Labour to renationalise train operators with no compensation

Shadow transport secretary says Britain’s railways are ‘broken’ and party’s plan to fix them will ‘bring significant savings’

Labour will push ahead with the renationalisation of train operators, Louise Haigh, the shadow transport secretary, said on Wednesday.
She said the party plans to bring the railways into public ownership as private contracts expire, meaning operators would be in public ownership within five years. Because of the contracts expiring, the companies would not receive compensation.
Ms Haigh’s comments came as Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, prepared to launch a major drive to woo business.
In a speech to business leaders on Thursday, he will pledge to make them his “equal partner” in government, saying they deserve praise for “serving the national interest” and stressing that Labour is now the “party of business”.
Ms Haigh told GB News that Britain’s railways were “broken” and that Labour’s plan to fix them would “bring significant savings”.
She said: “I’ll be setting out our plans, actually in just two or three weeks’ time, which will demonstrate how we’ll save money and how that money will bring those operators into public ownership, all of them, within the first term of a Labour government.
“There’s absolutely no compensation provided to the operators.”
The plan was first conceived during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, and a spokesman for the party said: “Our position remains the same – we will bring railways into public ownership as core contracts expire.”
This week, rail passengers’ journeys have been marred by strikes as members of Aslef, the the train drivers’ union, walk out across 16 companies.
In his speech, Sir Keir will launch a five-point plan for business and pledge that Labour will “do the hard yards, roll up our sleeves and get underneath the bonnet to fix an unprecedented stagnation in British productivity growth”.
The speech, in central London, echoes Tony Blair’s attempts to woo business in the run-up to the 1997 election. It will be attended by 400 senior business leaders, including FTSE 100 chief executives from a range of companies, as well as 200 international investors and ambassadors.
Labour has said tickets for the event sold out in four hours and hundreds were on the waiting list to attend.
Sir Keir will say: “The depth of the changes we’ve made to transform the Labour Party’s relationship with business is something I take immense pride in. Your presence here is a testament to the changes we have made over the past four years.
“So all the hard work that has taken us to this point is a vindication and a recognition of that guiding belief. Not just that Labour could be the party of business but that Labour should be the party of business, and that now, four years on, Labour is the party of business.”
The Labour leader will set out plans for skills to drive growth, the need to partner with business to make work pay for working people, backing British business and creating the stable economic conditions required for delivering growth.
He will say they are “five steps we can take together to begin our walk towards a Britain with its future back”, adding: “You can’t overstate what the British people have been through in the past 14 years. It’s not just the permanent cycle of crisis – there is something much more fundamentally broken in the way this country creates wealth.”
Richard Walker, the executive chairman of Iceland supermarkets and a former Conservative Party member, will be among the business leaders in attendance.
Mohamed El-Erian, the former chief executive of bond giant PIMCO and the president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, said it was vital for Labour to get business on side.
He added: “It’s important because we are a market-based economy where the private sector does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting economic growth and employment. The government just doesn’t have the fiscal space to be a direct engine of growth.”