[owisd]

This is just another “bendy bananas”-tier myth. The UK was never forced to privatise because of EU competition rules, see, for example, France, an EU member state that retained publicly owned railways during the same period.

There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.

[martinald]

Not true. The EU is taking Netherlands to court for not allowing private companies (not state owned) to bid on the main passenger routes: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

De facto it is required, and you see that in Germany - many routes are not operated by DB anymore.

[short_sells_poo]

I don't understand how is this "forced privatisation"? There's nothing preventing a state owned rail company from operating, no? All this says is that private companies must be allowed competitive access. Am I missing something?

[martinald]

No nothing preventing it but you cannot just have a state operator bid for it. The contract in question is basically the entire Netherlands passenger operations, with some small exceptions.

The key problem the EU has is the size of the contract. The contract cannot be for the entire country (more or less), it needs to be split into smaller ones (eg: one contract for intercity, one contract for local services near Amsterdam, etc). Netherlands defense is that the passenger rail system cannot be split up like this as it would cause operational problems and thus should not be franchised. I'm simplifying this from memory but it's roughly correct I think.

There is no doubt in my mind were it to be split up like the EU is requiring, that de facto some of it would be privatized. It has/is happening in every European state that has complied with the EU rules.

To me that is very close to forced privatisation. The current (Labour) UK model (government owned franchises with no bidding) would 100% not be allowed.