Peer review: Nigel Harris
Managing Editor & Events Director, RAIL and RailReview
Philip Haigh is a seasoned and experienced observer of the post-1993 privatised railway and he has neatly and effectively summarised the fundamental problems and key questions surrounding Network Rail’s structure, role and challenges. The picture he paints is as profoundly depressing as it is worrying.
What makes the NR conundrum so multi-faceted is that despite the very obvious problems of infrastructure efficiency, lateness and overspend, I still believe we have the best railway we have ever had. A doubling of passenger figures from the BR legacy of 800 million a year to today’s 1.6 billion is as much about a better-quality privatised product as it is a reflection of a growing economy.
The post-2008 recession proved that the old link between GDP and rail use had been broken - rail growth barely faltered despite the worst global recession in living memory. Trains are a great idea whose time has come again - but the way we manage infrastructure, while delivering that excellent railway, is still too expensive and too inefficient. And the NR conundrum lies at the heart of that sweet and sour outcome.
Rail infrastructure is just too expensive for the private sector to provide and maintain and in any case good rail services are fundamental to national economic success and so it is right that the state plays the core role in providing it. Hence I have no problem with NR being nationalised. What I do have a problem with is the costly clutter and waste surrounding it, a legacy of what was necessary to underpin the fiction of a privatised status under which NR has laboured since birth. So let’s get rid of the pointless members and take a good look at ORR while we’re at it. The regulatory function performed in other fully privatised industries is an illusion in rail, and any fines imposed on today’s clearly nationalised infrastructure owner would be ludicrous. But you can’t effectively sort ORR until you decide what to do with NR!
The DfT might decide to take devolution to its limit and set up half a dozen independent NR regional entities, in which case ORR could have a major role in ensuring consistent standards and efficiencies, driven by inter-regional ‘competition’ and benchmarking. Maybe ORR could also have a role in ensuring retention of the benefits of scale in procurement.
But before DfT makes such seismic decisions it needs to figure
how much of this problem is structural and how much of it is just
crass management and incompetence? For example, the King’s
Cross christmas overrun flowed from problems including a contractor who thought it was acceptable to bring untried equipment onto a very sensitive possession. This was made worse by NR managers then.keeping ‘schtum’ for far too long about the scale of the problem. None of this is structural - it was all incompetence.
So is the NR problem about structure or expertise? How much of an issue is the perceived lack of enough rail and asset management expertise at the top of NR? Should we give Chief Executive Mark Carne and Managing Director of Network Operations Phil Hufton a beefed-up top team of proven calibre? This would be eminently possible very quickly and could yield some quick and positive results. I’d happily provide a list of suitable names, if required.
