Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.
There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.
You don't travel with X from A to B because you think X is great value for money and provides a really top notch service; you do it because you need to get from A to B and X happens to be the operator.
However.. I'm pessimistic... I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand', and argue they need this that and the other in order to differentiate themselves and effectively compete...
There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.
You don't travel with X from A to B because you think X is great value for money and provides a really top notch service; you do it because you need to get from A to B and X happens to be the operator.
However.. I'm pessimistic... I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand', and argue they need this that and the other in order to differentiate themselves and effectively compete...