UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns

Posted on by Vaseline

The article that got the guy fired is (1) apparently. If you search for “Gareth Dennis” – honestly his criticisms seem pretty mild.

My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it’s good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.

I’m surprised this guy got fired – in the rail network I know, they’d have addressed his concerns by adding even more posters and announcements.

(1) https://web.archive.org/web/20240414153709/https://www.indep…

Euston is a special case. The lack of training/concern (depending on your level of cynicism) of ticket validity of the barrier staff isn’t unique (Paddington had this problem too), but the unique problem is the way the operator (network rail) do not announce platforms until the last minute leading to stampedes to the barriers.

The announcements are just there to sell more noise cancelling headphones in the on-station shops.

They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.

When they announce the platform there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.

It’s a hard problem to solve in the short term.

> there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.

I’m someone who used to frequently catch the last train north to Birmingham on a Saturday night (9:40pm), and it was usually full and so some people were without a seat. Of course we all rushed to try to get a seat. IMHO, it’s foolishness to think people would do otherwise in that situation – after all who wants to stand for over an hour and a half when you’ve paid over £30 for the ticket?

Tried building that. Price escalated, partly due to nimby pressure, partly due to inability for the U.K. to run large projects.

Now most of it has been cancelled and the benefits will be minimal.

Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform before it’s “sanctioned for the public to be informed about it”.

And no, there isn’t always time to stroll to the train, I’ve seen some really, really late announcements. Couple this with very large countdown timers that they actually added recently to each platform and you can see exactly why people feel stressed and rush.

> They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.

The alternative is forcing them all to wait in the same cramped concourse area (with most space lost to retail units). During disruption, it gets genuinely difficult to move through this area. It has felt unpleasant in normal use for a while, but when there are cancellations and delays it feels positively dangerous. I am not exaggerating when I say that it feels very much like it’s only a matter of time before something happens and someone gets crushed or trampled.

There’s none of this nonsense at some other London termini, and Birmingham New Street manages to let people wait on the platforms. Why can’t Euston?

When there’s a little delay you often find that a trian leaving at say :30 will be advertised at :26 with big warnings about platforms closing 2 minutes early, so everyone panics and 400 people try to get to platform 4 in 120 seconds, which is of course impossible.

> Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform…

And for anyone who isn’t in the know, that’s Realtime Trains(1). It isn’t correct 100% of the time; it uses the public record of train movements (TRUST) to predict which platform a train will arrive at, but is prevented by National Rail Enquiries from using the live status and delay data which official departure boards show (Darwin). That means that if the platform is changed at the last minute it is not certain that Realtime Trains will be able to detect the change.

(1): https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/

Curiously, I’ve had the exact same problem when I was in Britain. At Heathrow Airport. They would not announce which gate flights leave from until ~20 minutes before boarding.

Considering there’s no ‘crush risk’ in this scenario, what even is the point of it? In the end I just used any of the myriad of online sites that list flight data to know which gate I needed to head to 1.5 hours before everyone else, and got to enjoy some peace and quiet.

Unlike Euston, Kings Cross was extensively renovated for the 2012 olympics, which by the standards of UK rail stations is a very recent upgrade.

They seem to have built it with enough capacity that they can announce platforms at the last minute and send everyone scurrying without causing any great danger.

Kings Cross is a mess of different systems, especially as the whole Kings Cross/ St Pancras complex rather than solely Kings Cross (which is only a dozen platforms). The low numbered Kings Cross platforms (zero through seven) are all accessed via a sideways entrance gate line, which is not good at all and you’d clearly never do that unless there’s no economic alternative.

Oh absolutely. The underground bit is a total maze. Crossings on all the nearby roads are a nightmare. Nowhere near enough seating.

But that gate line you mention has loads of ticket barriers – there’s zero crush risk.

Yeah, no. So, at Christmas I was actually going to visit my mother. Kings Cross had advanced weather notice so they’d gone to a contigency plan, wall off that “loads of ticket barriers” (actually nowhere close to enough) with movable fencing and put staff behind the fences to allow in only those who were immediately travelling.

As I arrived, they announced that due to a tree falling on the line all service from those platforms was cancelled, no trains predicted for over an hour. My train, due to leave in about half an hour, was now delayed “indefinitely” supposedly.

But I’ve seen this movie before, I didn’t go far. Sure enough, as I was loitering near a food stand 10-15 minutes later they announced that “no trains” had a single exception, my train was in fact running exactly as scheduled.

So I went to that “loads of barriers” and of course there’s an enormous crowd just stood there, motionless, because they aren’t able to process anything except that they are at a train station and they aren’t being allowed to board a train, so they’re just stood there next to these handful of barriers. I try to fight my way through the crowd, but it’s too far and after about five minutes the staff announce that oh, actually there’s another of these non-existent trains going somewhere else now, we’re boarding that train and the one has now left.

About an hour later, with the station continuing to announce both that there are no trains and service hasn’t resumed, and yet periodically that in fact each of the scheduled trains has (miraculously?) arrived anyway on time and is scheduled to depart on schedule contrary to the message they’ve also read out, this time I am standing near the front of that huge crowd and can force my way through to board the next train to my destination.

I’m sure they’ve promised themselves there’s “zero crush risk” because they’ve screened off the barriers. “Yup, nobody was crushed against the barriers. Good work senior management team”

> The announcements are just there to sell more noise cancelling headphones in the on-station shops.

This is a good—albeit shameless—business model. They could probably do the same thing in San Francisco’s MUNI stations.

The T line just opened and I’m already sick of hearing the “transfer here” message eight goddamn times when my train passes Powell Station. It plays in four languages each time, once when Powell is the next station and again at Powell itself. Sounds like they made them part of the “station name” audio itself based on the way they are cued.

The transfer information is at least in line with why there’s a voice over system in the first place: giving useful actionable information to the blind in line with ADA requirements.

But it does not need to be in four languages, nor should there ever be a single message played back that isn’t exactly the stop information and maybe some transfer information. Every single other message from “please stand clear of the doors” to “sexual harassment sucks, don’t do it” doesn’t need to be in there.

Interesting, “the Office of Rail and Road … issued Network Rail with an improvement notice”

For the benefit of readers not versed with UK regulation, an improvement notice is a formal instrument under the powers of the Health and Safety Executive. Whilst short of a prosecution notice, it definitely indicates that the powers that be are Officially Not Happy with, in this case, Network Rail.

>Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it’s good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.

I don’t think there is a shred of evidence that being bombarded with neurotic fretting improves safety – here in the states this is usually recognized as limitation of liability. Juries will accept “we warned you,” as a counterbalance to their universal tendency to want to side with the little guy against the giant corporation.

Well, it could be liability related.

But, falls are basically the only way people get injured at DC’s Metro so it seems to make sense to have significant signage about that. I’d have to imagine there’s nothing unique about DC so it’s probably the same story for the UK.

“96% of the customer injuries were related to slips and falls within rail
stations, and about 52% of those were on escalators.” (1). The stat for employees was 40% with being struck by an object in #2 at 25%.

(1): https://wmata.com/about/calendar/events/upload/3A-Metro-s-Sa…

I work in transportation safety, primarily aviation but we also support WMATA. We usually define barriers which prevent, control, or mitigate an accident or undesired state (0). Safety systems often require warning signage. Anecdotally, I find that regulators, companies, etc. use signage or safety bulletins than active barriers (0) because they are cheaper and quicker to implement. Even when they implement something like, say, abrasive floor treatments (1), that is only one barrier and likely imperceptible to the public.

Warning signage may be helpful, but I am skeptical of its effectiveness (especially as implemented). For example, “ice-warning signs do not have a statistically significant impact on the frequency or severity of vehicular accidents that involve ice.” (2)

(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own.)

(0) https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/solutions/enablon/bowtie/ex…

(1) https://www.nata.aero/data/files/webinar_documents/preventin…

(2) https://doi.org/10.1016/S0001-4575(00)00020-8

I’m not sure being reminded not to slip would reduce my likelihood of slipping.

Seems like things like making sure floor transitions are mild, adequate drainage, textured floors would be more effective. (polished stone and concrete are a nightmare with some shoes that I own in wet weather).

I genuinely don’t see the harm of these things – I often think the issue is that lots of measures improve safety at the margins (e.g. if someone is drunk and stumbling down the stairs this announcement might help them) rather than on average. That is: many safety features will produce limited tangible benefit to the average person most of the time, but they do reduce accidents which normally happen at the tail end of the distribution in more extreme circumstances.

Banner blindness. If 95% of safety signage is banal and useless to most people, then most people will simply stop paying attention to signage.

Putting up a sign is not a free action!

I saw myself doing this in realtime when visiting California for the first time. The initial shock of seeing signs that warned of cancer causing chemicals in buildings quickly faded when I realised they were on every building – soon becoming as blind to them as the locals.

To be honest this is a general problem with the UK. Try driving on any major street and you’ll realize it’s plastered with mostly useless signs. A dozen warnings assault your senses at any one time, which makes it very difficult to pick out what is actually important. This is compounded by sometimes completely braindead implementation of rules. E.g. most bus lanes in London can be used by motorcyclists, but some cannot. There’s no rhyme or reason, the entire thing is decided by a small blue sign at the start of a particular stretch which may or may not have an even smaller motorbike icon on it – among an icon for a bus, taxi and pushbike. Whoever thought this is a good idea is either a moron or deliberately wanted to extract fines from motorcyclists who accidentally use the wrong bus lane.

> To be honest this is a general problem with the UK

Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated “doors closing” / “doors opening” announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.

Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries … or maybe they don’t, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.

Blind person here, I find the “doors closing” / “doors opening” announcements pretty tiresome, and I don’t think they provide any benefit to us.

They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn’t an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can’t keep up when there’s a lot of traffic. I’ve seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.

The “lift (elevator) going up / down” announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.

(speaking as a person who isn’t blind) The biggest omission seems to be that there is nothing to tell you what floor you’ve arrived at. This is probably fine for an empty elevator but as soon as it gets busy and there are 10s of floors I’d imagine it gets hard to navigate.

> Try driving on any major street and you’ll realize it’s plastered with mostly useless signs

This is not in line with my personal experience. Can you provide some examples of useless signs on typical roads in the UK?

The “tunnel ahead” sign always struck me as particularly pointless. Who needs that sign? Surely if you’re driving towards a tunnel, the enormous tunnel itself is the indication you need that you’re heading towards a tunnel?

Honourable mentions for “humps ahead”.

We have these in the US too because we have a ton of Semi’s and big rigs. They can get stuck. Usually the signs include the clearance too, like 12’8″.

There’s some funny videos online of trucks getting a haircut from these. So seems necessary to me.

Those are for truck drivers and those carrying dangerous goods
The Blackwall Tunnel in London has those signs starting something like ten miles south (ie on the edge of the city!), to try an ensure such vehicles don’t reach the tunnel unwittingly and force it to be closed.

I’m sorry, but UK is positively devoid of road signs compared to some other countries lol, I’ve been driving here for well over a decade and it’s really nice how few signs are here and it mostly relies on common sense.

Compare to your average road in Poland:

https://motofakty.pl/co-5-metrow-znak/ar/c4-16143839

67 road signs on a 360 metre long stretch of road – and to me, what’s shown in the picture is very typical, especially in big cities. There are soooo many signs it’s close to impossible to read all of them and still look at the road.

At a society level, ads are paid for with the opportunity cost of other things that people could be thinking about, e.g. cancer-curing drugs. We can therefore say that ads cause cancer.

Both are at the cost of a generally more tranquil and quiet environment. I would take the most boring, crack-filled and grayest concrete wall over someone else’s messaging whether it is paid for or the agency’s own propaganda.

One of the reasons that people like many tourist destinations is that many tourist destinations forbid most outdoor advertising. It’s subtle, probably many tourists don’t even realize it, but it changes the entire feel of a place.

> I genuinely don’t see the harm of these things (..) they do reduce accidents

It would be good to see actual data backing up this hypothesis.

The cynic in me says another equally plausible hypothesis would be that this is entirely about the owner/operator/landlord avoiding any legal responsibility for accidents than actually reducing the number of accidents.

My mother had a job coming up with such warnings. She was a ‘home safety technician’ for the local council, advising people not to fall off ladders and the like. It seems to work like there are statistics that so many people end up in hospital after falling of a ladder or whatever and the council thinks we must fix this, we’ll hire someone to educate the public. The odd poster probably doesn’t make much difference to the number of people falling but it was quite an easy and entertaining job for my mum.

it’s not so much “harmful” as it is a symptom of and also reinforcing a society mentality of immature and infantile irresponsibility. but one might also argue it is harming visual and acoustic silence by constantly announcing something and hanging signs everywhere.

