THE POLITICS OF FEAR

As Railtrack takes the rap in the Cullen report, Ross Clark

attacks the widely held superstition that private enterprise puts profit above safety

SO, the travelling public has finally nailed its enemy: Railtrack has been given top billing in the Cullen report into the Ladbroke Grove train crash, in which it is blamed for causing the accident by failing to upgrade the now infamous signal 109 outside Paddington Station. The company's share price, which has already tumbled by 75 per cent in the past year, is set to sink lower. The unions, as ever, are demanding renationalisation. Weary commuters, who have spent the past eight months creeping to work at 20rriph, may be tempted to saunter down to

the buffet car for a celebratory if overpriced — can of Newcastle Brown. The evil men who have been swilling at the trough of the national rail network, with no regard for life and limb, are within sight of being driven to the corporate equivalent of the abattoir. If there is still a share called Railtrack quoted on the Stock Exchange in a year's time, there will be huge disappointment.

The story of Railtrack is a morality tale that must send shivers down the spines of the directors of any other company unfortunate enough to get on the wrong side of public opinion in an age of triumphal consumerism. If you want to understand the extent to which Railtrack has been singled out as the hate figure for the travelling public, just consider the following names: Firstgroup, Balfour Beatty and the Go-Ahead Group. All were, or had employees who were, implicated in failings in one or other of that great triumvirate of British Railway Disasters — Southall, Ladbroke Grove and Hatfield — yet all have shares that are trading healthily on the stock market this week; and that is because none happens quite to fit the role of public bogeyman.

Railtrack's role makes it the perfect scapegoat for rail disasters. It is not in a position to win praise, even if the 8.32 to St Pancras does arrive bang on time; compliments would, instead, be warmly received by the train-operating company. Yet when trains jump the rails, pass red signals or simply arrive late, Railtrack is perfectly placed to act as a one-stop shop for the bereaved and aggrieved. This is not to say that Railtrack has not had its failings. We will have to bow to Lord Cullen in his conclusion that Railtrack should take the lion's share of the blame over the Ladbroke Grove disaster for failing to improve the visibility of signal 109 — though it is regrettable that it has become the custom in inquiries these days to place all the blame on 'institutional' failings rather than on individuals. Thames Trains, the Go-Ahead subsidiary which operated the train that went through the red signal, has never satisfactorily

explained \Nily the driver, who was killed in the crash, accelerated through several signals, ignoring the audible warning which would have sounded in his cab. For its part, Railtrack has failed to explain why no speed restriction was put in place at Hatfield, despite the fact that its engineers were aware of gauge corner cracking present at the site. Though the contractors responsible for maintenance on that stretch of line, Balfour Beatty, were hardly free of blame either. The damaged rails should have been replaced weeks beforehand, but the operation had been delayed because the new lengths of rail had been dropped off at the wrong site.

These are serious shortcomings, and heads deserved to roll, but they do not begin to explain the ire to which Railtrack has been subjected over the past two years. Beyond the facts established by Lord Cullen's inquiry and the Health and Safety

Executive's report into the Hatfield disaster lies a much broader, popular — and mythical — version of what has gone wrong on the railways. This runs as follows: the railways, which were essentially safe under British Rail, have become perilous thanks to the rails being put into private hands. Private enterprise puts profit above safety, and therefore should never be entrusted with matters of life and death. When it comes to public safety, money should not be allowed to come into the equation: human life is too sacred to be left to accountants.

It is a crude set of beliefs, and a thoroughly wrong one. It is remarkable how easily the public has forgotten the joke spawned by a series of rail disasters a decade ago: what's the difference between British Rail and a Scud missile? Answer: British Rail actually kills people. The railways under state management were certainly no safer than they have been under private management; if you iron out the peaks and troughs in the rail death-toll, the privatised railways' record over the past six years shows a continuation of the gradual improvement in rail safety that has been evident since the day in 1830 when the President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, was mown down by Stephenson's Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

Given what has happened since, it is easy to overlook the fact that between the Southall and Ladbroke Grove crashes the railway went nearly two years without a single passenger fatality. Easy, too, to forget the clusters of accidents that used to occur under British Rail, such as the fatal accidents at Clapham, Purley and Glasgow between December 1988 and March 1989. Nor is it true that mainland Europe's generously funded state railways have better safety records: you have to go back to 1915 to find a British rail crash that claimed as many lives as the 101 killed on the German inter-city train crash at Eschede in 1998.

