The transport secretary has announced the first three rail operators to be renationalised. Heidi Alexander said "in May next year South Western Railway will transfer over, in July C2C and then it will be followed by Greater Anglia Services in the autumn of next year". She added that, "we need to turn the page and ensure that we've got a railway that's fit for the 21st Century". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00We're announcing the three train operating companies that are going to come into public
00:04ownership next year. We passed the legislation as a priority, as a new government, so that
00:09we could take these train operating companies into public ownership. And so in May of next
00:15year, South Western Railway will transfer over in July, C2C, and then it will be followed
00:21by Greater Anglia Services in the autumn of next year.
00:25In the budget, the Chancellor announced that fares next year will go up by 4.6%. That's
00:32the lowest absolute increase for three years. We have to make sure that we've got enough
00:39money to run the services that people want, because if you strip back your service provision
00:46so far, then people won't be able to get a train when they want to get it, to where they
00:51want to get it. And then you enter into this death spiral where people think, I'm going
00:54to give up on the train altogether. And so it's really important that we ensure we can
01:01run the services that we need to be running, so that we can get more people using our railway,
01:07because it's a really sustainable and a good way to travel.
01:10And we've inherited a very difficult financial situation. When we came into government back
01:17in July, we inherited a £22 billion black hole. There was massive in-year overspending
01:26by government. We didn't anticipate that level of overspending that we would need to correct.
01:32And so we can't do all the things that we want to do straight away, and the Chancellor's
01:37had to take some difficult decisions. But what I think we need to ensure is that if
01:43we're asking people to pay a bit more on their train fares, that they get a really good quality
01:47service. And what we've seen over the last three decades with the private train operating
01:51companies is that they've presided over delays, cancellation, timetable chaos, waste, inefficiency.
02:01So we can't carry on the way we have been, and we need to turn the page and ensure that
02:06we've got a railway that's fit for the 21st century.