Judging by the graph on the linked page, the UK’s rail network is mostly safer due to a lower number of workplace accidents. A cynic might suggest that that’s correlated with a lack of maintenance :-).However I do also believe that the UK takes workplace accidents more serious than some other European countries.

Getting passenger fatalities down is mainly achieved by not letting your trains crash, and keeping an eye on the platform-train interface. Copious announcements about how to safely walk around a railway station probably only make a minor difference.

You’re talking about railway lines and stations with ad-hoc upgrades that are as much as 200 years old (yes). Most of the network is comfortably over 100 years old and trains were slower, and frankly, people were less mollycoddled.

But, with regards to the article, he’s 100% correct, Euston is dangerous. And it’s currently one of the worst central London stations for things going wrong. It’s pretty much every other week at the moment. London Bridge used to be as bad with overcrowding until they rebuilt most of it.

Then again, Euston was supposed to be redeveloped for HS2, and that’s been kicked into the long grass, even though all the hard work has been done. I don’t think there’s anyone truly as stupid as the UK government.

Those accidents can be life changing, and often cause delays to services or dangerous levels of congestion during rush hour. I also suspect TfL are motivated to reduce liability – if they can show on CCTV somebody walking past a sign saying to take care, and then not taking care, TfL’s coffers (i.e. the public’s, it’s not a private profit making entity), can be protected a little more from egregious legal claims.

But then trains highly overcrowded so in the case of another Greyrigg the death and injury toll would be far higher.

But affording to a train company there is “no upper limit on the number of passengers in a given train carriage”. I did point out that the laws of physics, and basic human physiology would refute that assertion.

So, maybe safety theatre rather than patronising levels of safety.

The UK rail network is in the unhappy position of getting sued whenever someone gets hurt, however stupid they’re being. I think there was a case where some youths cut through the fencing around a depot, climbed on a train and got killed by the overhead wire – and then Network Rail got fined for not having a more vandal-proof fence or something like that.

Sure, but the “See it, say it, sorted” announcement is played over and over ad nauseam on the train; it’s not just a sign. It’s the national rail equivalent of “mind the gap” on the tube, which is also said over and over again. In the case of the tube it makes a little more sense since the ridership is changing significantly at every stop. But on a 4+ hour ride up to Edinburgh, it is pretty redundant to make the announcement every minute or so.

“Mind the gap” announcements used to exist only where there was a huge gap on curved platforms. These locations still use the authoritative, male voice.

Playing the woman’s voice version at every station started about 15 years ago.

Oh it’s absurd. When I grew up in Britain we used to joke about America and how they had a sign on everything but the U.K. is now 10x worse. The endless announcements. The sign language video on every single timetable screen (Why? can deaf people not read? How do they navigate the 99.9999% of the world that lacks such screens? Can’t their iPhone help?). It’s madness.

My favourite is how the classic “mind the gap” (worthy as some of those gaps were quite big and it varies from station to station) has been replaced with “mind the gap between the train and the platform” as if some people are too stupid to know where the gap is? (And no sign language videos for that, so presumably it’s a slaughterhouse for the hard of hearing!).

And what is the “it” that we’re supposed to be seeing and spotting anyway? Maybe they could solve that problem instead.

I believe the purpose of these safety warnings is more about mitigating liability for accidents rather than any true concern for traveller’s well being.

Exactly. See Sidney Dekker’s Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. The posters do (almost) nothing — other than covering the backside of those who put them up, and doing safety theatre. Looks good, does nothing for safety.

The same author, Sidney Dekker, has a very good book about how to deal with someone like this whistleblower. It’s called “Just Culture”. Well worth a read. Spolier: It’s not to silence them, not this way. You can silence the person by, you know, actually doing something useful. But that requires actual change, and more importantly, a change in attitude. And you need to convince the crowds that you are doing better by NOT putting up posters. You’ll be surprised how many people really think the posters help.

>My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it’s good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.

Everything wrong with the UK today can be summarized as society going from “Mind the gap” to this insanity.

I agree that the announcements are annoying, but isn’t this an overly emotional response? UK railways are extremely safe (as shown in the following link that someone else already posted here), and the annoying announcements might just be one of the less appealing aspects of an overall safety culture which is working as designed. I certainly don’t see any connection between annoying announcements and any of the real problems facing the UK at present. E.g. what do they have to do with the housing crisis, or the social care crisis, or …?

https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat…

The annoying announcements are due to very a real problem facing the U.K. – what do you think the “it” is that we’re supposed to be spotting? It’s not a herd of unicorns.

In the comments here I read a lot about if this is whistleblowing or not, or if disciplinary measures are warranted for an employee “badmouthing” an employer’s client while not having an official mandate to speak in public, while mostly ignoring the threats made by a government official.

This is exactly the problem why the world sucks so hard.

The engineer, certainly knowledgeable in this field, made a measured public remark, which could have saved lives. He has done nothing wrong, because he didn’t claim to speak on behalf of his employer, and has the right to speak his mind as a person. In public, and with a lot of reach.

The government official, however, applied unconstitutional pressure to get the engineer fired and threatened his employer to lose business. Humanly very low and damaging to future public rail infrastructure, if a capable company is not allowed to provide services anymore and therefore most likely to increase prices through diminished competition.

If anyone should lose their job over this matter, it clearly should be the UK rail minister.

Ah that’s an interesting revelation. But yeah totally unsurprising really, he’s very good at talking in plain, accessible English about rail-related matters that might otherwise cause people to glaze over and ignore. And it’s not like he’s ever been a shit-stirrer either – in the interview in question he was pretty reasonable. It’s just that this guy Lord Hendy has taken a dislike to NR being called out and started a little vendetta against Dennis.

What’s great about this is that instead of covering up the issue, Henry’s behaviour has caused it to blow up and become way more visible. I certainly hadn’t heard about any of this until reading OP.

True, but it’s kind of a shame we’re dependent on those emails being leaked. If they hadn’t been then it’d be Dennis’ claim that someone in the government pressured his employer to get him sacked. Which doesn’t hold a great deal of weight and could easily be dismissed by a government keen to cover its ass.

