The readers' editor on… Britain's rail companies

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/jun/22/readers-editor-rail-companies-profits

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We British are curiously emotional about our railways; many of us are fondly nostalgic for a misremembered age of locomotives, luggage vans, restaurant cars and peak-capped porters. Their privatisation 20 years ago was viewed by some as a fat-cat seizure of a national asset, while others believed that private enterprise would free the underfunded railways to compete and improve. Whatever we may feel, they are never far from the headlines, as we saw last week when Virgin won the contract to continue to run the West Coast mainline, and the prime minister announced that China would help to build new high-speed lines.

John Major's privatisation in 1993, something that even Margaret Thatcher refused to contemplate, was hugely controversial, with the Paddington and Hatfield disasters just a few years later seeming to confirm the worst fears of the policy's opponents: big profits would be made at the expense of passenger safety and fares would rise but services diminish.

Today, the profits are still there (and executive bonuses) but there is no denying the expansion in services (up 25% since 1997) and the rapid increase in passenger numbers to 1.6 billion – more than double the number of journeys made in 1994. And the rail companies would point out that they are returning more money to government for reinvestment every year.

Given the huge amount of negative press the rail industry has experienced down the years, it is hardly surprising that it is sensitive to coverage. The industry's umbrella organisation, the inelegantly named Rail Delivery Group, is concerned the Observer has been unfair to it on a number of occasions recently: in an article about where Labour's thinking should be before the general election (27 April); a front-page news report on a call for the railways to be brought under state control from 30 Labour prospective parliamentary candidates (4 May); and a letter about rail from the Centre for Policy Studies' Tony Lodge on 11 May.

"Throughout this period your paper neither contacted us (nor it would seem anyone else in the railway) nor featured either of two letters we sent in response. The RDG believes you should have sought to achieve some balance by either including a quote from the railway in the news coverage or run a letter from the industry."

The article on Labour policy was forthright: "The system of franchising rail services to private companies has not proved either popular or good value for passengers. Rail fares have soared and many private operators have creamed off healthy profits. Money made by the private sector has been extracted from the network and ended up in the pockets of shareholders, rather than being reinvested in deficient national infrastructure."

In their unpublished letters, the RDG replied: "Your coverage never mentioned that successive governments instructed train companies annually to set above-inflation average increases in commuter fares from 2004 to last year. Nor that when this government decided to hold the increases in line with inflation this year, we applauded the move.

"You claimed that the private sector has been extracting money from the network and passing this on to shareholders rather than reinvesting, and the parliamentary candidates' letter accused operators of walking away with large profits. Yet operating margins are on average around 3% and dwarfed by the 300% increase over 15 years in money that train operations have returned to government to reinvest in services."

The Labour policy article compared German and French nationalised railways favourably with Britain's and the story on calls for state control reported that the publicly run East Coast line showed how to run better rail services in this country.

"Nowhere did you report that our railway is now safer than any major network on the continent, nor that growth here has far outstripped that in Germany or France," said the RDG. "Nor did you cite the independent rail regulator who spelt out last month that franchises have different costs and these cannot be used to draw conclusions about the financial performance of different operators. Your newspaper's handling of the subject over the past few weeks does not strike us as contributing to an open and honest debate."

I tend to agree. Newspapers must be free to pursue a vigorous line of argument but that doesn't exonerate them from the obligation to be fair. Our editorial code is clear: "The more serious the criticism or allegations we are reporting the greater the obligation to allow the subject the opportunity to respond."

reader@observer.co.uk