The Strategic Plan launch document <
https://gbrtt.co.uk/call-for-evidence-launch-document/> makes it clear that three time periods are being considered:
- The short term: the five-year period from delivery of the Strategic Plan in 2022.
- The medium term: the next ten years, which is the timeframe in which we expect to have moderate levels of certainty in our project planning and sequencing.
- The long term: the thirty years up to 2052, which are highly uncertain and unpredictable, making it all the more important that the rail system is prepared for a number of different scenarios that will be able to adapt to the challenges that the future holds.
The short term is manageable, the medium term less so and the long term is simply fiction as the launch document suggests. So much can change in 30 years — technically, socially, financially, politically — that it is, frankly, fortune telling.
So, my take on the whole thing is that the Williams-Shapps report was a smoke screen — following the civil service’s unwritten rule of ‘do not embarrass the Minister’ — to try to deflect attention from the complete horlicks that the DfT and Treasury has made of franchising since the days of the Strategic Rail Authority by demanding of each franchisee:
- a given financial return
- a defined service level and making it a contractual matter
- controlling the fares which may be offered.
It is possible to define two of these three as a requirement if the franchisee is allowed to manage the other one. Specifying all three will lead to bankruptcy as was shown in a similar case in California where the energy supplier, Pacific Gas and Electric, was also hog-tied and folded.
To compound the misery, the Government also agreed/specified infrastructure changes which were not necessarily aligned to franchise specifications or what the train operators needed. The GW electrification specification and the East Coast power upgrades being examples.
And all of this tight control has not prevented the cost runaway which was apparent even before Covid.
The politicians and civil servants producing the Williams-Shapps plan have made the classic mistake of assuming that the root of the problems lie in the structure of the organisation. It doesn’t, the root of the problems lie in the confused and incompatible incentives placed before the management. If these incentives are unclear or mutually incompatible it will all end in tears.
This is where getting the aims or incentives for the new situation right is vital. The structure of the organisation should not be incompatible with the incentives.
So the question remains, what should the aims/incentives of GBR be?
- To operate within an annual financing limit of £n-billion?
- To operate within an annual financing limit of £n-billion decreasing by x% per year?
- To operate with no funding from Government?
- To operate so that fare and fee income covers day-to-day costs?
- To maintain current fare and fee income?
- To continue to operate the same train service?
- To make it possible to travel by train to any settlement with more than, say, 12,000 inhabitants?
- Increase the modal share of rail travel by m% in five years?
- To ensure that everyone gets a seat regardless of route or time of day?
- To ensure that anyone arriving with a bicycle can put in on a train?
- Level boarding everywhere?
- To operate without fossil fuels?
- Etc.
- Etc.
You, as the Government can select one, and one only, of the above and accept the financial and political fall-out. How the aim is achieved must be left to the direction and management of GBR.
Which will it be?
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