It’s another wide-ranging column this month with, I hope, something for everyone. I’m keeping my promise not to return to the subject of electrification until the New Year, despite readers urging me to reconsider – there are some gluttons for punishment. But when the subject does reappear I will be able to draw on a mass of information from Informed Sources.
As many of you know I have been trying for two years now to become a Public Member of Network Rail. But before recounting my adventures, I thought it was time to explain in detail how the Governance of Network Rail is supposed to work, starting with the various classes of Members and their duties.
Having set the scene it’s time to move on to Resolution 10, put forward by ATOC members at this year’s Network Rail
As a Member of Network Rail, DfT Rail shares the duty of all members ‘to act in the best interests of the business without personal bias’. So what was one member doing trying to prevent other members fulfilling their duty in an attempt to avoid an embarrassing row?
As we all know, Resolution 10 was voted down. What was worrying, to me at least, was the reaction of the public members – typified by the letter in last month’s magazine. They seemed affronted that the TOCs should have the nerve to complain about ‘their’ company.
Which leads on to my application to become a public member: as everyone predicted, I failed to make even the shortlist for the second year running. Once again I asked for feedback on this failure and got the same pro-forma response as last year, which told me nothing.
When I asked for personal feedback I was told, ‘as a matter of policy the Membership Selection Panel does not provide specific feedback on the merits or demerits of individual applications. To do so would at the very least be misleading in that each application is not only judged on its on contents but importantly it is judged in the round with the other applications received as well as the Panel taking into account the composition of the existing Public Members’. This is known as the ‘balanced slate’.
Forgetting my personal involvement, and I am deadly serious, what these applications have shown is that selection is subjective. Network Rail can’t tell me where I fell short, only that I would have, presumably, tilted the ‘level slate’. With Network Rail getting £2.5 billion in direct grant, I would like to see more transparency in how the company is ‘held to account’.
Anyway, I’m not giving up. Conceivably, another white middle class, middle aged male living in the home counties and with a professional interest in railways may have retired by rotation next year and my chance to balance the ‘level slate’ may have come.
Last month I had a bit of fun with the reference to support for the railway ‘returning closer to the historic norm’ in the Sustainable railways White Paper. The indefatigable Miriam in the DfT Rail press office finally got someone in the Department to define the period of the historic norm and it turns out that civil servants look back fondly on the years from 1997/98 to 2001/02 ‘between privatisation and the collapse of Railtrack’.
I assume they chose 1997/98 since this was the year of the General election which brought Labour to power. But it does mean that the final year of this golden age is 2001/02, the first year of Control Period 2 when Rail Regulator Tom Winsor gave Railtrack more money.
I reckon that 1996/97-2000/01 – in other words the first Control Period, would have been more flattering to the privatised railway. But as you will see in the magazine, it makes little difference. Give or take only £50-75 million the average annual support is about £2 billion a year at current prices.
This compares with £3.5 billion a year in the Statement of Funds Available. But note that the aspiration is ‘closer to’ and DfT Rail emphasises that the ‘norm’ is not a target.
In the midst of the Competition Commission Inquiry into the rolling stock leasing market, Royal Bank of
This seems a lot compared with the £395 million paid by RBS in 1987. But as I explain, Angel has acquired something like £3.4 billion of new assets in the
Would anyone buy a ROSCO with the Competition Commission still inquiring? I see that as a minor issue compared with longer term threats. In particular, DfT Rail’s traction and rolling stock procurement strategy looks likely to freeze out the ROSCOs, as is already happening on the Intercity Express Programme (IEP).
Apply the IEP’s train service provision contract, with a consortium responsible for manufacture, long term maintenance and funding, to the replacement of the ex-BR EMU and DMU fleets, and the ROSCOs have a shrinking role in the domestic market. This is one reason why Angel is looking to double its existing £1 billion traction and rolling stock investment in mainland
Meanwhile, DfT Rail’s rolling stock ‘strategy’, expected in November, has slipped.
One of the aims of e-Preview is to pick up developments since the column went to press. In a speech to the Railway Forum’s Annual Symposium Transport Minister Tom Harris said that the Department now ‘aims’ to publish a ‘rolling stock plan’ by January next year. And it ‘won’t be a definitive carriage by carriage allocation’. Tom added that increasing capacity isn’t as easy as ‘simply ordering more rolling stock’.
Such vagueness can only increase the uncertainty for potential buyers of a ROSCO.
Having been critical of DfT Rail’s ‘magic bullet’ belief in ERTMS in the White paper, when it comes to Euro-politics I cannot fault their hard-nosed pragmatic realism. On 3 October the Department published its report to the European Commission on the implementation of ERTMS on the
While the National Implementation Plan (NIP) is a ‘political’ response to a European requirement, it has been developed with Network Rail and all the other industry players involved and represents the best view based on the information available. It lays out a programme for fitment to rolling stock and infrastructure which will eventually see 72% of the UK Network running under what is strictly ETCS – ERTMS, the overall train management system is a long way away.
Prudently the NIP is packed full of caveats and assumptions which will have to be met if the programme is to go ahead. It also highlights four UK-specific requirements, or ‘functionalities’ which will have to be resolved. In a jargon-rich environment can I commend ‘cold movement detection’ as the phrase of the month?
Two small ETCS ‘migration’ pilot schemes, on the Great Western and East Coast main lines, have been added to the programme as additions to the planned replacement of Radio Electronic Token Block (RETB) in East Anglia. Development of these new pilots will cost ‘around’ £80 million during Control Period 4. No figure is given for the cost of the programme as a whole
It’s been a very busy and interesting month since the last e-Preview, starting with my paper on train weights to the
Next came the first Fourth Friday Club of the new session. The room was packed to hear Bob Holden of London & Continental Railways talk about the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail link.
The following Monday there was a trade press dinner with Siemens and on the Thursday morning I went over to Hitchen to have a cataract operation on my ‘best’ eye. Fascinating to a techie, since it is done under local anaesthetic. This paralyses the optic nerve so (thankfully) you can’t see what is going on! I was home shortly after two. And next morning when I took off the dressing and untaped my eyelid the change was amazing.
So when it came to the Railway Forum annual seminar the following Tuesday I could read the smallest print on the Powerpoint presentations. I had a go at Transport Minister Tom Harris over his reply to a question on electrification. The word ‘disingenuous’ may have been used. Tom prefaced his answer with ‘I understand where you are coming from’.
Highlight of the week just past was a cracking conference on smart card ticketing. Sadly, I made such a nuisance in the Q&A session that a civil servant actually came up to me afterwards, with some consultancy muscle in support, to put me right. So that’s another subject for a future column.
November is fairly quiet until the end of the month when in the same week we have a major ERTMS conference organised by the IRSE and the Golden Spanner awards, which are now so popular that we have had to move the Fourth Friday Club to a larger venue.
Roger