ABSTRACT
In July 1992, the British government published a White Paper (Cm 2012, 1992) outlining its proposals for the privatization of and introduction of competition into British Rail. Since then, a string of consultation documents on specific aspects of the proposals have been produced by the Department of Transport (commencing in October 1992) and draft legislation (‘the Railway Bill’) was presented in January 1993. Ministerial statements have also served to make the intentions a great deal clearer whilst a detailed report by the House of Commons’ Transport Committee (HC 246, 1993) has provided a wealth of background information. This paper aims to provide a critique of these proposals. The next section provides some background on the situation of rail transport in Western Europe, before the proposals themselves are explained. The following five sections consider in turn issues surrounding the separation of infrastructure from operations, competition versus integration in the planning of rail services, whether the incentive to invest will be adequate, the problem of institutional complexity and transaction costs, and lack of competitive bidding, before we reach our conclusions. This paper updates earlier work we have presented to the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT, 1993). It is intended to complement the more quantitative work we have presented in a companion paper (Preston and Nash, 1993). For a critique from a different perspective see Glaister and Travers (1993).
