Green Party leader Natalie Bennett will be joining the RMT protest at King's Cross station on Thursday morning to show the party’s support for its campaign to keep the East Coast mainline in public hands.
The Directly Owned Railways now operating the East Coast Mainline gets just one per cent of its spending paid for by the taxpayer, compared to 13 per cent for Virgin's West Coast franchise, and up to 36 per cent elsewhere.
Bennett said: “ As a recent report by the Centre for Research on Social-Cultural Change, titled The Great Train Robbery, demonstrated, private train companies are heavily dependent upon the public purse to enable them to run services, and when they do make a profit, those companies getting the biggest return more than 90% to shareholders in dividends.
“There is simply no benefit in our privatised railways. There has been a big growth in travel over the period of privatisation, but that can be explain by employment, demographic and economic changes, not due to any improvement in our services.
“We have the most expensive trains in Europe, immense overcrowding, and cuts in the fees paid by the Train Operating Companies to Network Rail have left it heavily burdened with debt. Where services have significantly improved, this is a result of public investment, as on the West Coast Mainline, not the private operator.”
Green MP Caroline Lucas currently has before parliament a private members' bill to allow the train companies to "fall back" into public ownership, which is supported by a number of Labour backbenchers and Plaid Cymru MPs.
Bennett added: "The government's rush to reprivatise the East Coast Mainline, when the current arrangement is working well, lays bare the ideological nature of its drive for private ownership of everything it can hand over."
“A publicly owned system would be cheaper for the taxpayer, more efficient, and more democratically accountable.”