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The UK’s independent rail regulator has rejected three applications to run recent industrial private sector services along Britain’s West Coast, including from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, but said it was not bowing to government pressure to show them down.
On Thursday the Office of Rail and Road said it had refused bids by Virgin, FirstGroup and a consortium backed by train builder Alstom to launch recent trains on the West Coast predominant line linking London to cities including Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow, due to insufficient capability.
Virgin had been hoping to return to the UK rail network by launching recent services, including from London to Manchester and Liverpool Lime Street, while FirstGroup had planned to run a direct London to Rochdale train.
However the regulator rejected the “open-access” applications on the grounds there was insufficient capability on the southern section of the highly congested path to accommodate them.
The three applications and a series of others still into account became a subject of intense controversy last week when a senior Department for Transport official wrote to the ORR pressuring it to reject most of the open-access applications it was considering.
Open-access operators run as purely industrial operations but must prove there may be enough capability for his or her plans. They have to also prove they’ll not take revenue from operations running under government-awarded franchises — currently a combination of public sector and personal sector firms.
The UK’s existing open-access operators — Hull Trains, Lumo and Grand Central — will proceed after the present nationalisation of franchised services is accomplished. Other operations even have approval and are planning to begin, while a series of applications on routes apart from the West Coast predominant line stays into account.
The DfT had argued that, if the ORR approved all of the open-access applications still before it, it might cost franchised train operators an unacceptable £229mn in revenue as passengers selected open-access services over franchised ones.
The ORR statement made it clear it had ignored the DfT’s pressure in rejecting the applications. “Within the case of those three applications, lack of capability and the anticipated impact on performance alone meant we couldn’t approve them,” its statement said. “As such, our duty to have regard to the funds available to the secretary of state was not relevant to this decision.”
The pressure from Whitehall comes after the federal government said earlier this yr it was against the majority of the applications by private operators to launch services that run alongside the publicly owned predominant passenger rail network.
Most past open-access applications on the UK’s crowded rail network have been turned down either due to capability constraints or because they’d duplicate franchised services.
Virgin called the choice a “blow for consumer selection and competition”, while FirstGroup said it was “dissatisfied” on the ORR’s decision and that it might proceed to explore possibilities on the route involved. Alstom’s operation, WSMR, said it was “extremely dissatisfied”.