More than £30,000 of taxpayer money has been spent on creating a new logo for nationalised rail services, Sky News can reveal.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander unveiled the emblem for Great British Railways (GBR) last month, the brand which nationalised trains in England will fall under.
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As well as a fresh logo, which features the familiar double arrow symbol used by British Rail when the country’s trains were last publicly owned, carriages are also getting a paint job.
Ms Alexander insisted this “isn’t just a paint job”, and said the design “represents a new railway, casting off the frustrations of the past”.
But it can now be revealed that the exercise to design the logo and paint job cost £32,400.
A Freedom of Information request sent by Sky News found more than £27,000 – excluding VAT – was spent on audience and accessibility testing for the redesign, using a specialist agency.
The total £32,400 figure included creating a mock-up of a future GBR app and a set of poster designs.
How long will redesign take?
Half of the UK’s major rail operators are now in public ownership, but the first trains to be painted with the new GBR design will appear in the spring.
Asked about the projected total cost of repainting all nationalised rail services in England by the end of the parliament, the Department for Transport (DfT) said this had “not yet been determined”.
But it said the new livery will primarily be rolled out as and when trains and carriages go for routine maintenance. An estimate of how much it will cost to rebrand stations with GBR signage has not yet been calculated.
The Department for Transport refused to tell Sky News how much it expects it will cost to develop the GBR app, which it’s championed as a “one-stop shop” for rail users.
The department said many decisions regarding the app have not yet been taken, while much of the policy detail not yet been worked through, and a procurement process yet to begin – suggesting it won’t arrive any time soon.
‘Wasteful spending’
The TaxPayers’ Alliance, a right-wing thinktank that calls for an end to “wasteful government spending”, warned the figures are “simply the tip of a costly rail renationalisation iceberg”.
John O’Connell, the group’s chief executive, told Sky News: “This is just Whitehall playing with logos while passengers pay more for nationalised trains that have no guarantee of providing better services.
“Spending £32,000 on branding and focus groups without any idea of the final cost of repainting trains or building the app shows how flippantly taxpayers’ money is being treated.”
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A spokesperson for the DfT said: “To maximise value for money, the GBR brand was designed in-house, and will be rolled out gradually, rather than as an expensive exercise painting all the trains and stations in one go.
“As you’d expect with any new brand, the process included focus groups, including those with accessibility needs, which was done to fully comply with relevant accessibility legislation.”
