\n <\/p>\n
*Estimate based on contract expiry and government plans to nationalise every three months. Operator route maps are approximate<\/p>\n
The majority of Great Britain\u2019s major rail operators are now in public ownership, as the Labour government continues its efforts to make the railways \u201cmore reliable, affordable and accessible\u201d.<\/p>\n
The nationalisation of West Midlands Trains on 1 February represents the tenth major passenger service to be brought back into public ownership, leaving six to go before the government\u2019s deadline of completing every operator by 2027.<\/p>\n
The rollout, which is resulting in an operator being nationalised roughly every three months, is gradually bringing an end to a privatised system that critics argue has been overly fragmented and focused on profit, to the detriment of passenger experience.<\/p>\n
Several operators were already under public ownership by the time Labour were elected in 2024, having been nationalised by the Conservatives over financial woes and poor performance.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Transport for Wales and ScotRail were each nationalised by the Welsh and Scottish devolved governments, in 2021 and 2022 respectively.<\/p>\n
However, under the current transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, the Department for Transport (DfT) has accelerated the pace of nationalisation, bringing four operators on to the public books since May 2025: South Western Railway, C2C, Greater Anglia and West Midlands Trains.<\/p>\n
State of play, February 2026<\/p>\n
So far ten<\/span> of the 16 major rail operators in Britain are now in public ownership:<\/p>\n Tap an operator to highlight routes, tap again to deselect<\/p>\n The government has said the remaining six will be nationalised by October 2027<\/span>:<\/p>\n The operator that was nationalised most recently was West Midlands Trains<\/span>, which took place on 1 February 2026<\/span>.<\/p>\n The next operator set to be nationalised is Govia Thameslink<\/span>, which the government says will take place in May 2026<\/span>.<\/p>\n The nationalisations come ahead of the establishment of a new state-controlled company called Great British Railways, expected this year, which will manage rail infrastructure and services.<\/p>\n It has been described by the DfT as a \u201csingle directing mind\u201d for \u201cbringing track and train together, putting passengers and customers first, [and] rebuilding trust in the railway\u201d.<\/p>\n It will soon manage most of the publicly owned operators in Great Britain, combining them with Network Rail, which owns the tracks, signals and big stations.<\/p>\n However, Great Britain\u2019s trains will remain privately owned.<\/p>\n Industry insiders have expressed cautious optimism about Labour\u2019s plans, highlighting the potential for Great British Railways to achieve more coordination and, in turn, greater efficiency.<\/p>\n However, experts have also warned that nationalisation alone may not be enough to fix all of Britain\u2019s problems with rail, given ballooning costs.<\/p>\n \u201cIrrespective of the ownership changes, the government\u2019s got a major headache with the fact that rail is gobbling up so much public subsidy, and that\u2019s before you get to HS2,\u201d said Stephen Glaister, the emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London and a former chair of the Office of Rail and Road.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government are making promises to make fares even cheaper and services even better, but both will cost more public money.\u201d<\/p>\n The data available on nationalised operators so far offers a mixed picture on performance.<\/p>\n Several have experienced improving train punctuality and a reduction in cancellations but the performance of others has worsened over the past year.<\/p>\n LNER has been one of the most improved \u2013 and in June the rail minister, Peter Hendy, described the operator as a \u201cblueprint\u201d for wider renationalisation efforts.<\/p>\n Guardian graphic. Source: delay and cancellation data taken from the Office of Rail and Road. *Note: South Western Railway, C2C and Greater Anglia were nationalised by the Labour government in the latter half of the time period analysed here, while West Midlands Trains was nationalised afterwards<\/p>\n Labour committed to bringing rail into public ownership in the party\u2019s 2024 election manifesto \u2013 claiming it had come up with a way to nationalise trains \u201cwithout costing taxpayers a penny in compensation\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead of an \u201call-at-once\u201d approach, nationalising every operator simultaneously and paying off shareholders, the government is running down the clock on existing rail contracts.<\/p>\n The DfT is waiting for each operator\u2019s core contract expiry date, which allows the government to take over without compensating the private companies.<\/p>\n The final operator to expire in this way will be CrossCountry in October 2027 \u2013 and this is when the government says it will have completed rail nationalisation in Great Britain.<\/p>\n Until then, the government has set a pace of nationalising one operator in each annual quarter. Govia Thameslink is due next, in May 2026.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s current one-at-a-time approach builds off of the work of its predecessors in government. Several operators \u2013 including LNER, Northern and Southeastern \u2013 were brought into public ownership by the Conservatives from 2018 onwards.<\/p>\n In those cases, nationalisation was taken as an emergency measure rather than a deliberate policy \u2013 in response to financial difficulties, in the case of LNER, or because of dismal performance, in the case of Northern.<\/p>\n Additionally, ScotRail and Transport for Wales were brought into public ownership by their respective devolved governments, and their train operations are not expected to be merged into Great British Railways.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s strategy for the remaining operators is driven by legal reality \u2013 which experts say could be helpful given how fragmented rail in Great Britain has become.