It’s been a tough week for DfT. First, @NAOorguk published a damning report making clear DfT had made a hash of pretty much every aspect of rail ‘reform’ since the Williams Plan was published. The NAO concluded “DfT is not yet set up to secure value for money from its work to reform rail.” Depressing, since they’ve had 3 years to do so and the Williams Plan itself wasn’t written overnight. We might now conclude they are incapable of doing it though we should not be surprised. DfT have an awful track record of leading major projects (HS2), leading operational performance improvements or just about anything when it comes to managing risk in complex commercial environments. This has not stopped them thinking they can though. The week’s second DfT ‘moment’ is yet another reorganisation. More ‘deckchairs on the Titanic’? No, possibly worse, with the creation of a new Rail Infrastructure and Services Delivery Group - DG yet to be announced. This snappily entitled super group is apparently going to be “focused on the day to day operational performance of the railway” - yet it’s the one thing everyone else connected with the railway agrees the DfT should be nowhere near. Not content with dozens of people already employed in GBRTT at taxpayers’ expense planning how to bring infrastructure & operations together, the DfT have decided to set up a new group to double guess them. Sadly, this is a typical response from a government dept faced with a colossal problem of their own making - set up more oversight, more so- called governance and more debilitating red tape in the name of getting a grip. Instead, they should take an axe to their own organisation. Hopefully @LouHaigh will do so when she gets the chance.
The penny has still not yet dropped with DfT officials or Ministers that the common thread to the problems of the last 10 years - is the DfT. They are doing (or trying to do) things they are sadly lacking in the skills and experience to do. It needs to stop. Remarkably, there are still a sufficient number of high calibre rail managers who can get us out of this mess but they need to be liberated, empowered and held accountable to get us back on track. Time is running out though. We do not need any more hapless Sir Humphreys. We do not need more reorganisations and I’m not sure we even need the Rail Reform Bill in its current form. Instead of creating the yearned for simplicity, it seems hell bent instead on replacing one form of contractual matrix with another, and no fewer interfaces in the process. No, we need strong leadership and clear direction from within, not without. We need to focus on delivering a safe, boring, predictable, reliable and simpler railway. If we can do that and be allowed to get on with it - growing the railway and its revenue in the process as we would - we wouldn’t mind politicians taking the credit for
it in due course. After all, there are some things that will never change!
They don't work with our driver mobilisation times on diagrams and often causes delays.
