CHAMPIONS of privatisation always insist that its beauty lies in private companies bearing the risk of investment in public services and so sparing the need for government borrowing.

This has self-evidently not been explained to Department for Transport mandarins who were handed the ministry chequebook to go shopping for trains despite no experience of ever having done so.

The Commons public accounts committee is voicing concerns over the DfT decision to buy 866 new carriages for the Intercity Express programme on the East and West Coast Main Lines from a Hitachi-led consortium and 1,140 for Thameslink at a combined cost of £10.5 billion.

As the committee stresses, the department’s lack of expertise means that it is forced to rely on expensive outside consultants for advice on its purchase. 

DfT permanent secretary Philip Rutnam explained the department’s decision to switch from its previous practice of leaving it to rolling stock companies and train operators to buy trains by insisting that the government is in a better position to purchase trains in bulk than franchisees themselves. 

Rutnam suggested that this would deliver better value for the taxpayer in the long term.

Opponents of rail privatisation have always argued that an integrated publicly owned and operated body, backed by the government, can offer a more efficient and economically viable model than the fragmented mish-mash of profit-motivated private consortiums.

However, what the DfT is running is the worst of all worlds, with the government taking all the risk, hanging a £10.5bn bill round its neck while the private train operating companies lie back and let the profits roll in to the delight of their shareholders.

Even better for the shareholders is the revelation that the government has done the private operators’ dirty work for them in terms of specifications.

The rolling stock is designed to do away with the safety-critical role of train guards and to strip out buffet cars, which is not only a key issue for the RMT union that organises these workers but also for passengers denied consultation.

Apart from the £10.5bn bill and the possibility of future losses if DfT passenger demand forecasts prove inaccurate — the biggest disgrace of this shabby deal is that none of the 1,140 Siemens carriages will be made in Britain.

The DfT permanent secretary delivered the government’s stock rejoinder for such situations when questioned, claiming that European Union procurement law prohibits a protectionist approach to assist Britain’s declining engineering base. 

However, his ability to repel justifiable concerns by hiding behind a selection of obfuscatory responses picked up in just two-and-a-half years as DfT permanent secretary was blown out of the water by the public accounts committee’s more experienced chairwoman Margaret Hodge.

She pointed out that EU legislation did not appear to have prevented the French, German and Italian governments from procuring 95 per cent of their rolling stock requirements from domestic suppliers.

Even for as long as Britain remains in the EU and is subject to its rules, government has the power to ensure the existence of a flourishing home-grown train-building capacity.

Rail passengers, staff and taxpayers are equal victims of a Westminster conspiracy by all the major parliamentary parties to reject public opinion and to refuse to return the rail industry to full public ownership.

That conspiracy must be constantly exposed and the people’s voice heard ever more loudly to demand an end to the privatisation nightmare.