THE various conflicting bodies controlling the rail network should be abolished and replaced by a single railway agency, according to a House of Commons committee.

The industry is “out of effective control”, with soaring costs and slow progress on reducing delays. It has fragmented into “competing baronies” that absorb more than three times the subsidy granted to British Rail but deliver worse performance.

In a harshly worded report, the Labour-dominated Transport Select Committee accused the Government of failing to act soon enough to take control of the industry.

“The fundamental failure is one of Government policy,” the report concluded. “(The Government) has had six years to construct a policy and structure for the railway that works, but our report shows that is has failed to do so.”

Ministers botched their previous two attempts to reform the structure of the industry and should not squander the opportunity afforded by the current review to make reforms. The report called for the Government to scrap “the confused organisational arrangements and substitute a single delivery body responsible for a unified railway”.

The new government agency would have the power to determine spending and performance for both track and trains. It would be formed by merging the Strategic Rail Authority’s powers over train franchises with Network Rail’s responsibility for the tracks.

This would mean taking Network Rail into full public ownership, a move that the Government expressly ruled out when it announced the rail review in January.

The report said Network Rail, the not-for-profit company created by the Government to replace Railtrack, had presided over a “scandalous” decline in performance last summer. The company “lacks accountability” because it is answerable neither to shareholders nor to ministers.

Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, indicated that he would accept some of the committee’s recommendations when he published the results of the review this year. He said: “I agree there needs to be a streamlined structure with clear direction from a single guiding mind.”

The committee accepted the need for the continuing involvement of private companies in the rail industry but said they should have to negotiate contracts “with a unified infrastructure provider”.

The report said the creation of a railway agency would end the confusion over who was responsible for deciding the industry’s budget.

Tom Winsor, the rail regulator, said last night: “The report contains many significant errors of elementary fact on which its fundamentally flawed conclusions are then based. I reject entirely the unfounded allegations in relation to the performance of my office and am disappointed the report fails to acknowledge the very real achievements of regulation and the railway in the last few years.”

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