For all the talk about devolution helping make Britain’s railway more efficient, the Department for Transport is the body that can do most to achieve rail efficiency. If it can clearly specify what it wants from the railway and then stick to it, then NR, train operators and their contractors have the best chance of delivering.
If DfT were to keep changing its mind, or keep developing plans having already announced what it wants, then delivery would always be less efficient than it might. And current processes make it very easy for the DfT to keep changing its mind.
Every five years the DfT must announce formally what it wants from the railway. This is the High Level Output Specification, which ORR takes as the basis of its Periodic Reviews that set Network Rail’s income and spending for a five-year period.
Separately, DfT sets what it wants from train operators through its franchising process. The franchise Invitation to Tender usually sets a train service specification in terms of minimum train service and capacity requirements.
These two specification processes rarely work in synchronisation, which can mean that ORR is working to deliver one thing while bidders are working towards something else. The common players are DfT and NR, with the latter in the invidious position of being pushed by ORR to deliver what the DfT wanted a couple of years ago while at the same time being pushed by train operators to deliver what DfT wants now.
There is no better example of this than the trans-Pennine electrification project. DfT’s 2012 HLOS specified electrification of the Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds-Colton Junction (York) route. It specified the number of morning seats to be delivered into Manchester and Leeds by 2018-19 as 34,300 and 30,500 respectively for the peak three hours. But it did not specify any linespeed or journey time improvements for the route. Nor did it specify the train service, although it included an illustrative one as a suggestion.
Fast forward three years to publication of the ITTs for the Northern and TransPennine Express franchises. Now the DfT says it wants 7,708 morning peak seats from TPE by December 2018, and 29,566 from Northern by December 2019 for Leeds. That total of 37,274 compares with the 30,500 that ORR has funded Network Rail to deliver in line with DfT’s 2012 demands. For Manchester the figures are TPE 7,285 and Northern 52,192, making a total of 59,477, compared with HLOS’s 34,300. (Further seats will be delivered by other operators, such as those running long-distance services.)
The DfT then introduced a desire for journey times of around 60 minutes between Manchester Victoria and York, taking advantage of electrification.
As a result, the trans-Pennine upgrade grew from the electrification project that DfT specified in 2012 and which was estimated at £200 million, to one that needed resignalling (another £200m) and other improvements. With funding only to deliver 2012’s HLOS, NR’s project team was placed in an impossible situation trying to deliver a much bigger project. The root cause was DfT changing its mind and pursuing a more ambitious programme that, on ORR’s funding settlement, could not be afforded.
The result? In March 2015 Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin was forced to suspend the trans-Pennine electrification programme. That September, NR advised him to resume the plan with a possible delivery date of 2022, but there is still considerable doubt that wires will be strung along the Leeds-Huddersfield-Manchester route. Even if they are, it’s hard to see the project being able to claim it’s efficient, given the amount of money (not known, but surely millions) spent over the past few years.
Even if the revised and enlarged project offered better value for money than one that delivered HLOS’s specification, the story of this project does not shout efficiency. It speaks more of order, counter-order and disorder followed by delays and disappointment. To what extent devolution to NR’s routes will solve the problem of DfT changing its mind remains to be seen. NR now plans to present revised trans-Pennine plans at the end of this year.
Today’s railway collects a vast amount of information. Look on ORR’s data portal and you’ll see masses of it. Network Rail will have even more… so will train operators and rolling stock owners.
From this information they can plot and analyse trends, and discover the differences between actual and planned performance. This data is the lifeblood of statistical process control, and sits at the heart of process industries. From repair information, managers can see if faults are being fixed or merely the symptoms of a fault.