What aspect of the UK’s nebulous “constitution” do you claim was violated here? (Or are you just reflexively/thoughtlessly saying “unconstitutional” because it would be a First Amendment violation in the USA?)

Well, the UK doesn’t have a constitution, so technically you’re correct in mentioning that, but it should also be said that something like this happening in Europe is beyond shocking. It sounds like an April’s fool joke. But isn’t.

I suspect the minister may be an ex-minister soon, alright; it’s not a good look, and he’s only been in the job a month or so, so replacing wouldn’t be a huge deal.

> he’s only been in the job a month or so, so replacing wouldn’t be a huge deal

He’s way, way than more than just some guy who has been rail minister for a month, he’s one of the most respected, perhaps the most respected transport executive in Britain(at least until yesterday). He’s not an elected politician, he has worked professionally in rail transportation since 1975.

For 10 years he was Chief Executive of Transport for London which runs all public transport in London.
Following that, for the past 10 years he was and still is Chairman of Network Rail, the organisation which is responsible for the entire British Railway Network. It’s in this capacity that he sent the letter, not as a minister.

Unless this turns into some huge scandal, which seems unlikely, he’ll be fine.

> it clearly should be the UK rail minister.

Absolutely. He’s guilty of precisely what he complains about. He suggests that this engineer is implicating the “safety of Network Rail” whereas he’s just implicating the safety of a _single decision_.

Instead of reacting to a single statement the minister has decided to implicate his entire job. Which is madness. He should be deeply ashamed of how he abused his position, and quite frankly, for his inability to accept and react appropriately to criticism.

A giant baby if I’ve ever seen one.

Except it’s not government related action.

This is what a current official did prior to him becoming the minister while an executive of a rail company.

So the analysis and the discussion below all stem from a faulty premise

In countries that actually have a strong constitution—the US is the primary example though I hope others exist—the Constitution itself is the supreme law of the land and is, by design, difficult to amend. When legislatures pass laws that exceed the bounds of the Constitution, the courts strike down those laws as null and void.

In that sense, Britain does not have a constitution. Obviously it has a constitution in some sense, because there is always some set of laws, norms, traditions, and historical precedents that constitute the basis of government. But this is a much weaker sense of the term. For instance, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was a “constitutional” law that supposedly made it impossible to call a snap election, but a snap election was nonetheless called in 2019 via the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, which only required a simple majority because it had equivalent authority to the FTPA itself.

> Well, that’s not actually in the US constitution.

It’s a rather simple application of the premises that (a) the Constitution supersedes other statutory laws and (b) the courts have jurisdiction over disputes about the application of the law.

No, in that sense the UK does not have an American-style constitution – no more, no less. It is not accidental that Parliament can reverse any decision taken by an earlier Parliament: in fact it is one of the most important parts of the constitution that no Parliament can take a decision which binds a later one. It is different from the American design, yes, but the way in which the American constitution is used does not seem praiseworthy, not does it suggest that it would be wise to copy it.

The Bill of Rights begins with the words, “Congress shall make no law…” before enumerating some of the basic human rights that Congress is constitutionally prohibited from infringing. I think it is highly praiseworthy indeed that, unlike Parliament, Congress is constitutionally prevented from infringing on basic human rights. It is also highly praiseworthy that, unlike Parliament, Congress is constitutionally prevented from forming a kangaroo court to sentence the head of state to death or from subsequently installing a military dictatorship (which is the exact historical precedent whence parliamentary supremacy was established).

I’m not sure the US is currently a particularly great advertisment for its model of constitutional government. In place of acts of Parliament that have a relatively clear interpretation (and that can be undone or modified by elected representatives), there is legislative deadlock and an endless series of judicial séances attempting to determine whether or not Ben Franklin would have supported gay marriage, abortion rights and concealed carry of MANPADS if he’d been born 300 years later.

Laws are loosely written to effectively apply to anything and are interpreted by the courts. Sentences are subjectively and unevenly applied depending on the ‘circumstances’ of the offender.

> Laws are loosely written to effectively apply to anything and are interpreted by the courts.

This is called “English common law” and it is a feature American law shares with many other English-speaking countries.

So now we need a council of Europe referendum?

As you know human rights existed long before somebody decided to sign away our interpretation of them to a foreign body.

Weird how the right to liberty and security doesn’t apply to native populations.

If you’re trying to compare Britain unfavourably to the US with this comment then that doesn’t really hold up.

People are sacked all the time in the US for bringing their employer into disrepute, and it doesn’t even matter whether they actually did or not, since the employer doesn’t have to give a reason anyway.

What? That’s a clause with almost every UK contract I’ve ever signed. The US constitution doesn’t touch on employment rights.

Id also point out that the UK is generally an extremely poor country, living standards for the majority are low, income is extremely low after taxes, especially compared to the states.

Britain compares itself unfavourably to the US on almost every metric that matters.

The same as an American citizen, then. That piece of paper locked up in the national archives (or wherever) didn’t come running, armed with a gun, to save the life of George Floyd or anyone else.

There is a basis in UK law for freedom of speech (most recently, Article 10 of the Human Rights act). It’s true that protections for free speech are not as extensive in the UK as they are in the US, but the US is the outlier in that case. Very few countries have free speech protections as strong as the First Amendment.

Which must be tosh, you can literally go to prison for years here for stating facts. What if some day somebody takes offence to 2+2=4? The guy who says 2+2=4 goes to jail for years whilst rapists and murders get away with 6 months or suspended sentences. But don’t mention that, or else!

Even self defence is a dubious right here.

The UK laws elaborate on what is and isn’t free speech, while the US law basically just says “there shall be free speech (as far as Congress is concerned. Other parties can do whatever they like to stifle speech)”

UK law is extremely loosely defined. Judges are ultimately responsible for its interpretation, which they do relatively literally – so as long as the police and CPS bring a case there’s a good chance you’ve fallen foul of the law, subjectively – which is how they are written. E.g malicious communications act.

The US constitution is even more loosely defined if you exclude the outcome of hundreds of years of judicial interpretations of it. Hence the endless disagreements over what is or isn’t constitutional.

This guy will get 1 years salary as compensation after winning an unfair dismissal case, and then he will never work in rail again. He’ll have to pay much of those winnings back to his legal team.

Over his life, he will almost certainly earn less.

