Competition to provide better rail passenger services should warm up under draft rules voted in the European Parliament at the end of February. National authorities that give rail service contracts to a single operator would have to put them out to tender or justify not doing so. New and/or small operators would have to be given better access to rail infrastructure, and complex authorisation procedures for putting trains on tracks would be simplified. This vote confirms Parliament’s first reading position. When the Council has set out its own position, the two sides will negotiate the final wording of the rules.
To improve rail service quality and focus on tangible improvements for the passenger, a list of efficiency and service quality criteria should be set for public service contracts, say Parliament’s amendments, voted to draft common rules for awarding public service contracts in the rail passenger sector.
National authorities could tender out public service contracts or award contracts directly to a preferred rail operator, but the EU rules would set a maximum duration for such contracts and require the authorities to justify awarding them directly on efficiency criteria such as punctuality of services, cost-efficiency, frequency of train operations, and customer satisfaction, says Parliament.
Public service operators that are selected by the authorities should grant their staff working conditions that comply with binding national, regional or local social standards and/or rules for transfer of staff in the event of a change of operator. They would also have to comply with the relevant collective agreements and ensure decent employment and working conditions, adds the text.
The proposed rules also aim to create opportunities for new operators to provide services and to give all operators equal access to track infrastructure, while safeguarding the important role of public service contracts. Size limits on public service contracts, defined by setting a minimum number of contracts to be awarded in each member state according to traffic volume, should help smaller operators to compete for public contracts.
The vote of the European Parliament has generated a series of intense debates among the representatives of the European railway sector, some being for and some against the vote outcome. The amendments voted on the possibility to select the railway governance model for railway infrastructure managers have been by far those that have triggered the dissatisfaction and indignation of most railway market players. It is mainly about preserving the holding structure for railway governance. They showed that by adopting these amendments, the principles that should govern a free market and non-discriminatory access to railway infrastructure would no longer be considered.
Rail Freight Group is extremely disappointed that the European Parliament has rejected the Governance Section of the 4th Railway Package as approved by its Transport and Tourism Committee in December 2013.
The result is to allow the big incumbent railways to continue to behave in a monopolistic manner, in some way putting the clock back to before previous legislation, that allows financial flows between incumbent operators, infrastructure managers and holding companies, so that there may be a hidden subsidy to incumbent operators who can then compete unfairly with new entrants. It could allow an integration of infrastructure manager and incumbent train operator, as is planned in France, and it could allow one operator (the incumbent) to help finance the infrastructure manager and thereby get priority in paths allocation and perhaps charging.
Whereas the other parts of the 4th Railway Package will help bring in common standards and other benefits of interoperability, without a governance section which either requires total separation of infrastructure manager from all operators, or brings in strong Chinese walls to prevent hidden subsidies, transfers of staff or other bits of confidential information, the European rail network will not obtain the private sector investment that it desperately needs, because new entrants will continue to be rightly frightened of the ability of incumbents to kill or buy their business.
Share on:
