Author: johnredwood

Last year our equity value of Network Rail fell from £8.18 billion to just £6.39 billion. It is a very small sum for all that land, all those buildings, all that track and signal investment. Worse still, our equity value went down despite the railway spending another £6.47 bn on investment that year. I say our because of course Network Rail is owned by all of us, the taxpayers of the UK.

Let’s just look again at those numbers. Network Rail invested more in 2014-15 than its complete equity value at the end of the year. Despite investing so much, its equity value went down.

It takes a special management genius to be able to spend so much and to have so little equity at the end of it to show for it. It is true a lot of the investment was paid for by borrowings, but surely the idea is to add value, not to subtract it if you borrow to invest. When adding new investment to a well established investment and property, it is normal to show a profit on the investment when you put it in. Furthermore, Network Rail continued to enjoy high levels of subsidy/train operating company revenue from a rail system which remains heavily subsidised.

Overall last year it reported an after tax loss of £376 million. It did not have to pay large amounts of tax, but decided to write off tax losses it held as an asset, on the grounds that it was unlikely any time soon to be making sufficient profits to be able to use up the tax losses! However, if you turn to another of the financial statements that says the “total comprehensive(expense) for the year was (£1791 million)”,  that is a large negative sum.

So the owner of the some of the best property routes into the hearts of our cities and across our countryside, with a monopoly over them, is a big loss maker that invests in a way which reduces the equity value of its business. Network Rail is putting very large sums of capital into the railway, but seems to lack discipline over how much to spend and how to control the costs of individual projects. I was all in favour of a new Reading station and associated works, but did it really need to take a rumoured £900 million to do? What return will taxpayers receive on that and similar investments? Why can’t the railway earn a living on all this new investment? The fares are certainly high enough. The problems lie with the cost base, and with the large number of empty seats they run around the country without the marketing flair to fill them. Meanwhile commuters and people on busy routes at busy times of day suffer from too few seats and high prices.

German enthusiasm for a United States of Europe has been a given of the European project. Mrs Merkel is probably allowing herself a little private celebration that once again she has quelled rebels over lending money to Greece and has persuaded her anti bail out Finance Minister to back her and refrain from playing to the no more loans gallery. She probably knows that in practice money lent to Greece is going to be written off or placed on the never never in a way which makes it effectively a grant. She also knows that the German people are not ready to approve grants to Greece.

Juts as one problem recedes temporarily, another arrives in her In tray. Germany wants some migrant labour, as its population is falling and its economy is capable of generating extra jobs. The shock news that Germany might accept 800,000 refugees this year shows the scale of the problem now confronting the EU’s rulers. Germany may well be tolerant and friendly toward migrants for the most part, but the pace and size of this migration stretches even well run administrations trying to register, help and house all these new people. There are those in Germany who now say this is too many too quickly, and despair of the lack of proper border controls elsewhere in the Union that allows so many to travel through their countries to reach the German promised land.

Mrs Merkel does what is now a reflex action for German Chancellors under pressure in the EU – she picks up the phone to the French. On this occasion she wanted to discuss changes to the Schengen agreement on open frontiers. This response is somewhat different to her initial response to the UK’s proposal that we gain more control over EU migrants into the UK when she claimed to be a resolute supporter of free movement or completely open internal EU borders. Now German public opinion is on the move, maybe reform is possible after all. Germany seems to be considering reimposing proper German border controls, with German decisions on who should be admitted, if the rest of the EU both fails to control their own external borders properly, and fail to take their fair share of in bound migrants to the EU as a whole.

The BBC likes to contrast the UK taking say 15000 refugees with Germany taking 800,000. The true comparison is with the UK taking 600,000 migrants in various categories, many of them coming under free movement rules within the EU. Maybe German can now understand our worries about the ability of a government to keep up with migrant demand for homes, school places, health facilities and benefits if they come on too big a scale.

The German people have not been told the truth about the price of creating a United States of Europe. Germany will need to pay a lot more to other parts of the Eurozone, just as West Germany had to pay a lot to East Germany when they amalgamated currencies. Germany will also continue to be the receiver of migrants of last resort if they continue with one EU country with a common external frontier policed by Greece, Italy and the others.

For now under Mrs Merkel Germany remains the leader of an EU on a wild ride to political union. If more of the German people rumble the nature of the plan and see just how much the Euro will cost them German opinion might shift towards more German answers to EU created problems. Germans do not seem to have the same commitment to helping Greeks that West Germans had to helping East Germans.

Should anything more be done to promote and encourage safety and security on trains? Today’s worrying news makes this a topical question which I would be interested to hear about.