Shouldn’t have spoken out. Had he kept quiet, a crush would have happened, a few people would have been pushed off a platform and died under a train, and it would be a “tragedy” – but he’d get to keep his livelihood.

See Roger Boisjoly, an engineer at Morton Thiokol who tried to blow the whistle on design flaws in the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters before the Challenger disaster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly

> Boisjoly sent a memo describing the problem to his managers, but was apparently ignored.(8) Following several further memos, a task force was convened to investigate the matter, but after a month Boisjoly realized that the task force had no power, no resources, and no management support. In late 1985, Boisjoly advised his managers that if the problem was not fixed, there was a distinct chance that a shuttle mission would end in disaster. No action was taken.

> After President Ronald Reagan ordered a presidential commission to review the disaster, Boisjoly was one of the witnesses called. He gave accounts of how and why he felt the O-rings had failed, and argued that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, was an “unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation.”

> According to Boisjoly, Thiokol unassigned him from space work, and he was ostracized by his colleagues and managers.

I get the point you’re trying to make here, and the sarcastic undertone, but I’d have issues living with myself if people died because of something that I was able to identify and that was preventable, and I did nothing.

The whole case strikes me as odd. Not only did the higher ups know about the problem, they also left a paper trail about keeping a lid on it and getting rid of the guy. This opens them up to a lot of scenarios, like:

– As demonstrated by this case, the information came out because of the wrongful termination

– If an accident had happened there’s a fairly high chance that the investigators would uncover it, either because the engineer in question came forward or because they think they should have known about this, and cracks appear when they start asking questions.

An unspoken rule in a lot of fields is that you make sure that this kind of information never reaches the people that could be held liable for it. The people that are likely to be held responsible at least have to make it appear that they’re not trying to suppress information like this. You quickly lose that ability if you actively try to get rid of people that tries to raise an issue. So they surround themselves with middle management that knows to not bring things up to them, without being explicitly told so.

The point is that there are many people sleeping fine or not, that kept their livelihood by not whistleblowing. solely due to the misaligned incentives and lack of accountability

The maximum unfair dismissal compensatory award (in the UK) is £105,707. Imagine if the maximum you had to pay if you stole from or defrauded your employer was £100k …

The legislation tends to protect the paper entity ‘the corporation’ rather than the living breathing human.

> He’ll have to pay much of those winnings back to his legal team.

I’m not sure about the UK, but in the USA, most lawyers would take this case speculatively and they would charge 30% of the winnings. It’s an amount calibrated to just barely be acceptable but it typically isn’t as bad as you suggest.

His “speaking out” achieved nothing getting him on TV.

He’s no whistleblower with inside information. His engineering role is to design track geometry and nothing to do with stations or passengers so he has no professional authority to speak on the subject beyond that of an ordinary rail passenger.

The problems at Euston are well known and obvious to anyone who uses the station.

In fact, the UK rail safety regulator issued an improvement notice with legal force requiring the operator to take steps to change the situation: https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/rail-regulator-requires-c…

> The problems at Euston are well known and obvious to anyone who uses the station

Then you should be ashamed to even try to impune his credentials and say he had no “” professional authority”” to comment on the safety issue. What the fuck!

Yeah, I mean, why even become an engineer? Why work in safety? Let’s rubber-stamp everything the manager says it’s good. It must be good, they said it! Think about your words the next time you or a relative or a friend is hurt or dies in a preventable accident. Thank god you’re not an engineer.

Being forced from your home and into moving abroad and into a new career might work out for him, but it’s still seems like a lot of unnecessary turmoil for him and and his familybecause he chose to do the right thing.

This is going to surprise you, but having more money enables you to spend more of your finite lifespan working on your own initiatives/goals in life (whether they are financially rewarding or not) without needing to persuade someone wealthier than you that they want what you want and are willing to pay to do it.

I believe there is a non zero probability that you(awareness) are eternal and what you do in this life has consequences in subsequent lives.

It’s okay for you to disagree. That’s just my belief system.

Ah well I guess I don’t understand the relevance of that. Even if you for example have infinite time, doesn’t it still make sense a person might be motivated to attain wealth in order to give themselves more freedom in how they spend their life w/o needing to consider affording the survival needs?

Sorry. I was talking about this example where the person choose to risk a financial loss in favor of performing a more virtuous act for the society. He prefered to live a life with integrity over money.

People whose job is managing and not understanding issues does not want to deal with issues, it’s in their interest to always give the impression of everything working smoothly, that’s why engineering driven companies fail the moment that managerial people takes over.

Executives and managers do actually contribute useful things to large-enough firms. But the failure mode of engineer-driven companies is Juicero; the failure mode of MBA-driven firms is killing people for profit (lying in order to sell poison to third-world mothers, sending death squads after labor organizers, lowering passenger airliner quality until they start falling out of the sky, etc.).

> But the failure mode of engineer-driven companies is Juicero; the failure mode of MBA-driven firms is killing people for profit.

This is one to hang on the wall as an office poster!

I wouldn’t call Juicero engineering driven. More over-engineering driven. Similar to software developers creating hyper scalable microservice architectures for even the most trivial systems. True engineering is to understand the requirements and creating an efficient solution for those, not just throwing every possible technology at the project.

Lots of people with engineering degrees and backgrounds hold very senior positions at large companies and happily make short term, profit driven, decisions every day. Unless you want to play a game of “no TRUE engineer” I don’t think it would make a huge difference.

The UK is full of stuff, built by Victorian engineers. Quite a lot of it is still working. Some of it is quite beautiful. I doubt anything built by private equity backed companies will still be working in 100 years.

This is very true. Just look at Intel: people frequently complain that the company isn’t “engineering-driven” any more, but back when I worked there, it was led by Craig Barrett, an engineer. It was a disaster: under him, they adopted the terrible P4 Netburst architecture that was married to the patented, proprietary, and very expensive RAMBUS memory. And that was just one of many terrible decisions in that era. Don’t forget Itanic.

I don’t know about your tastes, but personally (as an individual contributor) the idea of classic manager work (dealing with vacations, perf reviews, hiring, firing, etc) are extremely unappealing to me.

Good engineers don’t have the neccesariy personality traits to climb over corpses of others to get into upper management. So those who end up in upper management are always the worst sociopaths who only know how to play the politics game as their main goal is just climbing the ladder, not developing good products/services. Exceptions do exist (Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, etc) but that’s why they are the exceptions.

