Ministers have scrapped the decision to award the West Coast franchise to FirstGroup, saying the bidding process was and is flawed.



Ministers have said 'there are significant technical flaws' in the bidding process, and the bid will have to be totally rerun.



Two independant reviews have been ordered, one for what has gone wrong and one into the Depertment for Transport rail franchise programme.



Long and short of it is (as a man in the know) the government saw dollar signs and Branson knows what he's doing and caught them out. (keep your eyes peeled for corruption/politcians changing jobs in this area)



What I don't understand is that exactly the same thing happened with the East Coast a few years back and no one learned anything.



Morons, well done Branson, you're making the Government look stupid by just being open and honest.

Two things - one solution.



Thing 1. The threat of legal action and the re-running of the bid process is just going to cost the national purse more, on top of the billion quid a year subsidy the franchise already receives in order to ensure a return for shareholders.

Thing 2. This episode proves that if free-market capitalism doesn't work in your favour, just stamp your feet and threaten to sue.



The solution. Take back ownership of our railways.

But the threat of legal action is the ONLY thing that has prevented a [ifait accompli.[/i The re-run of the bid process will cost, sure, but I doubt Branson would agree to toss a coin for it.





Nope, both sides have lawyers available, you will get nowhere with a mere "threat to sue", it won't work unless you have a strongly arguable case.





Amen to that.

Absobloodylutely.

Really? Even people who work on the railways know that when they were private it was a joke. Virgin Trains rival Japan and Germany on punctuation, run at a profit and have 98% customer satisfaction.



Why would you want to change that?

To save public money. BR wasn't great, but the current situation is worse. It costs more for less. Billions go into the system from each and every one of us and it is lost to us. We won't see that again. At the very least, under a nationalised system every penny is accounted for and accountability - for faults and successes - is clear.

How much of that profit is in the form of public subsidy?

I use Virgin pretty regularly. The service is not bad – at least not now the works around Rugby have been completed – but the ticketing is a farce and the prices are frequently bonkers.



And yet, as with others, this is a subsidised service, whereby the taxpayer helps ensure company shareholders get their money. It's utterly absurd.



Run it as a public service and either reinvest profits or give them to the Exchequer.

Probably because we are paying through the nose to ensure the private companies that run the trains (and the utilities for that matter) [umake a profit[/u. I don't see how they provide value for tax-payer money.



The fact you need regulators to stop private industries exploiting what are in effect regional monopolies ought to tell you there are just some things that make sense to be publicly owned.



Think about what privatization has meant. Instead of one board of directors we have several companies who's senior staff all take high salaries. There is duplication like this all over the place. Each firm has its own legal, HR and other departments and so on. This all costs them money that they all pass onto us. There is no economy of scale.

Work on replacing the sewers has been taking place, throughout the summer, on a street around the corner from where I work.



Spotted there have been vans for engineering company Murphy. On the side of the vans, it proclaims: 'Murphy a partner of Optimise, working with Thames Water'.



The latter, when a publicly owned utility used to have its own engineers etc.



Now, it seems that for a job, you require three different, private companies, with – presumably – three sets of directors, three HR departments, three finances departments etc etc. And three sets of shareholders needing an annual payout.



And people wonder why the cost of their utility bills has risen so much.

The railways were in decline in every way before privitization, it had next to no public investment, cost the government £1,5 Billion per year, passenger levels were plummeting. Now the railways get £3 Billion per year from the companies, passenger numbers are on the increase every year, not to mention the massive affect it would have on the freight industry if the railways went private again.



I'm not saying franchising is perfect, far from it, but one company has started to make money, pay it back and get a good service, maybe they should be the template for what the industry should work from. And now they are working on a more transparent bidding process so that companies like First Group and National Express can't pull figures from thin air to achieve a contract they can't deliver on.

This happens in all spheres now. Local authorities though public bodies outsource just about everything to private companies. My wife works as a school secretary and over the years she has done the job more and more stuff has been outsourced and the council provides less and less direct support for schools such as maintenance, refuse collection and so on.



This requires less council staff so the wage bill drops and the council can point to how efficient they are. What they don't tell you is the huge amount of waste as in wasted money working this way results in. No one in the council has a real handle on the costs because they are spread across so many suppliers. The people in my wife's position now have to organize the work she would normally just have called the maintenance department to fix for example.



It is now down to the efforts of all the individual staff like my wife to ensure they are not being ripped off and get the best deal. My wife does do this as she comes from a public service background where councils spent money in a very guarded way but I know for a fact most people in her situation either don't give a toss or have not got the time to do it. It is far easier just to pay the invoice then chase incorrect amounts or whatever.



The end result is councils are cash cows for private companies and it costs us all more.