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Scotland’s great Rosco rip-off rolls on
Our groundbreaking report reveals how private rail companies are bleeding millions from public coffers through exploitative leasing practices — but we have the solutions, writes Aslef Scottish organiser KEVIN LINDSAY
A piper walks the platform alongside the Avanti West Coast Class 390 EMU train as it arrives at Glasgow Central Station from London Euston, failing to break the 36-year-old record for the fastest train journey between London and Glasgow, June 17, 2021
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REPLACING Scotland’s rail rolling stock over the next few years will be a test of the Scottish government’s progressive credentials. To their credit in recent years, they rightly took ScotRail, Scotland’s train operating company, and the Caledonian Sleeper back into public ownership. Nevertheless, profiteering from our railways is still alive and well via rail rolling stock companies, known as Roscos. Their continuing parasitic role in leasing trains to train operating companies, including ScotRail, represents one of the last failed legacies of the complete failure of rail privatisation.
Since their creation, Roscos have been a license to print money for their original, as well as current, owners who bought them for a pittance before selling them on for huge profits to foreign banks and pension funds that now own them. These Roscos, and the more recent use of PFI to replace rail rolling stock, have enjoyed massive public subsidies to help their accrual of huge profits, none of which is reinvested back into rail services.
It is instead transferred into shareholder dividends, often these profits are sent off to offshore tax havens to avoid paying tax, meaning that they avoid paying into the same tax yield, which, from their various public contracts and subsidies, they then profit from. This, in any other language, is naked racketeering taking place in plain sight.
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Now that Scotland's railways are back in public hands, we must make sure they stay that way — and that the government invests in more services, better stations and lower fares for our passengers, writes KEVIN LINDSAY
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