Rail Partners' report, Revitalising Rail: How private operators can accelerate recovery, sets out the successes of the public-private partnership between train operators and government as part of rail privatisation, and proposes how private operators could be best harnessed after the pandemic to support the railway's recovery.
Through commercial acumen and a focus on the customer, private sector operators delivered a doubling of passenger journeys, grew revenues at twice the rate of GDP, and overturned a £2 billion annual industry operating loss in the years between rail privatisation and the pandemic (1995-2019). In the context of post-pandemic recovery, the report also shows that operators with greater commercial freedom and stronger revenue incentives recovered revenue more quickly than operators without the same flexibilities.
