JACK SHORT, the recently appointed Secretary General of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, had an important message for delegates to the 28th IRCA-UIC Congress in Wien at the end of September. He said governments must provide a framework for railways that encourages innovation and productivity and that gives them the right incentives to develop to meet tomorrow’s demands. This means ’increased freedom of management to respond to the needs of the market’.
Whether similar considerations were in the mind of Stephen Byers, Britain’s Secretary of State for Transport, when he turned off Railtrack’s blood supply on October 7 (p746), is not known. His decision is momentous, for it signals the end of the private railway structure developed by the Conservative government in the early 1990s. Predictably, there was rejoicing among his fellow Labour politicians and shrieks of outrage from Railtrack’s shareholders. Within the industry there will be few people who will rue the demise of an organisation that acquired special expertise in inflating the cost of major projects and spending large sums of money without improving the 16666 km network.
Byers’ action has, initially at least, added further turmoil to what was already chaos. His earlier rejection of long-term franchising (RG 8.01 p491) put an end to hopes of a long-term programme of investment to expand and upgrade the network. It also scared off interest from railways outside Britain - Swiss Federal Railways confirmed on October 9 that it had downgraded its bidding partnership with construction company John Laing to become a consultant.
More immediately, despite Byers’ assurances that the government remains committed to spend £30bn over the next 10 years, there is a danger that this, and matching money from the private sector, will be siphoned off to pay for premature installation of ETCS. Back in March, in their report on train protection systems, Lord Cullen and Professor Uff called for ETCS to be made mandatory by 2008 on all routes where trains exceed 160 km/h (RG 5.01 p295). Current figures suggest that this will absorb up to £5·8bn, excluding the West Coast Main Line.
We always regarded the ability of the private sector to manage the transformation of the West Coast route into a 225 km/h high capacity trunk line as the true test of success, and last month’s news that the cost had escalated to over £8bn gives some indication of how spectacularly it has failed. We understand that Virgin and Railtrack were on the point of agreeing to scale back the second stage of the upgrading programme when Railtrack was forced into administration. What can be conjured up in the fresh world of Phoenixtrack is anybody’s guess, but it is certain that more public funding will be needed.
Byers gave few indications to Parliament on October 15 of the structure of Phoenixtrack, nor of the future overall shape of the industry. On the other hand, there are strong indications that the Department for Transport, Local Government & the Regions had been planning for more direct control of the railway before October 7.
Time and effort expended by the Strategic Rail Authority in developing its Strategic Plan have been wasted, and as SRA Chairman Sir Alastair Morton warned the Parliamentary Transport Sub-Committee on October 17, this may be the last chance to save the railway: ’if we muddle along too much, the patient will die’, he said.
Byers would do well to pay heed, and to take note of what Jack Short had to say. If the future structure of Britain’s railway is as badly wrong as that dreamt up by Byers’ predecessors, the outlook is bleak indeed. Freedom to manage and a clear-cut relationship between government and railway are essential for success.
- Rail Regulator Tom Winsor announced on October 18 that charges paid by freight operators for use of the British network will be halved. The shortfall, estimated at £500m over the 2001-06 control period, is to be funded by the SRA.