I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name “good” CEOs or “good” celebrities. Lots of skeletons come out later. I don’t like to put people on a pedestal, especially those we don’t know intimately well.

> I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name “good” CEOs or “good” celebrities

Good CEOs are good at being CEOs. That doesn’t mean that they’re good people.

Steve Jobs was pretty famously an a-hole, and did a number of morally questionable things.

But he also took Apple from the verge of bankrupcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world.

OJ Simpson was a fantastic football player. And he murdered (my opinion) Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

It’s OK to acknowledge that some people are good at one thing and are also terrible in other ways.

Funnily enough that’s also often the issue with engineers – good at technical things but not so good elsewhere. There’s a reason we all have different jobs.

>Funnily enough that’s also often the issue with engineers – good at technical things but not so good elsewhere.

Exactly. There’s plenty of examples of people we consider great engineers in history. Does it matter that some of them may have been terrible marriage partners? When we’re discussing their engineering accomplishments, no. When we’re talking about someone as a great scientist, engineer, business leader, etc., we’re not also claiming that they’re literally a saint. Of course they have flaws in other parts of their lives; everyone does.

That’s a vast overgeneralization. Sometimes instead of being sociopath the opposite is needed: the so-called emotional intelligence and knowing where the wind blows from so that you can act accordingly. I good example is Mira Murati whom I definitely wouldn’t call a sociopath and instead is very flexible in her position, something that would be quite painful for many engineers (at least the ones I know).

Hope that doesn’t come back to bite him, I’m sure if he mentioned it in one of his streams any one of us in the community would’ve happily updated the page.

His brother’s a Baron. Of course this class fails upwards. Only the poor plebs will pay the price while those in power award each other CBEs and ignore warnings from the working class about impending disaster. See also the post office injustice and the Grenfell Tower fire.

Thanks, I’ll check it out. One of my friends and his brothers all left Russia (before the recent war) because of the corruption. The most depressing part of his stories is how apathetic most people are and how there is so little hope for change there.

Lol, there’s even more classy things about him on there:

> During 2014, Hendy reportedly spent over £1,200 in taxpayer-provided money on lunches and dinners, including on one occasion more than £90 in alcohol.

And that despite a 650k salary – as if he couldn’t afford to get wasted on his own. What a disgrace.

And us plebs are still massively subsiding the food and drink of UK MPs and Lords. As well as paying their rent and loads of other expenses, on top of a pretty decent salary. Why should they get drunk at tax payers expense? Funny how austerity always affects the poorest, but doesn’t touch the politicians.

There’s rarely a “right” way to whistleblow. Most of the official channels in any bureaucracy exist to both sound nice and simultaneously sweep everything under the rug

Yes: it takes an extraordinary amount of cultural back-pressure to counter out the tendency to protect the organizational hierarchy. This can be slightly better in the public sector when laws require disclosure but it’s usually still too easy to obscure matters or, especially, rely on complex organizational structures and outsourcing to diffuse responsibility to the point that it’s hard to hold any one person accountable.

It’s notable here that he didn’t engage as a representative of the company, but more as an “engineering writer”, probably after the newspaper reached out for comment.

But yes, not exactly a fan of people this senior sticking their nose in misconduct matters, but also, if you’re employed by a company, you probably shouldn’t badmouth their clients in the national papers and not be aware that’s risky. It’s not exactly whistleblowing.

Raising safety issues is part of a senior engineer’s duties (or any engineer, really).

Since railways through Europe are a state monopoly, it’s not like there are tons of people in the industry that do not work for said ‘client’. Who is supposed to pull the alarm in this case? No One? That’s how you end up with Boeing-adjacent engineering.

> railways through Europe are a state monopoly

The situation is much more stupid than that: there’s a set of “private” companies, some of which are substantially owned by states and some are not, all of which are quasi-monopolies.

Maybe, but it was already public knowledge:

> In September 2023 the government regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), had issued an improvement notice to Network Rail about overcrowding at the station, warning: “You have failed to implement, so far as reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station.”

It’s concerning to me that Hendy was the chair of Network Rail from 2015 before becoming Transport Minister, and here he is sacking someone after a comment about his former workplace. Should definitely be an investigation into his motives/incentives IMO

Well, when I was in Euston rail station a few weeks ago, it was very overcrowded. It seemed worse in the day than the night.
Seems like the minister is missing the necessity of acting with integrity and transparency, a lesson they frequently need reminding of. Surely there must be better person the PM could find for the job, that don’t feel a need write harassing letters, bullying train companies into firing staff?

but do “correct internal channels” exist, are accessible by the people people in raising concerns (especially potentially anonymously) and are not ignored?

because most times they aren’t really usable if they even exist

and raising concerns on such channels can often get you in as much trouble as doing so publicly — but without you concerns being pretty much guaranteed ignored

I personally find this information frightening… we are now in a world where management no longer even listens to its engineers or technical experts when they warn of serious dangers. Obviously everyone thinks of Boeing, and today it’s “only” a train station, but imagine if the same culture developed in an industrial chemical plant or a nuclear power station?

Where do you go? What do you do? Unless you have an Engineer Association or an Union to back you up, you are doomed to be crushed by your upper management and beyond…

You are correct, he’s also been a guest on “Well There’s Your Problem” (an engineering disasters podcast/channel) and TRASHFUTURE (UK tech/politics podcast) a few times.

This really sets the government up for failure. The next time there’s a tragedy on our rail system the question I’m going to ask is “Would this have happened if the person in charge took safety concerns seriously”. This just makes Hendy’s position totally untenable.

Starmers promise of very similar policies to the Tories, but operated more competently playing out.

On the other hand he doesn’t handle bad press well, let’s see how this goes.

This occurred before Labour took office – Hendy was the chair of Network Rail at the time. However as Starmer appointed him Transport Minister it’ll be interesting to see what he does. I think it’ll just be swept aside and ignored because they’re too focussed on Austerity 2.0

You’d hope so but Starmer’s a bit weird – seems to want to look like he’s in charge (suspending the seven who voted against the government on the 2 child cap) so it wouldn’t surprise me if he tries to brush it off and do nothing. The papers are largely all still with him and I haven’t seen this story getting picked up outside Politico so it’s possible they’ll just agree to spike it and move on :-/

Worth noting the story here has subtly that the headline cannot accurately capture. For one I wouldn’t say this is about raising safety concerns or whistle-blowing, it’s about how the employer views employees talking to the media.

