At first sight, Stockholm’s smoothly running and gleamingly clean metro system, could be taken as another example of the country’s much admired public sector-dominated social model. Except, however, that it is run by a private operator – Veolia Transport (formerly known as Connex) – after a deregulation based on the much less admired British railways model.

The Tunnelbannen is currently the only large privately-operated metro in Europe. With 1.1m journeys a day, it has a dominant market share in the greater Stockholm area of 1.9m inhabitants. In Stockholm, buses, local train lines and the metro are all run by private operators, leaving the transport authority, SL, with the role of integrating the networks and planning future investment. Consequently, the authority has been able to cut its own workforce from around 13,000 in 1990 to 500 today.