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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Troubled intercity rail operator Avanti West Coast will not be stripped of its contract early by the UK government, according to people with knowledge of the plans. 

Earlier this year, northern leaders demanded that operation of the route — which connects London with major cities including Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool — be nationalised because of sustained frustrations over performance.

Avanti was the worst-performing train operator in the UK between April and June, according to recent industry figures. Almost 60 per cent of its trains over the period were late, double the national average, figures from the Office of Rail and Road showed. Cancellation levels were also twice the national average.

However, legal advice provided to the Department for Transport concluded that the operator was not in breach of its performance obligations, people familiar with the findings said.

One of the people said the company’s most recent contract had “rewarded failure”, as it had been drawn up in such a way that it was very difficult to breach on performance grounds.

As a result, the route could end up being one of the last to be nationalised under Labour’s plans to gradually bring all rail services under state control, because its contract is one of the last to come up for renewal.

Ministers are instead working on the basis that the first nationalisations under Labour will be Greater Anglia or West Midlands trains early next year.

Earlier on Tuesday, Starmer championed the railway services bill “bringing railways back into public ownership” in his speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool.

Avanti, which is co-owned by First Group and Trentitalia, has been heavily criticised over the reliability and quality of its services since it took over the country’s biggest intercity rail route in 2019. 

Twelve months ago the previous Conservative government extended its contract for a further nine years, with a break clause in 2026, following a brief period of improvement. Shortly afterwards the operator’s performance nosedived again. 

In April, members of the pan-northern transport body Transport for the North unanimously voted for the service to be nationalised because of its sustained unreliability, slashed timetables and poor customer service. 

Greater Manchester’s Labour mayor Andy Burnham said he had “completely run out of patience” with the operator.

At the time, the Department for Transport said that removing Avanti’s contract would not solve problems that it said were caused by issues beyond the company’s control, such as the weather and infrastructure problems. 

Three months later, Labour were elected to power on a promise to gradually nationalise the entirety of the rail network as each existing operating contract expires.

Two people with knowledge of the matter said that the earliest end date was likely to be 2027, once a break in the contract had been executed.

The government is expected to begin its broader nationalisation process when the Passenger Railway Services bill receives Royal Assent, which is expected later this year.

Under the bill, contracts to run train operators that are let to private companies will be permanently returned to the government as they expire.

These former franchises would then be run by the Department for Transport’s “Operator of Last Resort”, which already operates four English railway franchises on behalf of the government. 

The first contract to expire will be South Western Railway in May 2025. But under the terms of the current contracts with train operators, the government can also exercise break clauses in order to bring companies in-house earlier.

Break clauses at Greater Anglia and West Midlands Trains expired in September, so the government is set to begin the nationalisations after giving one of these operators, which are both run by TransportUK, the required three months notice.

A government official said that process was expected to start in February.

Industry executives believe ministers had been considering whether to start with a high-profile struggling operator, such as Avanti or Cross Country, which received an improvement notice in August. 

But they said an easier option would be to bring in one of the TransportUK franchises first, which are both performing well. 

Greater Anglia was the best-performing operator according to the recent reliability data, and is the only operator currently returning a surplus to the government.

One industry executive warned that trying to nationalise several operators in a short timeframe was “a recipe for failure and risk”.

Trenitalia and First Group declined to comment. The Department for Transport and TransportUK did not immediately comment.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is author of ‘Black Wave’, distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics and an FT contributing editor

The pager attack and Israeli missile strikes against Hizbollah targets have revealed deep and embarrassing security breaches within a group that long prided itself on the discipline and loyalty of its members. 

The start of the Israeli bombing campaign against Lebanon on Monday punctured what was left of the longstanding narrative Hizbollah has sold to its base: that it can protect them and deter Israel. But events of the past week have also brought back to the surface deep schisms inside Lebanon and across the region about its role as a state within a state and a heavily armed regional paramilitary group. 

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta described the pager attacks as a form of terrorism, with “terror going into the supply chain.” The long-term consequences, beyond Lebanon, of booby-trapping everyday objects on a large scale will unfold over time. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the terror was felt on a national level, in a small country, where sirens wailed for hours and panicked mothers unplugged their baby monitors. 

There was a brief moment of general compassion. Political opponents expressed sympathy and said politics should be set aside for now. Lebanese of all confessions rushed to donate blood. It was the kind of compassion Hizbollah itself has never afforded its opponents — not in Lebanon, where it stands accused of assassinating former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and scores of others, nor in Syria, where it participated in the bloody civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad. 