The engineer in question was sacked for stating ‘You’re talking about thousands of people squished into that space. It’s not just uncomfortable, it’s not just unpleasant, it’s unsafe.’ in a media interview (see https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/euston-trains-stati… looks like the unsafe part of that quote made the headline).

Here he was just amplifying already public information that the Office of Rail and Road had raised concerns and issued an improvement notice (which is reference in the article before he is quoted). I guess they hadn’t actually declared it ‘unsafe’ though.

I think it is reasonable for employers to require employees don’t go making negative comments in the media, though that is tempered by the public interest in raising the profile of safety concerns. Perhaps here the engineer felt no-one was taking the improvement notice seriously and needed more incentive to do so? Could also be he felt he wasn’t trying to cause any upset at all and was simply stating what was already public known.

It does feel here that the minister that triggered the sacking was just being thin-skinned. He saw a newspaper headline that angered him and sought to take it out on someone. Perhaps some disciplinary action was warranted (maybe improvements were indeed underway and the engineer shouldn’t go causing extra needless public alarm) but sacking him looks to be a big overreaction.

In this case it’s a little more than just an employer/employee relationship. It’s the head of a non-departmental government body (at the time Hendy lead Network Rail, he’s now Minister for Transport) threatening to not award contracts to a railway services provider unless they terminate an employee who voiced safety concerns publicly. Notably these concerns were shared by the Office of Rail and Road (i.e. … the government).

A “non-departmental government body” – more usually known in the press as a “quango” or “quasi-autonomous non-government body”, because we cannot make up our mind in the UK about what things are part of the “government” and which are not. 🙂

The other point worth raising is that the employee has stated on Twitter that he had a media agreement with his employer that allowed him to speak independently (presumably because he runs a YouTube channel, as per the comments elsewhere on this thread).

Out of interest, what would the right resolution have been to reduce the risk of a crush due to overcrowding? Close the station entrance when at capacity?

London Underground does close access to platforms when they are at capacity.

The station itself is probably running the maximum number of trains possible. The plan for increasing throughput northwards is HS2, which the previous government put on hold.

My understanding is that the crush risk at Euston is entirely an operational issue of Network Rail’s making (NR being the station facility owner), by deliberately not announcing platforms until the last moment, causing passengers to run to the platform en masse. If platforms were announced earlier, the crush risk would be seriously mitigated.

The obvious next question is whether platforms _can_ be announced earlier – to which the answer is, as I understand it, yes. The platforms are known about much further in advance and the reason for the delay appears to be a combination of intransigence by Euston management and a lack of sufficient ticket gateline staff by the train operators.

They do close the station entrance at Euston with some regularity when trains are not running (which happens annoyingly often because of the parlous state of the railways).

For a full long distance train pausing between two multi-hour trips it’s reasonable.

5 Minutes for disembarking, 10 minutes cleaning, 10 minutes for boarding and you have 25 minutes platform occupancy. But on top of that the tracks will be blocked by the train going in and out for a few extra minutes, you need to find a slot on the line itself, and you need to allow for disruption.

It’s all very inefficient in terms of occupying scarce and inelastic inner-city track capacity, so modern practice is to build through stations if at all possible and send trains off to sidings to be cleaned, but that wasn’t practical 100 years ago.

Platforms != distinct rail lines. Now, if only there were plans to run a new national, let’s say high speed, rail link from the North of England into Euston which would improve this capacity …

The capacity limit is the number of tracks. There are 4 AC and 2 DC tracks on the line out of Euston and they are also used for freight trains as well as the Bakerloo line.

There were plans to expand Euston, then the Tories cancelled those plans and sold off the land that was acquired to accommodate said plans to make sure it wouldn’t ever happen in the future (by this point they were already collapsing in popularity and clearly going to lose the election).

Both solutions would take months/years to implement.

“More trains” mean they need to radically improve service/repairs and/or purchase of new trains.

“Expand the station” would mean that they would have to shut down all-of or large-parts of it while works take place. I remember being impacted of the London Bridge train station de-spaghetti-fying the tracks. I moved out of the area I was living so eventually I was impacted for only 4-5 months.

I will not touch the matter of costs.

London bridge tracks untangled is so much better for throughput – I remember so many long waits as a Brighton train blocked the whole station crossing the tracks.

One surprising good thing the gov did at that time was insist on the rebuild of the station itself, it was particularly grim, and just a mess.

I’ve lived nearby the whole time and the new station is a nice space, generally efficient with good throughput for the trains.

I’m pessimistic, but really hoping they don’t stick with plans to build a too small terminus in London for HS1, not too optimistic as we have Rachael Reeves as a continuity austerity Chancellor – lets see.

> plans to build a too small terminus in London for HS1

You’re talking about HS2 and Old Oak Common, right? Yeah that’s a peculiar choice of terminus

One of the reasons I’m against nationalisation, is that when the government contracts out services to the private sector it hold them to a high standard — and regulates in lots of saftey/etc. conditions.

When the gov runs services there’s a massive conflict of interest in regulating them properly: its embarrassing for the gov, there’s no accountability for profitability/sustainable-use-of-resources/etc.

So whilst centrist (and center-left on some matters), I’m largely in favour of a gov which runs via contracted services with significant regulation and oversight.

Lots of cover-up stories have come out recently which show that political control over key services undermines their accountability, not improves it.

You are not from Britain (or Europe), no?

Privatisation of the rail in UK is a nightmare, the government is not holding the private sector to a high standard at all. High profit and High standard are barely compatible, I’m not sure they are even good examples in the world.

That statistic always gets used but it hides a lot of other macro trends and context. In North Irland you will see a grath that look the same without privatization.

Also lots of things that came together by privatization had been developed at BritishRail.

And anyway, it was only really private in the slights way. After just a few years networkrail had to be created. This was hugely costly and the infrastructure during the private time degraded.

After that the government had even more diect control over routes and timetables then they had under BritishRail.

Having the services themselves being run by private companies isnt all that interesting. The can only really innovate on underpaying employes and some user experiance.

And to get this part to be private, you have to have a whole army of lawyer on both sides. And then again between the service companies and the train rental companies.

The user experiance gain is completly negated by having a system that is so much harder to use in general. Every company with their own branding. Changing all the time when provider change.

