EUROPE: The European Rail Freight Association says three key issues need to be addressed in the European Commission’s planned revision of state aid guidelines for railway undertakings.
Modal shift: ERFA believes state aid has an important role to play in supporting a transition towards more sustainable transport. Operational aid is therefore important, but thresholds should be maintained to ensure state aid does not just subsidise unsustainable business models. Given the high investments required in digitalisation, particularly ETCS deployment, interoperability aid should be increased to 100%, ERFA says.
Rolling stock: ERFA calls for a ‘cautious’ approach to state aid for rolling stock, saying the needs of the passenger and freight sectors are ‘fundamentally different’. ERFA believes state aid has an important role to play in upgrading existing rolling stock where it is in the common interest, for example, through retrofitting locomotives and wagons to reduce noise.
Restructuring: ERFA says there should be no special treatment for restructuring of rail freight undertakings, and normal state aid guidelines for rescuing and restructuring should be applicable. ERFA says railway undertakings had had the opportunity to restructure before 2010, and the revised guidelines would play an essential role in promoting the independence and preventing non-transparent illegal cross-subsidisation.
‘Almost half of the European rail freight market is made up of challengers to national incumbents’, said ERFA President Dirk Stahl on March 22. ‘If we are to look at how these figures have evolved over the past two decades, we can anticipate this trend will continue and that challengers will soon hold the majority of national markets on average. We therefore need an evolution in how we think about state aid. We need to transition to an approach which focuses on sectoral support measures rather than supporting individual operators.’
