
James O'Brien 10am - 1pm
25 May 2025, 00:01 | Updated: 25 May 2025, 00:05
The transport secretary has said decades of “waste and bureaucracy” are ending on Britain’s railways, as the government's renationalisation programme begins with South Western Railway.
The SWR network, previously run by FirstGroup and MTR, is the first to come into public control under the changes - although the Department for Transport is already in charge of several other franchises as an "operator of last resort".
On a visit to a train depot in Bournemouth earlier this week, Heidi Alexander said: “I really do feel that this is a new dawn for our railways.
"We’re going to wave goodbye to 30 years worth of inefficiency, waste, passenger frustration, and we’re going to step really confidently towards a new future for the railways."
She added: “Of course, change isn’t going to happen overnight.
“We’ve always been clear that public ownership isn’t a silver bullet, but we are really firing this starting gun in that race for a truly 21st-century railway. That does mean refocusing away from private profit and towards the public good.”
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Ms Alexander said: “We will sweep away those decades of waste and bureaucracy, and we really, really will deliver great services for Britain’s travelling public."
From 1:59am BST on Sunday May 25, services operated under SWR will come under the control of the Department for Transport (DfT).
The DfT has said publicly owned services “will need to meet tough performance standards to be rebranded Great British Railways”.
These standards will cover factors such as punctuality, reliability and the experience of passengers.
Eyebrows were raised after it transpired that the first renationalised SWR service would be a rail replacement bus.
The next scheduled service after renationalisation was due to be the 2:27am service from Guildford to Waterloo - but this was cancelled.
The next service was the 5:36am train from Woking to London Waterloo, but due to engineering works, passengers would have to change onto a bus at Surbiton.
Ms Alexander is expected to travel on the first full train journey from London Waterloo, which will be the 6:14am train to Shepperton, Surrey.
SWR - which runs trains across large parts of southern England - will be the first of all other services run by private companies to be renationalised, as each of their individual contracts run out.
Renationalised services will be integrated into Great British Railways (GBR), a new public sector body that will also oversee rail infrastructure.
Legislation to enable the creation of GBR is expected to be introduced in Parliament later this year.
The next contract to expire is c2c in July - a service running between London and Essex. Greater Anglia will be renationalised on October 12.
The process is scheduled to be completed in late 2027, when the last relevant contract is due to expire.
The move to renationalise comes amid heightened criticism of private railway companies, as prices skyrocketed despite service cancellations, strikes and executive bonuses.
Rail strikes became a regular fixture of UK travel between 2022 and 2024, as pay disputes between unions and rail companies disrupted travel for millions of UK passengers.
Office of Rail and Road (ORR) figures show the equivalent of 4% of services in Britain were cancelled in the year to April 26. For SWR, the figure was 3%.
Amid this, the ORR recorded fare price raises of 5.0% in 2024, compared to a 4.3% increase in the Retail Price Index between March 2023 and March 2024.
Prices of off-peak tickets saw the biggest price increase in 2024, rising by 5.4%. The market share of off-peak tickets also increased during this period, taking up the majority of revenue share with 37%.
FirstGroup specifically came into criticism last year, after firm boss Graham Sutherland was awarded an £800,000 bonus on top of his £567,000 salary for hitting “diversity” targets.
This was despite 61,000 of the firm’s trains being fully or partially cancelled in the preceding year.