The rolling stock firm Porterbrook paid out £80m in dividends to its mainly overseas shareholders last year, accounts show, fuelling further calls for Britain’s trains to be nationalised.
The firm’s train leasing arm made profits of £144m in 2023, when the railway was still beset by strikes over frozen pay and passengers faced widespread cancellations and fare rises of almost 6%.
Unions described the figures as “shocking but unsurprising” after years of Porterbrook and other rolling stock firms continuing to pay out large dividends to shareholders, despite the downturn in the wider rail industry’s revenues.
The pay of Porterbrook’s chief executive, Mary Grant, rose to almost £1.4m – more than double that of the chief executive of Network Rail.
Just more than £150m was paid in dividends from Porterbrook’s leasing arm to its parent company, Porterbrook Holdings, in the 12 months to December 2023, according to accounts filed this month.
The holdings firm paid out £80m in dividends to its shareholders, led by the insurer Allianz and the Canadian pension fund AIM. It is the second successive year it has returned £80m in dividends.
Unions argue that the hundreds of millions in profits diverted overseas by Porterbrook, Eversholt, Angel Trains and others should be reinvested in rail. Labour has started legislating to renationalise train operating firms but not the rolling stock firms, which would require a huge capital outlay.
A spokesperson for Aslef, the train drivers’ trade union, said: “These new figures are shocking, but not surprising. The privatisation of the RoSCos, the rolling stock companies, by John Major in 1994 was the most egregious example of all the Tories’ privatisations.
“The new Labour government is doing a great job bringing the passenger companies back into public ownership. Now, though, the government must turn its attention to the freight companies, and the rolling stock companies, which are turning the taxpayer over big time. We have to get their snouts out of the public trough.”
Porterbrook said it had spent £3.5bn on rolling stock and hundreds of millions more in upgrading fleets and testing green technology.
A spokesperson said: “Porterbrook is able to invest and innovate for the future of the railway because of the funding that our shareholders provide, and in the normal course of business, when appropriate, dividends are paid.”