Another kind of board for British Rail?
THERE IS ALLEGED to be an ancient Chinese curse which runs: 'May you live in interesting times'. Members of the British Railways Board may well wonder if they have not incurred the enmity of some remote Oriental when they contemplate their prospects, in which only one thing appears to be pretty certain — that the Board will not continue in its present form very much longer. Interesting possibilities surround it from all directions.

In a 'Viewpoint' published in the March 1976 issue of Modern Railways a correspondent drew attention to some of the anomalies that have crept in since nationalisation in 1948, and how far we have come away from the original concept of a public corporation, run on strictly business lines and financially viable, with Ministerial powers of intervention strictly limited to general directions on matters that affect the national interest. Today the BRB is stumbling along in a sort of three-legged race, its senior ' executives - awkwardly tied up to opposite numbers in Marsham Street; and if this is the inevitable consequence of the degree of Government financial support required for the preservation of an effective railway network, the question arises whether. the whole thing would not be more effectively conducted if the railways were to abandon the pretence of being a free-standing corporation and were integrated into the Department of Transport. That of course is an extreme and unlikely possibility. But other and more probable types of change exist in three quite distinct directions. These cover worker participation; industry policy councils for the nationalised industries; and two-tier Boards. Worker participation, or industrial democracy as some prefer to call it, is being studied by the Bullock Committee, which was expected to report by the turn of the year. There can be little doubt that close attention will be paid in the report to West Germany's experience in this field. But German conditions are somewhat specialised. After the Second World War the victorious Allies wanted to ensure that the power of capitalism in the iron, steel and coal firms of the Ruhr was weakened by 'democratisation' of these corporations. There were obvious strategic motives which led to the 1951 'Co-determination Act' providing that the Supervisory Board (Aussichtsrat) for each company should have 10 representatives of the owners (shareholders) and 10 of the employees, with a 'neutral' additional member. By further Acts of 1952, 1972 and 1976 this general principle was extended to all large enterprises, employing 2000 or more staff, in industry as a whole. Can this principle usefully be transplanted to Britain? It seems to have worked fairly well in Germany where all decisions of importance affecting workers — for instance closing a factory or laying-off employees — are always taken jointly by managements and trade unions. But the strictly limited number of the German unions and their industry-based lines of demarcation have made representation much easier than would be the case if, for instance, a fixed number of Board places on the BRB had to be allocated between the National Union of Railwaymen, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers & Firemen, and the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association. In Britain, inter - union differences would persist as far as the Board table, unless there were a marked change in habits of thought.

Co-determination will not necessarily always be welcomed here either by Personnel Directors or their opposite numbers, the union General Secretaries, because it weakens their key role in negotiation and appears to downgrade their expertise. Equally, the union rank-and-file members may be suspicious of their representatives becoming too easily influenced by the management's arguments if they are elevated to the Board table and are subject to pressure from their colleagues there.