Decarbonising rural transport
A Backbench Business Committee debate on decarbonising rural transport is scheduled to be held on 7 March 2023 at 9:30am in Westminster Hall. The debate that will be opened by Selaine Saxby MP.

This briefing provides an overview of the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, the Government's White Paper on rail reform, and some of the key challenges ahead for the railway in Great Britain, along with an explanation of the arrangements the Government has put in place to ensure services continued to run during the Covid-19 pandemic. This briefing also provides an overview of the current system and how the railway in Great Britain has been structured over the last 30 years.
The future of rail (666 KB , PDF)
The Government’s Rail white paper, the Williams-Shapps plan for rail, presents “the biggest shake up” of the sector in over 30 years.
Following privatisation in 1993, British Rail – a publicly owned company responsible for running the railway – was divided into over 100 separate companies. The private sector became responsible for buying and leasing trains (rolling stock companies), running passenger and freight services (train operating companies and freight operating companies) and managing the infrastructure. The then Conservative Government’s privatisation of the railway in Great Britain was unprecedented. The Transport Select Committee at the time outlined that no other country with a comparable railway was even considering the degree of changes proposed within the Railways Bill.
Privatisation introduced greater private sector involvement and competition into the rail industry. Franchising, the commercial model by which private operators took over responsibility for running passenger services, coincided with a significant growth in passenger numbers. However, these reforms also introduced extra complexity.
Responsibility and accountability for the running of the railway is split between a range of different bodies, often operating with different incentives. For example:
Since privatisation, successive governments have attempted to redress the fragmentation that exists within the rail industry by bringing responsibility for track and train (namely responsibility for managing the infrastructure and running services) closer together.
The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail was published in May 2021 and sets out the Government’s plans for altering the management of railways in Great Britain. In a statement to Parliament, the Transport Secretary described the Plan as “the biggest shake up in three decades, bringing the railway together under a single national leadership, with one overwhelming aim: to deliver for passengers”.
The Plan proposes:
In the Queen’s Speech in May 2022, the Government announced its plans to bring forward a Transport Bill, which will include the legislative changes needed to implement the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail. In June 2022, the Government began to consult on its proposed legislative changes. The Government is analysing the feedback from this consultation, which ran until 4 August 2022.
The number of people using the railways during the first year of pandemic fell dramatically to its lowest levels since 1872. Over the course of 2020-21, just 388 million journeys were made on Great Britain’s railway (equivalent to 22.3% of the journeys made in 2019-20), compared to 1.7billion journeys the year before.
With fewer people using the railways during the pandemic, passenger revenue decreased. According to the Office of Rail and Road, passenger revenue totalled £1.9 billion in 2020-21 (just 18.3% of the £10.4 billion generated in 2019-20).
While the pandemic has presented significant challenges for the rail sector it has also provided the Government with an opportunity to speed up the delivery of its reform agenda. For example, emergency contracts were introduced to keep services running. These contracts are now being used as a stepping-stone from franchising towards the new commercial model outlined in the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.
Official statistics show passenger number have yet to return to pre-Covid levels, but have risen to a high of 95%. When the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail published, the Government acknowledged that the rise of homeworking and online shopping over the pandemic means that the sector now faces deep, possibly permanent, structural change in some of its key markets. However, in the context of the UK Government’s 2050 net zero target and its plans to decarbonise transport, rail has been identified as having a significant role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport.
The future of rail (666 KB , PDF)
A Backbench Business Committee debate on decarbonising rural transport is scheduled to be held on 7 March 2023 at 9:30am in Westminster Hall. The debate that will be opened by Selaine Saxby MP.
A Westminster Hall debate is scheduled for 24 January 2023 at 9.30am on the 'Restoring Your Railway' Fund. The debate will be opened by Kevin Foster MP.
There will be a Westminster Hall debate on rail transport services to the communities served by the West Coast Main Line on 15 December 2022. The debate will be opened by Virginia Crosbie MP.