There's plenty of improvements that are made by TOCs, though often not the things that get big headlines: service frequency increases are often done by the TOC,

There's plenty of improvements that are made by TOCs, though often not the things that get big headlines: service frequency increases are often done by the TOC, wifi on-board became commonplace on intercity services without government funding, etc. Certainly there's plenty of cases where the improvements are only made because they're a requirement of the franchise specification (with or without funding), but I think it's unfair to say that all improvements have happened because of government intervention.