Top secret bids are drawn up by people divorced from the experiences of train staff and passengers

The fundamental problem with franchise bids is that they are written and drawn up by people who don't know what actually happens on UK railways.

Very few people, outside a select group of civil servants, politicians, consultants and railway employees (yes, they do even get railway employees involved in franchise bidding), ever get to see the process. Bid teams are locked away in secret offices, far from the realities of the day to day running of the railway, with everything under lock and key and about a million passwords lest the top secret information from one multinational corporation's bid fall into the hands of another (although for multinational corporation increasingly read European state-owned railway).

Little has been done to address the problem, despite the focus on the UK franchising process recently - with last year's West Coast franchising fiasco and First Group initially winning the bid only to find out later that the whole process had been a complete shambles from start to finish. This forced the whole programme to grind to a halt, and was only restarted following the Laidlaw Report and the Brown Report. Both of which, in effect, merely said: 'Carry on!'.

Bid teams understand little of the day-to-day experience of arguably two of our most important stakeholders: the frontline staff and the passengers. Trains get dirty, don't get repainted, get patch-and-mend repairs, and all because the frontline staff responsible for service delivery are told 'we can't spend any money in the last years of the franchise – wait until the new franchise'.

Always a promise of jam tomorrow, but it's the frontline staff and passengers that suffer not the consultants on exorbitant fees.

Yes, the franchise bid process allows companies to be creative - to go away and do some 'blue sky thinking' and come up with bold proposals for how the nation's railways may be run differently.

But when so much is micro-managed by the Department for Transport (a fact well known by everybody bar the Department itself, which continues to claim, straight-faced, that operators have complete freedom to do what they like), it's impossible for companies such as Stagecoach or Arriva to truly be creative. All this ends up doing is dragging senior managers away from the day job of actually running the railway.

After over 15 years of franchising, I've not seen anything that convinces me that it is a viable way to run a railway system, particularly when the concession system run by TfL and Merseytravel, with London Overground and Merseyrail respectively, has been seen as a huge success. We are the only country in the world to run our railways using this crazy franchising system, and the political dogma which drives the government to keep it in place perpetuates.

The author works for one of Britain's major transport companies.

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