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The UK government plans to take South Western Railway into public ownership in May, in the first nationalisation of the country’s passenger rail network under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour administration.
Plans for ministers to step in once the contract by FirstGroup and MTR to run the SWR network expires in May will be announced as early as Wednesday, according to two people with knowledge of the details.
Control of the operator will be handed to the Operator of Last Resort, a public body that runs nationalised trains on behalf of the government.
SWR is one of the UK’s largest operators and runs commuter services into London Waterloo as well as serving a swath of south-west England.
Labour promised to renationalise rail operators as their contracts expire, with the plan of bringing the whole passenger network into public ownership this decade.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander’s decision to start with SWR represents a more cautious approach than under her predecessor Louise Haigh, who resigned last week.
Haigh had drawn up plans to exercise a break clause to nationalise Greater Anglia or West Midlands Railway as soon as February, the people said.
Industry and government officials had warned that this plan carried the serious risk legal action from their owner, Transport UK.
Haigh resigned from government on Friday after admitting she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence over a missing mobile phone.
The Labour government’s flagship “public ownership bill” received Royal Assent and became law last week, ending the privatisation era of the British railway that began in 1994.
Under the law, contracts to run train operators, which are let to private companies, will be permanently returned to the government as they expire.
About 40 per cent of services are already being run by the Operator of Last Resort, which is set to be renamed, after four failing services in England including the East Coast main line and the TransPennine Express were taken over by the previous Conservative government.
Scottish and Welsh railways are already run by their devolved governments.
Ministers plan to bring new legislation next year to further reform the industry and hand control of the operators to a new public body — Great British Railways — which will unite track and train for the first time since British Rail disappeared.
Speaking last week, SWR’s managing director Stuart Meek said the company’s management was “committed to working with the government”.
“Our job at South Western Railway is to deliver a good service for our customers and our communities . . . what we are actually really excited about is the government’s plan for rail travel to be top of the agenda,” he told reporters.
The Department for Transport declined to comment.
This article has been amended to correct an earlier headline