labour steadily transfers nearly all passenger rail services into public ownership.
Nationalisation remains popular. A YouGov tracker poll suggests almost two thirds of the public support public ownership. Yet big structural changes have yet to be introduced, and experts caution it is too early to judge their success.
South Western Railway (SWR), nationalised in May 2025, was the first of six services brought into public ownership under Labour. At Woking station, commuter Leo told the BBC he had been optimistic about public ownership but had noticed no difference so far. “I think the phrase ’emperor’s new clothes’ comes to mind… it’s still unreliable,” he said.
SWR saw a clear increase in cancellations during its first year in public hands. The Conservatives have cited the operator as evidence that public control does not necessarily deliver improvements. The government argues the early period was affected by high summer temperatures, signal failures and trespass incidents. Rail minister Lord Hendy says turnaround work has included introducing long-delayed new trains on suburban routes and recruiting more drivers, resulting in a drop in cancellations caused by staff shortages.
Earlier nationalisations show mixed picture
TransPennine Express was nationalised in May 2023 under the Conservative government, after struggling to fulfil its timetable amid poor industrial relations. An improvement plan involved cutting some services and removing one type of train to resolve staffing problems. A new deal with the drivers’ union also helped — something an insider at the former private sector operator claimed their company had not been permitted to do.
Cancellations at TransPennine have fallen noticeably but remained above the Great Britain average in the year to August.
The BBC notes the data can only tell us so much. Performance is affected by many factors: the state of the infrastructure each service relies on, weather events, and how well an operator was performing before the government took over. Of the operators nationalised since Labour came to power, only SWR and c2c have completed a whole year in public hands. For operators nationalised earlier, the picture is clouded by the pandemic, when passenger numbers fell sharply.
Alex Hynes, chief executive of DfT Operator Limited (DfTO), the government company that owns publicly-run operators, says some short-term changes have been possible. These include making one team jointly responsible for managing infrastructure and passenger train services in some areas, including the south-west of England.
“The railway is a system: track, train, people,” he said. “So by putting one person in charge, they can fix all elements of the system to deliver a better service to customers.”
Hynes also cited changes at recently nationalised Thameslink: investment in better cleaning, improved toilets and replacement of unpopular upright “ironing-board” seats.
On whether conclusions can be drawn from recent performance data, Stephen Glaister, a former chair of regulator the Office of Rail and Road and now emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London, said: “I think it’s completely hopeless to try and do that assessment over such a short period.” He believes a decade is needed to assess the impact of nationalisation.
The government argues official data suggests publicly owned train operators are performing better on punctuality and cancellations overall than those still under DfT contracts to private operators.
Experts point out that limitations remain whoever runs the trains. Many delays happen because infrastructure such as signals fails. Network capacity is fixed, and acquiring better trains or more staff can take years.
Privatisation record debated
While the view that privatisation ultimately failed — leaving unreliable services and high fares — may be widespread, Prof Glaister argues the old privatised system actually worked well for a few years in the 1990s, with operating costs and subsidies falling while the number of train services and passengers rose.
The current reality is also more complicated than the term nationalisation suggests. The railways Labour inherited were not completely privatised, and nationalisation does not mean a return to British Rail. Infrastructure manager Network Rail has been fully under public control for over two decades. LNER and Northern were already nationalised under the Conservatives, and Scotrail, Transport for Wales and Caledonian Sleeper are controlled by devolved national governments.
Even operators still on DfT contracts at Westminster have been heavily controlled by government for years. During Covid, private operators began being paid a fixed fee to run services while the taxpayer took on the financial risk. One senior industry executive, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, said the contract terms meant train companies had to “ask government for permission to blow their nose”.
Highly profitable rolling stock companies (ROSCOS) still own the trains. Freight companies operate privately, and a handful of fully commercial “open access operators” — including Lumo, Hull Trains and Grand Central — run on the rails, though there are industry concerns these could end up squeezed.
What is often called rail nationalisation therefore amounts to gradually returning passenger train operators run by private companies to public hands as their contracts expire — and making that the default.
Great British Railways awaits
The government hopes reorganising the railways under a new publicly run body, Great British Railways (GBR), will make a significant difference by bringing together the running of trains and tracks, ending the current fragmented system.
A botched timetable introduction in 2018 was the spark for the then-Conservative government to eventually propose GBR as an overarching body, though the Tories believe private competition should not be excluded from the system.
Some trains already carry distinctive GBR branding, but the organisation does not yet exist. A new law to create it is making its way through parliament. Unknowns remain, including exactly how GBR will interact with devolved governments and who its senior leaders will be.
Transport expert and author Prof Jon Shaw of the University of Plymouth says the idea of a “single guiding mind” should create “a better planned railway that’s more aligned to the customer”. Potential benefits, he thinks, include better long-term planning around rolling stock and timetables, and the removal of “the compensation merry-go-round”, where train companies and Network Rail argue over whose fault a delay was.
“The way you get the railway to work is you get the infrastructure and the trains and the people working in harmony because it’s a system,” said Hynes. “And we can do that in a publicly owned GBR railway in a way that we haven’t been able to do for a generation.”
Prof Shaw cautions over potential pitfalls, however. “There remains very little money,” he said, and “a massive issue is whether or not the rail minister or DfT more generally — or the Treasury — will be able to butt out” and leave rail leaders to run the railway.
Prof Glaister also fears that politically sensitive areas such as fares and levels of service could lead politicians to try running the railways themselves, given the amount of public money involved. “Actually, governments are not very good at running railways,” he said. “So you want management who are somewhat independent and able to run it.”
Lord Hendy insists that despite the Transport Secretary having ultimate sign-off on GBR’s strategy, the body will be genuinely arms-length from government. “The point of this is to get a cadre of people who are committed to the outcomes that the secretary of state and I want for it, who can go off and run it on their own,” he said, adding: “They’ll have a lot more chance in the future than they’ve had in the last 20 years.”
Subsidy questions loom
The railways are currently subsidised to the tune of around £12bn a year, not including spending on major projects like HS2.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander says she wants to see subsidy levels fall. Network Rail has acknowledged that a squeezed budget means difficult choices, and that shoring up the network against the effects of more extreme weather requires investment.
“When the public is hoping for a better level of service, more reliability, fewer breakdowns and lower fares, what they’re really asking for is more money to be put into the railway,” said Prof Glaister. “I don’t think it’s likely the government is going to be able to find more money, probably [it will have] less, actually. And so I think there’s a real problem with ministers raising expectations from this policy.”
Hynes does not see a contradiction between reducing taxpayer subsidy and improving services. “My two north stars are performance up and subsidy down,” he said. “If the service is better, we get more customers, we get more revenue.”
Lord Hendy and Hynes also push back on the idea that running fewer trains might improve reliability. “In an industry with high fixed costs, the best way of getting the subsidy down is to go for growth,” said Hynes.
Questions also remain over how GBR will manage industrial relations. Terms and conditions currently vary across operators. What cost-conscious ministers will do if unions seek to standardise these at the most generous level across the network is unclear.
While ministers argue they are getting on with improvements people will notice, there is acknowledgement that the speed of improvement will vary between operators. Lord Hendy says some changes “ought to be dead boring… to make sure tomorrow is a little better than today if you can do it”, but that “more than 30 years worth of behaviours” will need altering to make the railway run solely in the interests of the customer.
Back at Woking, asked whether he is optimistic things will improve in the long run, Leo said: “I really hope so — it would be amazing, as it’s not the best service now.”
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