I have pointed out in past years that Network Rail, our nationalised railway industry, is very good at reporting large losses on trading and owning derivatives. Yesterday I looked at charities close to the state and in receipt of large grants that have made a financial success out of it. Today I want to start a review of a nationalised business that receives far larger sums from the state and has made large losses out of it.

The Network Rail management claim they need to deal in derivatives, as they have substantial long term borrowings where the interest rate might go up when they need to refinance. Worse still the company has borrowed considerable amounts in foreign currencies, meaning they have a foreign exchange risk which would require them to pay back a larger sum if the pound falls whilst they owe the debt. They call what they do hedging.

Their latest annual account for 2014-15 states ” Some derivatives do not qualify for hedge accounting and are therefore classified as held for trading. Changes in the fair value of derivative financial instruments that do not qualify for cash flow hedge accounting are recognised in the Income statement as they arise.” This is a complex way of saying that although they claim all their derivatives are needed against borrowings they have made, accountants regard some of them as trading activities. When these go down in value they have to declare the loss each year as it occurs and put up more collateral – more cash – against the position they are running. Last year they needed to find an extra £690 million of cash to sustain their derivatives. The reported loss on derivatives was £982 million.
Is this what a nationalised.l railway should be doing with taxpayers money? Is this Jeremy Corbyn’s dream way to run a nationalised railway? I don’t think they should be borrowing in foreign currencies in the first place, and am glad they are now treated as a business owned for taxpayers by the Department of Transport, using the Treasury to borrow money for them in sterling. Their revenue is in pounds so it is better their debts are in pounds.

When we are trying to control public spending it does not help when a large taxpayer owned business has such an expensive position in derivatives.

It is good to see a group of charities which are closely linked to the public sector doing well financially. The Housing Association movement has a successful business model. They invest in residential property, often with grant aid for the investment. They let most of the homes out to people who usually need Housing Benefit to pay the rents, so there is state underwriting of their main income. Housing Benefit stands behind many of the rent increases that are now common, owing to pressures from demand on the supply of rented properties. They make a surplus or profit on their trading accounts. They pay no tax on this surplus all the time they maintain their charitable status. They then see the value of their residential holdings go up as the market rises, yielding substantial tax free gains.

One of the largest reported a surplus of £209 million last year on trading account. It held £340 million in cash and liquid investments. Its properties which cost it £5.6 billion to buy and build were worth £16.3 billion (at market value assuming with vacant possession). It had received £2.695 billion of accumulated grants. This pattern seems common. Another I look at recorded an operating surplus of £106 million last year, held £170 million in cash and liquid assets and held £3.7bn of gross assets at book cost which was doubtless a substantial understatement of market value.

The issue I want to raise is what more can the Housing Association movement do to assist with the wish of many more people to own their own home? Could they use their cash, their skills as developers and their ability to borrow against the security of their large portfolios to make many more new homes available for affordable homes to buy? What should the government’s policy on grants be, given the financial strength of these bodies? Are these bodies doing enough to help in a market short of housing with high rents?

86% of UK householders would like to own their home, but only 64% do. This is down from 69% in 2001. Worse still the proportion of people under 40 who own their home has shrunk fastest, thanks to the pressure of demand and pre 2007 lending policies driving up prices.

The government has set an ambitious target to double UK exports by 2020. That would certainly boost growth and transform the balance of payments. Equally helpful would be reducing imports by making and providing more of the things we want for ourselves instead of importing them.

The Environment Secretary has recently said she would like to see the UK dairy industry expand its cheese, yoghurt and other added value manufacture of milk products. As someone who usually buys English cheese I know there is plenty of choice and good English product already available. Today I carefully selected UK yoghurt which was also available. It should be possible for the home grown industry to woo more domestic customers. I look forward to progress with clearer labelling without EU interference.

Homes are UK produced, but there is a wide array of components, utilities, fixtures and fittings which are imported. Maybe businesses could respond to the challenge of coming up with the perfect English or Scottish home, with a higher proportion of local materials and products included.

UK buyers seem to like buying cars imported from afar, whilst the UK industry is especially good at selling cars abroad. I have always bought an English manufactured car. I only once used a German car many years ago provided by the company I then worked for and was disappointed with the build quality and reliability. I have been satisfied with most of the English cars I have owned and impressed by many of the huge improvements they – and other overseas car industries – have achieved in recent decades in specification and performance. The UK industry could persuade more UK buyers.

Great advanced country manufacturing businesses are driven to success by great design and good technology. The UK has allowed some of its design edge to slip in textiles, ceramics, machine tools and other areas of engineering. As change is ceaseless and the digital age is anarchic in its impact on many old business models, there is still opportunity for the makers to march in bigger numbers.

