Nigel Harris assesses the chance to set our railways on a new course.

We face a unique opportunity - but will you seize it?

RON Howard’s Apollo 13 is a great movie. One powerful scene shows ‘techies’ seeking a way to prevent the three astronauts being killed by carbon monoxide in the tiny lunar module.

An engineer brandishes a square filter: “We’ve got to find a way to make this fit into the hole made for this [a round filter] - using nothing but that…” From an upturned box cascades pieces of pipe, hose, gaffer tape, ring binder flight manuals, food bags, water bottles and other bits and pieces in the spacecraft.

DfT officials are confronting a similar problem. They must develop a workable new structure to operate our railway efficiently and encourage/enable growth. It is not enough just to run the trains. And they have to do it quickly (existing emergency passenger contracts expire in September), using only what they have to hand. There is just no time for the two years required to legislate to create new bodies.

They must avoid ‘letting the perfect be the enemy of the good’. They must avoid the easy option of full public command and control which would lead to a merely adequate railway. That won’t be efficient, it won’t satisfy passengers, it won’t give good value for money, and it won’t enable or encourage the growth needed to ensure the railway plays its part in restoring our economy.

So, what does a post-COVID-19 sustainable, efficient and growing railway look like? And what are the fundamentals not just driving, but also hampering, decision-making?

Firstly, how can we plan a railway when we don’t know how many commuters there will be, how often they will travel, or what leisure market will emerge? We will not see a return to previous passenger levels possibly for many years (if ever), so we should not return to the previous timetable. Running even 95% would instantly decongest the network, leading to improved performance, punctuality and resilience. A relatively easy win.

The railway’s budget is blown. Collapsed revenues and passenger growth uncertainties mean that asking the private sector to take revenue/GDP risk is a non-starter. That risk will remain with Government. But where do we go from there?

The word ‘concessions’ naturally follows - but there are problems, however. Where concessions succeed (Merseyrail, London Overground) that is not merely a function of an excellent concession holder. Success demands an expert, informed client. That client must not only be well-resourced, it must also understand its market in detail in order to properly plan an efficient, popular and growing service.

Merseytravel and Transport for London do all these things (and more besides) very well, but the DfT does not have such expertise. DfT would need an expert arm’s length body to serve as that informed client, to draw up effective concessions. Williams was heading for just such a body (with DfT support), but I fear that has now changed. Mood music suggests that the arm’s length body proposed by Williams and supported at the time by the DfT is no longer on the agenda. Look at the No. 10 of Dominic Cummings - you don’t hear much cheering for Public Health England and scientific advisory group SAGE. The omens are not good for new public bodies in more ways than the time needed to set up a railway body.

Which brings me to Network Rail. Both the Daily Telegraph and The Times have been running woolly news stories in July about NR being ‘handed control’. Hmm. These look to me like DfT ‘punts’ to test reactions.

Traditional vocal opposition from train operating companies and owning groups to enhancing NR’s role would be largely silenced in a post-franchise world of concession holders who do not bear risk. That also leads to another problem. If you remove revenue risk from a private operator, you seriously blunt the sharp commercial edge needed to drive all-round improvement. How do you replace this? An informed concession manager would probably propose a passenger volume incentive alongside customer service scores.

There’s also a legal question as to whether NR has the necessary legislative authority. But NR already exists under DfT control and it has impressed during the pandemic. It is a key component of DfT’s Apollo 13 toolkit. This might not be an ideal solution, but it is expedient.

Giving NR a leading role would further solve a long-standing problem: who is in charge? Keith Williams’ review grew out of the May 2018 timetable meltdown when even Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling realised that someone other than the SoS needed to be in charge.

Three areas are potentially politically fatal for a SoS. They are a major accident detonating a safety scandal, a major industrial relations disaster, and operational fiascos such as the May 2018 timetable chaos. In the current model, Government not only cannot avoid blame for such developments, the problems of political reality and its lack of expertise mean that it also cannot put them right. And no one else is empowered to do so. What a mess.

How do others do it? The London Mayor does not run (and is not accountable for) transport delivery. Mayors Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan had Transport Commissioners Bob Kiley, Peter Hendy and Mike Brown (now Andy Byford) for that. Mayors were able to say: “Deliver me X, Y and Z - or you’re fired.” The SoS has not been able to say this about the national network since Alistair Darling scrapped the Strategic Rail Authority in 2004.

In the unavoidable realities of the moment, NR could be thus reconfigured/rebooted, allowing the SoS to say to its NR CEO and Chairman: “Give me what passengers and freight operators want, at this cost and in this timescale, or be fired.” Accountability and responsibility for rail strategy and delivery could finally be reunited for the first time since 2004.

Grayling understood this only too clearly after May 2018 - and it’s not a question you can fudge. The problem for politicians and officials is that you cannot put NR (or anyone else) ‘in charge’ without handing over the powers currently wielded by DfT officials. That has been the core of the problem since 2004.

We urgently need an aspirational, ambitious railway which can give politicians what they want through an agility that no government department could ever sustain. We need a railway which adds value to a rising economy by growing with it - rather than a pedestrian railway which is merely a dead weight of cost.

If Grant Shapps fudges this fundamental question in the next two months, the trains will continue to run - but the railway will yet again drift off in the wrong direction. A unique and historic opportunity, born of the pandemic, to set our railway on a new course, will have been lost. Fudge this question again and our best chance for rail to generate the best value for the British economy will have been squandered. Again.

Your call, Grant.

“Accountability and responsibility for rail strategy and delivery could finally be reunited for the first time since 2004.”