In order to put more goods on the trains and less on the truck norias that cross France, is the best possible strategy to… dismantle the leading player in rail freight? Hard to believe.
However, this is what the government is preparing to do, considering that this is the only strategy to prevent Fret SNCF from reimbursing, under duress from the European Commission, 5.3 billion euros of State aid received between 2007 and 2019.
Such a sanction would immediately put the SNCF subsidiary, which provides 50% of the market, into bankruptcy. The Minister for Transport, Clément Beaune, therefore opted for a so-called “discontinuity” solution: Fret SNCF will disappear and be reborn in the form of two companies, one specializing in train maintenance, the other in freight , but reduced by 20% of its turnover for the benefit of its competitors and 500 employees out of 5,000.
Faced with the incongruity of the situation, the deputy (Communist Party, PCF) for Seine-Maritime Hubert Wulfranc hoped that a parliamentary commission of inquiry “on the liberalization of rail freight and its consequences for the future” is open. He is the rapporteur and David Valence (Renaissance, Vosges), the president. She has already carried out forty hours of hearings, including those of the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, of Mr. Beaune and his predecessors, of several leaders of the SNCF, present and past, but also of the unions and their consulting firm Secafi Alpha…
The Director General of Competition at the European Commission, Olivier Guersent, will be heard on Tuesday October 24. But not Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner who took a step back to defend her candidacy for president of the European Investment Bank. An attitude that annoys Mr. Wulfranc. “We want to understand the reasons for the decline in rail freight over the past twenty years, the effect of the opening to competition in 2006 and the relevance of the solution put forward by the governmentexplains Mr. Valencia. What strikes me, is that rail freight in France has been treated as the burden which we left to the SNCF so as not to hear too much about it. It has only very recently been considered as an instrument of environmental public policy. »
Those interviewed – starting with Louis Gallois, president of the SNCF between 1996 and 2006 – all present the decline of freight as an inevitable phenomenon linked to the end of coal, the deindustrialization of France, the weak dynamism of its ports, then at the pace imposed by the last mile policy, that of online sales and the new logistics platforms of these giants.
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