Member

The practical consequences are concrete enough. A single employer removes duplicated management structures and the costs that arise whenever one company must contract with another to do something that could be done internally. It makes the movement of staff between routes easier, and it makes movement through an integrated career structure built into the system. That is what produces flexibility in the useful sense: being able to move people and knowledge to where they are needed. A structure that retains or proliferates subsidiary companies does the opposite: it reproduces inside the public sector the boundaries that privatisation created, with the transaction costs and demarcation arguments that go with them. Having gone to the trouble of ending fragmentation in the ownership of the railway, it would be an odd result to preserve it in the employment of the people who operate it.