One of the disappointing features of the public sector is how much it imports and how little it sells abroad. As a recent blogger has reminded us the NHS fails to bill lots of foreign visitors who receive treatment here. The nationalised railway along with the subsidised and directed private companies that form part of it import large quantities of equipment from overseas instead of basing the technology, design and production here.

Various parts of the UK public sector buy cars made overseas when there are perfectly good UK produced ones available. If I challenge this I am usually told it’s the result of EU procurement rules. Funny I don’t see German or French officials travelling around in UK made cars.

Some people write to this site or in other publications to tell us that as sector balances in an economy have to sum to zero, attempts to cut the public sector deficit are damaging to output and activity as something else has to give to keep the sector balance. Let me explain why their view is likely to be wrong.

First, we need to grasp that there are conventionally four sectors with balances, not just the balance of payments and the public sector deficit they like to concentrate on. There is the private household sector, the private business sector, the public sector and the foreign sector or balance of payments. Turning their argument around, we have only been able to run a large public sector deficit because the business and household sectors wished or were required to stop net borrowing and generate a savings surplus, and because the overseas sector was prepared to let us buy more than we could afford, with substantial inward movements of money for loans and investments to balance the excess purchases. Whilst reining in the private sector a bit may have been necessary after the large borrowings of the pre crisis period, running a large balance of payments deficit and encouraging a lot of new foreign claims over our assets may not be such a good long term strategy.

Getting the public sector deficit or borrowing down can be balanced by any one of the following, or some combination of them. It could be facilitated by a movement out of balance of payments deficit, by making more of the things we want to buy here at home and or selling more abroad. It could be enabled by the private household sector borrowing more to facilitate more home ownership for example. It could be enabled by businesses borrowing more to invest, or generating less profit and cashflow if conditions become more competitive. More borrowing or less saving by either part of the private sector could be a good thing if it leads to more productive investment, better housing or other stores of value. If it is just a question of which brings more satisfaction, borrowing to spend on what you want or the government borrowing to spend on your behalf to buy what you want, it does not mean public sector borrowing is always the best choice.

The range of changes is considerable. There is no simple identity between the public deficit and the balance of payments. Curbing the public borrowing requirement as the balance of payments deficit on trade is coming down or as the private business sector has some profitable investments to undertake is a good thing, not a bad thing and can take place with growth occurring.

One of the ironies of the Labour leadership contest is the dislike of democracy amongst the Labour establishment. We read of rumours that a senior figure wanted to terminate the contest prematurely because it might produce the wrong answer. We hear of conversations between Labour establishment advisers and others over whether they could have a single Stop Corbyn candidate. We hear that some Labour MPs would want to dump the new leader as soon as possible if it is to be Mr Corbyn. We watch and listen to Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham respond to Mr Corbyn, allowing their agenda to be dragged into discussion of the suitability of the front runner rather than a positive case of why they would offer the best leadership. Yvette Cooper understands she needs to communicate a positive message of a better UK were she to lead, but is being hampered by the absence of a compelling vision and phrase. Andy Burnham just flip flops from one day to the next as he tries to gain the front runner position he seemed to think he had by right.

No wonder people are fed up with aspects of contemporary politics. The Labour leadership discussion exudes a sense of entitlement rebuffed from the mainstream candidates. They look shocked that they are not leading the opinion polls, worried that their meetings don’t attract the following Mr Corbyn attracts, and bemused by the way Mr Corbyn has an army of followers enrolling as £3 voting members when they do not have lots of new people to draft in. They fall back on garnering the endorsement of Messrs Blair and Brown and repeating the establishment arguments that you have to carry on doing things much as they did them in Brown’s government and Miliband’s opposition period. “Credible” is their favourite word, mouthed without any sense of irony. How credible was Labour’s tax and spend strategy? How credible was Labour’s remodelled banking regulation? How credible is Labour’s passive acceptance of all things EU? What does Labour now think of its immigration policies of the last decade? Has Labour found England on a map yet or recognised our flag?

I certainly don’t think Mr Corbyn has the answer to the UK’s problems. I do think he asks difficult questions of the Labour establishment, and highlights the failings of their past economic, foreign and EU policies. It is his willingness to demand change and to point out that it was the Labour establishment that got them into their current mess that clearly appeals to many Labour supporters. Meanwhile the country could benefit from an opposition that was willing to oppose. If only one of them would pledge to oppose the accretions of power and the unwise laws coming from the EU that would liven UK politics up and shine a light onto just how much is now done for us by Brussels. The Opposition should be putting pressure onto the government to get powers back from the renegotiation. They need to confess just how much power they gave away and show some remorse at the limitations now placed on any UK government. The more parts of UK government policy the EU runs, the more the Labour establishment figures look like puppets of Brussels.