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Rail Privatisation
Railways - safe and sound?
The safety record is a complex one to judge. Travelling by train is still the safest way to travel. For the last 10 years for which statistics are available there were nearly six times as many deaths per billion passenger kilometres from car journeys as from rail. On the same basis there were 100 times more deaths from walking than travelling by train. In the year before and the year
after the Paddington crash (in which 31 people died) there were no deaths at all from train crashes.
However, are these statistics a fair way to judge? Probably not is the answer to that! To try to judge safety and privatisation we need to look at the number of accidents there have been.
Privatisation occurred in 1996 and in the year before privatisation there were 989 rail accidents. In the year after (1996/7) there were 1,285. This certainly does not seem a good record. The figure has come down to 1,164 in 1998/9 but this is still above the number before privatisation. If we look at the number of derailments there is a similar picture. In the year before
privatisation there were 104 derailments and in the year after (1996/7) there were 119. This fell in 1997/8 but has risen again in 1998/9, the latest year for which figures are available.
Looking at all this is would be tempting to say that safety has deteriorated since privatisation and that may be true, but how significant are the changes. There were major train crashes in the era of nationalisation and we cannot hark back to some sort of golden age before privatisation. However, perhaps we can expect more from privatised companies.
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