A VAST outsourcing company, which has grown fat on contracts to run various parts of the state over the past decade, is the latest to be handed a section of Britain’s railways.

It is better known for charging the government for non-existent tagged prisoners when it ran probation sevices, or for its appalling performance running NHS services in Cornwall.

The company, aware of its terrible corporate record, is terribly coy.

Its name doesn’t appear on the gleaming new livery of the trains concerned, or on its social media presence, and only appears as a covert link on the shiny new website.

The company’s name is Serco, which took over the running of the Caledonian Sleeper service on April Fools Day.

Serco already has experience running British rail franchises. It runs Northern Rail and Merseyside Rail in partnership with Abeillo, which is in turn operated by a subsidiary of the Dutch state rail company.

Foreign state-owned companies love running British franchises, as they’re able to reinvest the profits into cheaper fares and better rail services in their own countries. And who can blame them?

Meanwhile, the flagship East Coast franchise has been reprivatised, despite bringing in more than £1 billion to the Treasury’s coffers since the previous franchise operator, National Express, defaulted ignominiously in 2009. It is now run as Virgin East Coast, with everyone’s favourite cuddly carpetbagger, Richard Branson, at the PR helm.

In fact, the new East Coast franchise is 90 per cent owned by Brian Souter’s Stagecoach.

Souter prefers to keep a lower profile these days, but made his money through bus companies before hoovering up many juicy rail contracts across Britain.

He has also donated millions to the Scottish National Party. Which, mysteriously, then scrapped its plans to regulate the bus industry north of the border, in an entirely unrelated political move.

The above may sound like satire, perhaps the plot of some JG Ballard short story warning against a dystopia corporate future. Instead it’s the dreary, grubby reality.

The non-debate about the future of Britain’s railways encapsulates how narrow mainstream political discourse has become. The commentator Mark Fisher calls this “capitalist realism,” a pervasive cultural malaise whereby it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Yet a healthy majority of voters believe the railways should be brought back under public control. According to YouGov polling data, this move would be popular even with a majority of Tory voters.

Instead we have the Tories offering more of the same and Labour making vague pledges to allow publicly owned franchises to bid alongside the private train operating companies.

This would see a state-owned franchise pitching to the state for the right to run trains on infrastructure owned and operated by the state.

Of major parties only the Green Party has pledged a full return to public ownership. Labour’s position baffles Mike Cash, the RMT’s general secretary.

“If you have a billion to spare in these difficult times, rather than give it to someone to give to their shareholders why not put it back in the system?

“Keep fares at a better level? Build more trains and reduce overcrowding? You can do all that with a nationalised model,” he told the Guardian last week.

The irony, of course, is that many aspects of the railways are still very much under state control.

Network Rail, which owns all the infrastructure and stations, is now a public-sector firm, its booming debt on the public balance sheet.

Half of fares are still regulated by the government, with David Cameron last week promising no above-inflation rises on these tickets.

Companies like Serco may trumpet the impending arrival of new rolling stock, but this too is ordered and paid for by the Treasury.

Overall, the state subsidy for the railways is in the region of £4bn — twice what it was under British Rail, accounting for inflation.

The blame for all this lies with John Major, whose government embarked on a disastrously botched privatisation after the Tories unexpectedly won the 1992 election.

Driven by the misguided belief that competition would eventually lead to a lower subsidy, British Rail was shattered by a doomed party in its last years of power.

Matthew Engel captured the chaos in his book Eleven Minutes Late, where he records how British Rail was broken up into “25 train operating companies, six track renewal companies, six track maintenance companies, six rolling stock maintenance companies, three freight operators, three rolling stock leasing companies. And they all had to be flogged off before the closure date of the next election.”

New Labour made hay blaming the Tories for the chaos they inherited but did frustratingly little about it.

And in a case of history repeating itself, the current coalition has determinedly made it harder for the next government to overhaul the franchises — hence its hurried reprivatisation of East Coast and a cosy contract extension for First Great Western.

Serco, meanwhile, is contracted to run the Caledonian Sleeper for the next 15 years.

New rolling stock, paid for by a capital grant by the Scottish government, is expected in 2018. Customers are promised a revitalised “hospitality experience” when the new trains are up and running.

In the meantime, the cheapest advance fares are no longer available on Serco’s new website. Last week, the new franchise managed to accept bookings for two carriages of the sleeper that didn’t exist.

Teething problems, or business as usual? One thing is clear: Britain’s rail passengers — not customers — deserve an end to this chaos.