Railtalk
Speaking to the Retired Railway Officers’ Society on 8 May, Office of Rail & Road Chairman Professor Stephen Glaister was characteristically forthright. Just over three years into Control Period 5 (2014-19) and Network Rail’s financial system is becoming difficult.
Actually, we must watch the tense of that sentence. At the excellent IMechE conference on electrification on 6 June, an engineer warned that the industry was sleepwalking into making electrification uneconomic; here again, the choice of tense is questionable.
Electrification is surely already unaffordable and Network Rail is expected to run out of funds for maintenance and renewals by the final year of CP5. ‘Difficult’ is here and now and Network Rail’s suppliers are already feeling the pain.
Given that we are in the midst of ‘the greatest investment in the railways since Victorian times’, how can this be, when the Regulatory determination of Network Rail’s income in CP5 included £3 billion for maintenance, £12 billion for renewals and £13 billion for enhancements?
Prof Glaister had the simple answer. Efficiency is going in the wrong direction, unit costs are going up and the financial headroom, now capped by the Treasury, is ‘very narrow’.
