CARDIFF, Wales — Under fire from the opposition Conservative Party, Transport Secretary Stephen Byers laid out a firm defense Saturday of his decision to pull the plug on the private company that ran Britain’s railroads.
Speaking at a meeting of the governing Labor Party, Byers said his decision last fall to put Railtrack into administration was the only way to save the train network from the consequences of a disastrous privatization.
He said no public funds would be used to compensate the company’s shareholders, who have complained bitterly about Byers’ move.
“Railtrack was a company that had failed,” Byers said. “Its failure to maintain the track led to Hatfield,” where a crash killed four people in October 2000. “Train delays due to Railtrack were at an unacceptable level.”
Then-Prime Minister John Major’s Conservative government created Railtrack as part of a piecemeal privatization of the state-owned train system. The company took charge of maintaining tracks and other infrastructure, while more than a dozen other companies operated the trains.
Byers withdrew public subsidies from Railtrack in October, placing the company into administration.
Prime Minister Tony Blair made fixing a rail network beset by delays and safety problems a central promise of his re-election campaign last year. He has defended the withdrawal of government subsidies from Railtrack as the best way of doing that.
Blair’s plans to bring private companies in as partners in operating some other public services — including the London Underground and the National Health Service — drew bitter criticism from union leaders at the party meeting.
John Edmonds, general secretary of the GMB union, compared the prime minister’s flirtation with the private sector to Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to introduce a poll tax, which helped prompt her own party to push her out of office.
“This Government had better be very careful,” Edmonds warned. “Because it has invented, totally unnecessarily, its own poll tax, its own electoral disadvantage, its own imploding policy which is going to drag down its support.”