Big Graeme wrote:
Decades of under investment take time to unravel and they don't unravel by cutting budgets.
Those stats me nothing BTW they just give the Mail and Express something to be outraged about.
They do mean something. They mean people are being ripped off by over paid managements that are perhaps wasting money by negotiating poor deals with major contractors.
Take are local station for example. They have wasted a fortune on it whilst doing nothing to improve the running of the railways and turning the station into an identkit version of an inner city station.
Daft things they have done include:
- putting up a waiting room then demolishing to make way for a new footbridge
- the old station building has a ble plaque commemorating an award for sypmathetic refurbishment. What do NR do? Build a modern steel and glass monstronsity on the side of it with atomated barriers. The operating company then pays two people to stand there. Same on the other side of the tracks. Daft things the barrier building close after evening rush hour. There is no point in them. An absolute waste of money. They don't stop fare dodgers as they are not 24/7. In any event it would be cheaper to have ticket collectors on more trains.
I could go on but cannot be bothered.
The point being huge public subsidy and huge fares do not neceassarily equate to better service. It often just means more wasteful expenditure in this country.
We have this daft, wasteful political narrative that people like you buy into that "years of under investment" mean we need to chuuck cash at things and then "years of profligacy by Labour" mean we need to slash expenditure. As ever, where politicians get involved things just become a mess. RBS is the latest example.
