Fiddling the Books

When Railtrack - notionally, a privatised company - was declared bust, its assets [railway lines, signalling systems, many stations, masses of land etc] were seized and a new government agency called Network Rail carried on as Railtrack had done. Under the daft scheme of privatisation that was undertaken by the Major government, the infrastructure was [mostly] put under Railtrack/Network Rail while the train operating companies competed for franchises to run the trains on the Railtrack infrastructure.

In a crazier development, the government began to subsidise Railtrack [and continued with Network Rail] by giving them money to make improvements, and allowing them to borrow money for track maintenance, updating signals systems, making level crossings safer etc. They also began to subsidise some of the franchised train operating companies as well. These companies could run on a relatively slender capital investment, as the majority of the rolling-stock on the railways had been privatised separately to leasing companies that leased the trains to the operators. The leasing business was quite exclusive and was generally profitable; but where there was doubt as to whether the mass purchase of updated trains would be affordable to the leasing company or the operators, the government opened the taxpayers' assets yet again to pay for the new trains.

The net result is that the people [as a whole] are paying more, per capita, in real terms than they did under British Rail; for a service that is in some cases inferior to British Rail when it was strapped for cash.

A few years after the Railtrack debacle was ended - by the creation of Network Rail - some bureaucrat noticed that the growing debt ascribed on the books to Network Rail was in fact guaranteed by the government; that Network Rail was ultimately part of the state apparatus. So the Railtrack debt was aggregated with the national debt: which made the government's debt-reduction target even less attainable.

And now, suddenly, some other bureaucrat has noticed that housing associations are established as companies. So their aggregate debt [which has been accounted as part of the national debt] should be shunted off the government's books: and that is to be done.

The political importance of that decision is that the government is under huge criticism for the failure of 'the system' to address the dearth of 'affordable housing'. The housing association sector will now be pressured to borrow masses more money - at the prevailing low interest rates - to provide a partial solution to the housing crisis. If the bureaucracy had had the simple common sense to shunt the housing debt off the state's ledger seven years ago, when Osborne began to implement his austerity mania, thousands of homes could now be in use. Under the present regime, politics never offers the right response, even to the most obvious and urgent social issues.