Harder to do proper ticket integration and so on and so on.

Not to mention that during that period almost no new fleets were ordered so the majority of UK train manufacturing is gone. And the one that still there makes subpar trains that don’t compte with the trains from France, Germany and Switzerland.

In summation, I would say privatisation didnt really save the UK much money, arguebly it cost them money.

And now privatisation is done anyway because all the franchises are simply controlled by the government anyway.

Allowing BritishRail to continue to develop into something like the Swiss SBB would have been much better for Britain.

Comming from Switzerland travling by train in Britain felt like time travling to an earlier age. There is some fancy knew stuff on the most important routes. But travling the country side in 40 year old trains and stopping at stations that look like nature was in the process of consuming them.

In Switzerland is expensive, but you get something for money. In England its expensive and so much worse in so many dimensions.

The pressure and bullying to achieve Japan’s train promptness sometimes kills hundreds of people, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment

> Drivers for JR West face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, “dayshift education”), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash. This program consisted of severe verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Many experts saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as punishment and psychological torture, not retraining

A 19 year old example doesn’t seem great, surely things can change in 20 years.

Also that derailment was truly caused by surpassing the speed limit, which shouldn’t even be possible (even more so today). Enforcing a speed limit by block is trivial. Which it looks like is what they did after.

Japan has a very different culture and a very different way to organize and finance everything. If you want yo copy their system you cant just cherry pick a single aspect and just assume it gone work the same way.

Yes, I’m from the UK.

1. Compare and contrast the privately run phase of rail service with the public version before the early 90s. It was low-use by the public and in a decrepit state.

2. The form privatisation took in the UK kept the most expensive, old, difficult to maintain etc. parts of the rail networks under public control. You saw what happened (HS2) when that public control was actually used to improve the infrastructure.

… We’ll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies, and whether you think you’ll get what you want. I doubt it.

With 1) you’re comparing apples to oranges and you’re still wrong. The turnaround in rail use in the UK began in the 1980s before the private train operating companies got involved. And if you’re referring to the network itself being in “a decrepit state” before and now being improved to the point where it can sustain higher capacities … well you can thank Network Rail for that (note: not a private company). The TOCs are headed for nationalisation anyway, leaving the ROSCOs as the big privatisation “success” (in that they’ve extracted enormous profits while not exactly contributing anything particularly novel).

What we saw with HS2 is a large (and frankly completely necessary) engineering project getting fucked around with and repeatedly chopped down until it no longer satisfied its original plan (providing greater capacity for both local and national services by providing a new North-South line that happened to be “high-speed”) and became exactly what those wielding the axe that killed it accused it of (“just a way for some to get to London slightly faster”).

> We’ll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies

Good rail outcomes were obviously impossible under a Tory government regardless of how the control worked, but they might be possible under a Labour government. We’ll have to see.

The current state of the UK water industry doesn’t seem to support this theory. Privatisation has only lead to water companies like Thames Water taking on unsustainable debt while paying out billions in dividends, underinvesting in infrastructure, and polluting like crazy. Now they are demanding permission from the regulator to massively hike prices, because the foreign investment funds that own them are apparently unwilling to countenance the idea of losing any money on their investments.

Infrastructure like public transport and utilities are not, and never will be, functional markets, and regulation is always captured or ineffective in the long term. Privatisation is only a method to let financial markets pillage public goods.

Sure, I believe these dividend policies used to be illegal.

I would certainly make it illegal to do share buybacks, and to issue dividends on credit.

Privitisation doesnt really work with the private equity model that has been developed over the last decade, ie., buy a biz on credit and raid its resources.

But i think it’s easier to get these laws passed than require a politican investigate resource waste, bad service, etc. in services they are responsible for. The UK gov is structured to disable accountability at every level — that’s a much harder fix.

The private sector pumps sewage into UK rivers while paying billions in dividends to their global investors.

Then when the government tries to reign them back in the excuse is their company is “neither financeable nor investible” without customers footing the bill. No shit, it was loaded with debt and money syphoned out of it for 30 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/28/tha…

Exactly the same happens with private train companies in the UK, though hopefully not for long.

Sure, and what would happen if the gov ran the system? It’s a 300bn fix. The only difference would be that you wouldnt know about it.

Thankfully MPs are incentivised to publish this stuff against private companies.

Well “the gov” does run the system in Scotland. Scottish Water, which didn’t suffer privatisation, ticks over nicely – providing high quality service at low cost and reinvesting any profits.

You’re inventing a hypothetical nightmare scenario while ignoring a very real and positive one because it’s inconvenient for your “privatisation = good” argument.

How would the government be able to hide that? There is oversight of the Treasury by the OBR and there is more than one political party in the UK, opposition MPs happily point out all the failures of the party in power.

My view is that it is easy to accuse government services of being dysfunctional because there is far MORE transparency than for private companies. Bankrupting a water company can happen in plain sight by a private company because money that was supposed to be used to, you know, build a functioning sewage system is fed through a maze of offshore accounts for years.

> when the government contracts out services to the private sector it hold them to a high standard

PPE Medpro?

The fundamental problem with this kind of neoliberalism is that if you don’t trust government to manage something directly, then outsourcing it doesn’t help, because the management oversight still has to be done, but now it happens indirectly.

It only works if you can have an actual market with actual market forces. What tends to get built is a “fake” market, where instead of individual service users picking their preference you get a tendering process. The rail tendering process is a fake market: the trains are owned by ROSCOs (banks), the rails are owned by the state (Network rail) because the private operator skimped on safety then collapsed, and the TOCs transfer all their staff through TUPE every time the franchise changes. All that changes is the livery.

Specifying through contract is a lot less efficient than direct management (see Coase, theory of the firm). This is why Tube privatization failed; they got up to hundreds of thousands of pages of contract before realizing it wasn’t going to work.

Not really true. National Rail, which owns the tracks is a quango, not a private company. The actual train operators are truly privately owned but it is important to understand that they are not privately making any major strategic decisions about the network, just maintaining the rolling stock and providing staff; their routes, times, prices, and profits are mostly set by the state (with some narrow room for discretion) and not by the private sector.

Much better answer than mine. Also worth mentioning they don’t even own the rolling stock – that’s the ROSCOs and tbh that’s probably where the profit is to be made.

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