The Scottish Government has been urged to withhold notifying the winning bidder of the ScotRail franchise until after more power is devolved to Holyrood.
Labour MSP Mark Griffin has called on Transport Minister Keith Brown to act, as he believes the current franchise model was unnecessarily constrained by limits imposed by UK legislation.
In a letter to the minister, the Labour politician wrote: “It makes no sense to continue a process which will lock the people of Scotland into a franchise for 10 years from April 2015.
“I ask you to suspend the tendering process and allow the current franchise to continue until the additional proposed powers are available to this parliament to allow public and not-for-profit bids to run Scotland’s rail passenger services”.
The call has been backed by the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association.
But a spokesman for the Scottish Government agency Transport Scotland said its hands were tied.
“We are obliged, under Westminster legislation, to operate a procurement competition for franchising of our railways, and we want to secure a good outcome for both passengers and the workforce,” he added.
“The ScotRail franchise is the single biggest contract let by the Scottish Government and to suspend the procurement at this very late stage would, as was evidenced by the Department for Transport’s West Coast Mainline fiasco, result in massive and unnecessary costs to the public purse.”
But Labour claimed there was a clause in the franchise tender document that enabled the government to act.
