How to Fix Britain's Railways
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The next round of rail strikes look set to compound long-running problems with Britain's railways. But the problems on the network go far beyond this spate of industrial action. David Aaronvitch asks the experts in The Briefing Room this week the reasons why our rail network has acquired such a reputation for unreliability, and what can be done to put it right.
Contributors:
Christian Wolmar Mark Smith Jennifer Williams Gareth Dennis
Producers: Kirsteen Knight Ben Carter Daniel Gordon
Production Coordinators: Siobhan Reed Sophie Hill
Sound mix: Rod Farquhar
Editor: Richard Vadon
Image: Train timetable board Credit: Martin Pope via Getty
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.2 | I'm David Ronovich. Welcome to the briefing room. |
| 0:12.6 | You, me, top experts, plus 28 minutes, equals enlightenment on a big subject. |
| 0:19.2 | Today, strikes, delays, cancellations and high fares. |
| 0:23.6 | Just how bad are Britain's railways, really. |
| 0:26.8 | And what's the solution? |
| 0:28.2 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:36.7 | First, a stats blitz. Here with a numbers crunch is the briefing room's Ben Carter. Ben, |
| 0:43.0 | what do we know about the number of people using trains now compared to historically? |
| 0:48.4 | Well, David, there's a government website, the Office of Rail and Road, and it has a data portal. |
| 0:53.2 | And what it shows is that in the six years between 2014 and 2020, the Office of Rail and Road and it has a data portal. And what it shows is that in the six years between 2014 and 2020, |
| 0:58.0 | the numbers were really consistent. |
| 0:59.4 | You were seeing about 1.7 billion passenger journeys every year. |
| 1:03.6 | And these numbers are for financial years, so April through March. |
| 1:07.9 | At the end of 2020, COVID hit and the UK went into lockdown. And unsurprisingly, |
| 1:13.8 | the number of journeys plummeted. There were 400 million journeys in 2020, 2020, and that's roughly |
| 1:19.6 | a quarter of what would be expected. In 2021, 22, there were one billion journeys. And remember, |
| 1:27.2 | there were still some lockdown restrictions |
| 1:28.8 | in that year and a lot of businesses were still encouraging employees to work from home. |
| 1:33.9 | And what about the current year? We don't have the numbers for the whole of 2022, |
| 1:37.8 | 2020, but we do have the first two quarters and there were roughly 700 million journeys. |
| 1:43.8 | If we assumed the journey numbers |
... |
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