Syrian dissident and intellectual Yassin Al Haj Saleh wrote on X that while schadenfreude among his compatriots in the wake of the pager attack was not something to be proud of, it was an understandable reaction. Syrians, he said, had been “killed, besieged and starved” by Hizbollah as it “helped a genocidal regime”. Shockingly, the gloating continued on Monday even as almost 600 people were killed in Israeli strikes, the deadliest single day in Lebanon since the civil war. 

Hizbollah is now fighting without the popular and regional support it had during the previous face-off in 2006, when its leader Hassan Nasrallah became hugely popular in the region for staring down Israel. Assad, who owes his regime’s survival to Hizbollah and its patron Iran, as well as Russia, is missing in action. In New York, Iranian officials have signalled that they’re open to negotiations with the US.

Israel will see all this as an opportunity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might think it also means the Lebanese will rise up against Hizbollah, or that the latter will relent as losses mount. But while its strategy might lie in ruins, Hizbollah will not admit defeat. And the Lebanese are too scared and tired to rise up in the middle of a war. There will also be a natural rallying together against Israel. Many Lebanese who oppose Hizbollah have also watched with horror as Gaza has been bombarded and flattened. 

When Hizbollah launched rockets against Israel on October 8 last year in support of Hamas and Gaza, it tied Lebanon’s fate to a ceasefire in Gaza. But it never expected the conflict to last this long. Both Hizbollah and Iran repeatedly signalled that they didn’t want all-out war. They had settled into a balance between deterrence and a war of attrition — until last week, when Israel dramatically shifted gear.

In 2006, after a devastating war between Israel and Hizbollah which destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and killed 1,200 Lebanese civilians, Nasrallah admitted that he would not have ordered the capture of Israeli soldiers on the border if he had known it would provoke such a devastating conflict. Today, Lebanon, a country with no president, a caretaker cabinet and barely functioning institutions, stands on the precipice of another devastating conflict.

There is a short window for international diplomacy to find a face-saving formula that would allow Hizbollah to extricate itself from the Gaza conflict and stand down for the sake of Lebanon. This would require, however, the kind of national coalition building inside Lebanon that historically has proven hard to achieve. Crucially, it also entails the Biden administration obtaining iron-clad guarantees from Israel that it too will step back.

Alas, 11 months into the war in Gaza, Joe Biden has shown himself unable or unwilling to extract promises from Netanyahu. And he will be even more loath to do so with an American presidential election just over a month away. 

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A new “women’s justice board” will be set up to cut the female prison population in England and Wales as part of a longer-term push to reduce the number of women’s jails, the justice secretary has said.

In a speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, Shabana Mahmood rejected then Conservative home secretary Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that “prison works”, saying that “for women prison isn’t working”.

Labour has said it inherited a criminal justice system at “breaking point” when it won the general election in July, and in her first 10 weeks in office Mahmood has faced record jail overcrowding, which saw the prison estate come to within a few hundred places of capacity.

Almost 2,000 prisoners were released early this month, with several thousand more to be let out in October, under temporary emergency measures reducing the proportion of some custodial sentences from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.  

Mahmood in her speech accused “guilty men in the last government” of bringing the prison system “to the point of disaster”.

The new women’s justice board would be tasked with providing early interventions to divert women away from the criminal justice system, improving community support and looking at specific problems affecting young women in custody, she said.

The self-harm rate among female inmates is eight times higher than among men, and women between the ages of 18 and 24 account for more than one-third of incidents despite constituting less than 10 per cent of the female prison population.

Some 3,453 women were in prison in England and Wales as of last Friday, according to Ministry of Justice figures, compared with 82,953 male inmates.

There are 123 jails in England and Wales, according to HM Prison Service, of which 12 in England are for women. Mahmood described them as “desperate places” that led female offenders into a life of crime rather than helping them rehabilitate.

About two-thirds of female offenders sentenced to prison did not commit a violent crime, and more than half of female offenders were the victims of domestic abuse, the department said in a release announcing Mahmood’s planned reforms.

The MoJ said women serving short custodial sentences were “significantly more likely to reoffend” than those serving non-custodial sentences.

The new body would be led by a minister and set up in the MoJ, the department added.

Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust charity, welcomed the creation of a separate oversight board for female offenders as a “historic moment for women’s justice”.

“Many women are primary carers for children, which means prison can have a devastating impact on those left behind on the outside as well as on the women themselves,” she said.

Sinha added that for the women’s justice board to be effective it “must provide a framework for better use of liaison and diversion services and community alternatives for women”.

Mahmood also pledged to make progress on Labour’s manifesto pledge to give all rape victims access to an independent legal advocate representing them “rather than a defendant or prosecutor”.

The change is aimed at cutting the number of victims who drop out of rape cases — 60 per cent at present — before they go to trial.