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t do it in one go,\u201d said Marcus Mayers, the managing director of the Rail and Station Innovation Company. \u201cIf you try to merge 22 companies in one go \u2013 you don\u2019t have the ability to build the system, to join it together that quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you build an operation which is capable of ingesting organisations, and is capable of ingesting organisations at the rate of one every three months. That makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has previously said his government would not be nationalising rail out of ideology but because of what it could deliver for passengers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve tried privatisation for two or three decades and it\u2019s a complete mess,\u201d the Labour leader said in April 2024. \u201cEverybody who travels on the trains has been affected by the cancellations and delay.\u201d<\/p>\n Privatisation was undertaken by the Conservatives in the 1990s, after decades of falling ridership under the nationalised British Rail.<\/p>\n From 1948 onwards the annual number of journeys on Britain\u2019s rail network fell consistently, from a peak of more than 1 billion a year in 1950 to a low of 0.6 billion in 1982.<\/p>\n After privatisation, rail journeys recovered significantly, reaching a new peak of 1.7 billion by 2017.<\/p>\n Chart showing passenger journeys on Britain\u2019s rail network between 1945 to 2025<\/p>\n \u201cPrivatisation sparked a railway renaissance,\u201d said Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary under David Cameron, in a speech in 2013.<\/p>\n However, the impact on other aspects of train travel has been more mixed.<\/p>\n One of the original selling points of privatisation was that competition <\/strong>for franchises would bring better value for the taxpayer.<\/p>\n While the industry remained subsidised overall, some major commuter franchises went on to pay a return.<\/p>\n Yet in the past few years, after huge falls in passenger numbers during the coronavirus pandemic, the amount the government pays to operators in public subsidy has ballooned to record levels.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government is still forking out \u00a312bn on operational subsidy, plus HS2 is another \u00a37bn, plus extracurricular investment projects on the existing railways,\u201d Glaister said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a very great deal of money in the context of the public expenditure crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n Costs have risen for passengers, too. Rail fares have become less affordable since privatisation, rising faster than average earnings in the same period.<\/p>\n Today it costs about \u00a38.90 to take a 50km (31-mile) journey by rail, based on how much revenue rail operators collect for each kilometre travelled on their network.<\/p>\n When adjusting for inflation, that same journey would have cost \u00a37.54 in 1994.<\/p>\n Chart showing how rail fares have increased relative to wages since privatisation in 1995<\/p>\n The rising cost of rail comes amid widespread dissatisfaction with the reliability of Great Britain\u2019s trains.<\/p>\n Last year was the worst year for cancellations nationally since 2015, according to statistics produced by the Office of Rail and Road.<\/p>\n Labour has pledged to improve reliability and affordability with nationalisation, banking on a unified Great British Railways to end what critics see as an overly fragmented system.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s possible, because there\u2019s efficiencies of integration of track and train, which might mean that problems get solved more quickly,\u201d Mayers said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou may be taking out the commercial imperative to drive reliability, but you\u2019ve also got more collaboration about how to achieve it. So it\u2019s a fine balance, and whether it will work or not is still open for debate.\u201d<\/p>\n Others are sceptical of how much more efficiency can be wrung out of the system.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernments frequently say: \u2018Oh, we\u2019ll make the railways more efficient, we\u2019ll buy lots of new equipment, we\u2019ll employ less people to do the work,\u2019\u201d Glaister said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the industry has been trying to do that for years and years, and the regulators screw that down to the absolute bottom in their settlements. And I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a lot of, as it were, undiscovered efficiencies to go for.\u201d<\/p>\n A DfT spokesperson said: \u201cThrough public ownership and the creation of Great British Railways, the government is fundamentally reforming how our railways are run, putting passengers first.<\/p>\n \u201cPublic ownership will deliver a railway that is more accountable, efficient, and reliable \u2013 resulting in greater opportunities for communities and significant growth.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not a silver bullet, and issues inherited from private sector ownership will take time to root out, but we expect public sector operators \u2013 and Great British Railways once it is established \u2013 to focus relentlessly on improving reliability, punctuality and other aspects of the service that matter most to passengers, and we will hold them to account for doing so.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" *Estimate based on contract expiry and government plans to nationalise every three months. Operator route maps are approximate The majority of Great Britain\u2019s major rail operators are now in public ownership, as the Labour government continues its efforts to make the railways \u201cmore reliable, affordable and accessible\u201d. The nationalisation of West Midlands Trains on 1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[841,118,3940,1545,1811,9699,177,6363,5215],"class_list":{"0":"post-43687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-britains","9":"tag-great","10":"tag-hands","11":"tag-industry","12":"tag-major","13":"tag-operators","14":"tag-public","15":"tag-rail","16":"tag-working"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}When will the next operators be nationalised?<\/h2>\n
Will nationalisation improve the railways?<\/h2>\n