There were some maintenance problems associated with privatisation, but the prime failing was committed by Railtrack in its very early days when it was still a state owned company. In 1995 its engineers ended the practice of rail-grinding — the routine removal of a thin layer of steel from the top of the rail designed to prevent short, hairline cracks from developing into large ones. The move led to an increase in broken rails, and by 1999, more than a year before the Hatfield crash, Railtrack had resumed rail-grinding. The result was that in the months before Hatfield, the number of broken rails fell by 30 per cent.

Similarly, improvements in signalling led to a decrease in the number of signals passed at danger — or SPADs — which, at 600 in 2000, was lower than ever. This was happening in spite of an unprecedented growth in passenger numbers — 7 per cent a year after privatisation — which was putting more stress on the track and making signalling operations more complicated. British Rail had a good safety record, but this was achieved partly through anti-business methods: it ran the railways at under-capacity, pricing passengers off trains, because its functionaries found life easier that way.

In 1999 rail safety was going in the right direction, to the extent that one might have expected government to move quickly to restore confidence in rail travel. Instead, the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the Ladbroke Grove disaster, Alastair Campbell and John Prescott between them effectively did an Edwina Currie and fixed the public's mind so firmly against Railtrack that it made the chaos of the post-Hatfield era inevitable.

One of the compliments often paid to the Labour government is how skilled it is at capturing the public mood. This is not always a good thing. Here are the words of John Prescott in October 1999: 'The Ladbroke Grove junction crash touched the heart of the nation. It must be a watershed for rail safety.' Overlooking the fact that Ladbroke Grove is not a rail junction but a series of crossovers, it is clear what was in Prescott's mind: here was another Diana moment, another Dunblane moment, another chance to stir the emotions of a famously repressed nation. It was a bad misjudgment. Together with the hasty announcement that Railtrack was to be stripped of its safety role — implying fault even before the Health and Safety Executive had announced its preliminary findings — it gave the impression that henceforth no rail disaster would be tolerated. The railway was to become risk-free — or else.

When, a year later, an express train jumped the rails at Hatfield, it became politically impossible for Railtrack to do anything other than virtually to close down the rail system. The company imposed speed limits of 20mph on 81 sites, none of which, it turned out, had cracks anything like as bad as at Hatfield. When. last December, Tony Blair complained that some of Railtrack's speed restrictions might have been 'a little over the top', he did so seemingly oblivious to the possibility that pronouncements of his own ministers were responsible for making them so. It is a pattern that emerges over and over again with this government: when crisis strikes, it goes into weepy mode, trying to generate a national mood. Only when it is too late does it realise that a more balanced approach might have been desirable, at which point it seeks to pass the blame on to others; as with the Hatfield disaster, as with foot-and-mouth. On 28 February the then agriculture minister rushed through legislation to close all footpaths, and urged local authorities to prosecute transgressors, with no regard for what effect that might have on the tourist industry, which is vastly larger than livestock farming. Only later was the error spotted, whereupon others were blamed for closing the countryside: 'The countryside is not closed as some would have us believe,' Nick Brown feebly announced on 15 March.

There is a rational debate to be had on transport safety. Just how should the risks of speed and danger be balanced? How much money should be spent on the lives of rail passengers when far less is spent per head on saving the lives of road-users? What about the ten people wiped out every day of the year for want of adequate crash barriers, pavements or pedestrian crossings?

But it is not possible to have this debate when all discussion is conducted at an emotive level. At the Cullen inquiry last October, Railtrack's chief executive, Gerald Corbett, spent a day being challenged in detail over the responsibilities and failings of Railtrack, during which he explained the unsatisfactory nature of having to rely on maintenance contracts with outside firms. The company was intent on 'vertically integrating' its business, so that in future all maintenance would be in-house, countering the objection that relying on contractors was compromising safety. Yet that was not what caught the news bulletins: that honour was bestowed on a remark by Corbett that the striving for perfection in any aspect of a business — be it for safety or profit — was like a journey 'in which you never arrive at your destination'. 'It was totally insensitive because our loved ones did not complete their journeys,' wept the mother of one victim. 'It reduced two or three of us to tears.' It is not necessary to criticise her for what she said to make the point that in that kitsch media moment passed yet one more opportunity for reasoned discussion on the future of the railways.

Nothing has been quite so ridiculous in the past eight months as the mantra that Railtrack, along with every large privately owned business, operates on the principle of profit before safety. That a major rail accident would have a debilitating effect on Railtrack's profits was obvious without putting it to the test. Profit is as dependent on safety as it is upon speed and punctuality. And, conversely, safety ultimately relies on profit: something that will become rapidly apparent if private capital is forced to flee the railway business. If Railtrack does go down the tube, it will be the victim not so much of its own avowed failings, but of government-inspired hysteria.