Haigh: We won’t shut ticket offices or cut jobs – or nationalise water

Labour has pledged to protect ticket offices and staff if elected to power, as part of its planned radical overhaul of the rail network.

Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh unveiled the party’s proposals to bring Britain’s railways back into public ownership on Thursday at an event at Trainline HQ in central London. She vowed to  crack down on delays and make the service better value for money for passengers.

She said that the overhaul, the “biggest in a generation”, would work to address the root causes of the “deepening crisis” in the rail network, with Labour’s “fully-costed” plans ensuring services are reliable, affordable, efficient, safe and accessible.

Under Labour’s plans, private operators will be brought into public ownership as contracts expire, with Great British Railways (GBR) controlling the nation’s railways in the interest of passengers. Haigh said that those operations would be folded into GBR “well within the first term” of a Labour government.

While people will say “same old Labour”, neither passengers nor taxpayers can afford for the current arrangements to continue, she added.

Haigh explained she would serve as “passenger-in-chief”, setting the strategy and objectives for the new state-owned operator and holding it to account.

She also promised to deliver simplified fares and ticketing, with a “best fare guarantee” across the rail network, as well as resetting industrial relations following a series of strikes under the Conservative government.

“Labour will take a consciously different approach: we will see our workforce as an asset, rather than a liability. We will work with them – and where there are disagreements, we will get around the table and work them out.”

When asked to guarantee no ticket offices would close at a launch event at Trainline’s HQ in Holborn, Haigh said Labour had “absolutely no plans to close or change staffing levels”.

The shadow cabinet member played down the idea of public ownership of water too.

While Labour has committed to nationalise the nation’s rail network by taking contracts in-house when they expire, Haigh said that nationalising water would cost the taxpayer “billions” because there is a different settlement with firms.

She said: “In a constrained fiscal environment, we don’t think that’s immediately the right priority.”

She instead highlighted Labour’s plans for “tough” regulation, legislation and the threat of criminal sanctions, tackling sewage and ensuring firms pay for infrastructure upgrades.

Despite the plans to implement nationalisation over the course of the first term of a Labour government, Haigh said she believes that Labour could enact basic improvements to services “from day one” and said customers would start to see changes “very early on” in Labour’s time in power.

While Haigh said she could not set out plans to lower fares, she did say Labour would simplify tickets for passengers to make them “more accessible, more transparent and more trustworthy”.

“Passengers have to contend with a dizzying array of different types of tickets and fares, which means they simply don’t trust they are getting the best value for the journey,” she said.

“We will deliver a best fare guarantee so they can always trust they are getting the lowest fare for their journey, just as people currently experience with Transport for London when they tap in and tap out of the system.”

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