Quote:
Originally Posted by David A Hicks
Aw! What ever happened to that deflation we are apparently having?
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This is a perfectly reasonable question, and one which every passenger is going to be demanding.
And the answer, not surprisingly is that this is what the franchising system requires. ORR based it's calculations on Gordon Brown's neverneverland growing economy, as well as a yearly passenger growth prediction. Since civil servants and politicians don't live in the real world, it never occurred to them that the good times wouldn't roll forever. Because they've benn trying to screw as much money out of taxpayers/passengers instead of running a public service, the house of cards is about to come tumbling down.
The TOCs are expected to pay ever increasing wodges of money to the treasury, based on a now out of date model of a prosperous economy. It's widely anticipated within the industry that due to shortfalls in income the next step will be that several TOCs will be soon be demanding to renegotiate their conditions, and will threaten to hand back the franchise if they don't get some big concessions. (Remember GNER ?)
From an economic sense things have just ticked along nicely since privitisation, and this is the first big 'challenge' to the current system. If you're an optimist you might hope that by the time this mess is sorted it will bring about a much more realistic franchising arrangement.
(Sadly I'm not, and I don't
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