The Railways Bill is expected to be in parliament later this year, but rail minister Lord Hendy wants work to integrate track and train to start today

 
The Railways Bill is expected to be in parliament later this year, but rail minister Lord Hendy wants work to integrate track and train to start today

 
Legislation to reform Britain’s railways and establish Great British Railways is expected later this year, but rail minister Lord Hendy has urged the industry not to wait before making improvements.

Addressing an audience of 200 people at this week’s Transport Times UK Rail Summit in London, Lord Hendy, the former chair of Network Rail, said: “I am expecting the Railways Bill to be in parliament later this year … I’ve already learnt as a politician that you don’t predict weeks, months or even seasons but I’d certainly expect it if not before the summer then immediately afterwards.”

However, he urged the railway not to waste time while waiting for its implementation, stating: “We can’t wait for legislation to kick in before we make progress.”

He said that GBR could begin making improvements in shadow form today, helping GBR to “hit the ground running” when the legislation finally comes.

Lord Hendy said: “What I want most of all, and what I am most passionate about, is that as we progressively take passenger operations back into public ownership, we progressively see, for the first time for 30-odd years, pieces of railways that somebody can get their arms around – run by one person who runs the operations, the infrastructure, the rolling stock, the commercial activities, and of course, all the staff and management under their control, so that their failures and delays meetings are not contractual, are not about allocating financial penalties, but actually about fixing yesterday’s failures today so they don’t happen tomorrow.”

He recalled the collapse of Tube infrastructure company Metronet in 2009, during his time at Transport for London. It led to track and train being reunited at London Underground. The day after, TfL got rid of 50 lawyers whose job was to argue contractually about the attribution of the previous day’s delays.

This year you’ll see people start to be in charge of pieces of the railway who can be directly held responsible

“It will work, and the railway is full of good people who can make it work better if they don’t spend all their time reading contracts, finding out how to make 0.001% margin on them, and actually not working in the interests of passengers,” said Hendy.

“I can see it daily on my journey to work … Driving trains into infrastructure failures because it’s marginally beneficial to the operator to do so is the wrong way of running a railway – and I’m really, really passionate about it.”

“This year, you’ll see people start to be in charge of pieces of the railway who can be directly held responsible for the performance of the railway on an hourly and daily basis … That is how you drive performance and that is how you drive revenue. It’s also how you reduce costs.”

 
Funding infrastructure

Hendy called for a rethink of how major infrastructure projects are funded, pointing out that the Crossrail was built with the financial assistance of Canary Wharf, who also built the station.

People are already taking great advantage of the wealth and increased connectivity we bring

“The most scandalous thing of all at HS2, in my opinion, is that when you roll into New Street and look at the skyline of Birmingham, it’s full of cranes,” he said. “People are already taking great advantage of the wealth and increased connectivity we bring – but not a penny of the growth in land values and everything that goes with it is attributed to HS2.”

 
Reforming rail retail

Hendy also repeated his calls for better retailing. “We have to sort out a railway whose retail offer is so complex that nobody understands it,” he said. “It is extraordinary that the railway is a retail environment in which people prefer to buy your products from somebody else than you … If you were John Lewis and Sainsbury’s were able to sell your products more reliably than you, you’d do something about it
– and GBR needs to do that.”

 
‘There’s tons of demand’

Vernon Everitt, transport commissioner for Greater Manchester, struck an optimistic note when he told the conference: “There’s tons of demand out there if you get the service right.”

Offering an example, he pointed out that demand for travel on Manchester’s Metrolink light rail network is now well ahead of pre-Covid pandemic levels.

However, he urged investment in public transport to be viewed in the context of its wider benefits and not through P&Ls. “If you just look at it through that narrow prism, you wouldn’t do anything, actually,” he explained.

 
This article appears in the latest issue of Passenger Transport.

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