Over the past decade, the growth of passenger traffic by rail has been insufficient to increase its modal share in comparison to road and air transport. The 6% modal share of passenger transport for rail in the European Union has remained fairly stable. Rail passenger transport services have not kept pace with other modes of transport in terms of availability, price and quality. Considering this, it is necessary to analyse all the practices in the approach adopted by the Union during the last three railway reforms.
“In order to ensure high quality services to passengers, achieving at the same time the objectives of the public passenger transport policy, free access rights should be respected and coordinated, inter alia, by mandatory procedures for the award of public service contracts”, shows the legislative text adopted by the European Parliament related to the liberalisation of the domestic railway passenger transport market.
“To ensure sound financing to meet the objectives of public transport plans, competent authorities need to design public service obligations to attain public transport objectives in a cost-effective manner taking account of the compensation for the net financial effect of those obligations and they need to ensure long-term financial sustainability of public transport provided under public service contracts. This includes both the over-compensation and the under-compensation due either to the substance of public service obligations or to the competent authority’s failure to comply with its financial commitments”, states the text adopted by the European Parliament at the beginning of this year.
A maximum annual volume of a public service contract for passenger transport by rail needs to be set in a way that facilitates competition between small bidders, new entrants and the incumbent operator, for such contracts while allowing competent authorities some flexibility to optimise the volume according to economic and operational considerations.
To ensure a fair competition and to prevent inappropriate use of compensatory payments, the principle of reciprocity should be applied. The companies obtaining public service contracts by direct award should not participate in procedures for the award of public service contracts.
National authorities that today give rail service contracts to a single operator would have to put them out to public tender or justify not doing so. According to the Parliament’s vote, these amendments included in the legislative text should enter into force after 2022. Anyway, transitional measures are necessary for the contracts awarded directly by December 2019.
The award of service contracts by competitive procedure, although limited by various forms of direct award of these contracts, represents the basic element of this regulation. These include in particular the freedom of the competent authority to decide whether to provide transport services through its own transportation operator (domestic operator) or whether to organise a tender for this purpose. The possibility to directly assign contracts is subject to a reciprocity clause, under which domestic operators are not allowed to participate in competitive procedures for the award of contracts organised outside the territory of the local competent authority.
In the view of the rapporteur of this legal text, Mathieu Grosch, “the competent authority plays a central role. In line with the subsidiarity principle, it should be responsible for establishing an urban transport plan and for an appraisal of the services required within public passenger transport. The same applies to defining public service obligations. Competent authorities are best placed to assess what public service obligations are needed, locally, for what routes there should be open access, or where open access should be restricted by means of a public service contract. The very issue of how the concept of open access and public service contracts relate to each other is highly sensitive. Where the open-access principle is interpreted too liberally, there is always a risk of cherry picking by private providers, at the public sector’s expense”.
Source: Rail Liberalisation Index 2011
[ by Elena Ilie ]Share on:
