Peer review: Michael Holden
Chief Executive, Directly Operated Railways
I have a degree of sympathy for Network Rail. It is a large and complex beast at the centre of a tightly constrained and regulated jungle. There is no shortage of people who want to control, cajole, or otherwise bend it to their own will. And it has been buffeted by stormy weather ever since its creation 13 years ago.
Safety systems, culture and outcomes have been steadily improving during this time. Mark Carne has made occupational safety his special area of focus, and this is to be welcomed as perhaps long overdue.
While good safety ought to go hand in hand with good planning, and lead in turn to good performance and efficiency, there is the opportunity for disconnects when workforce safety is tackled independently from the rest of the operation. For example, the major push away from red zone working has led to inefficiencies in maintenance and renewals work, as the planning horizon is still far too long to cope with events on the network that require remedial infrastructure intervention. It has also pushed much more work into night-time and weekend possessions, which can cost up to four times as much and disrupt revenue-earning traffic.
What has been needed to go with this push is a major overhaul of possession and isolation procedures. These are frankly archaic. The whole industry should accept responsibility for this failure, including RSSB and ORR, and a degree of urgency needs to be applied to modernising this key area of railway activity. A standardised, cyclical possession programme, with train protection contained within signalling centres and isolations protected by mechanised earthing, remotely controlled, is all practicable today if the industry wills the means to make it happen. This would lead to major improvements in safety, efficiency and (in due course) performance.
The other big area for concern is infrastructure safety. Much has improved in culture and process since the set of major accidents from Clapham Junction in 1988 to Grayrigg in 2007. The risk of a catastrophe caused by signalling system or track component failure is now reduced. Level crossings have probably been the biggest single-risk area in the past decade, and a growing one, but there is now a real appetite within NR to contain and reduce it.
Nowadays, I worry most about the risks arising from structural and earthworks failures. The bridge and tunnel estate is becoming ever older, and there are signs that assessments and remedial works have not received the focus they deserve. This cannot continue, or it will end in disaster. Equally, the condition of embankments and cuttings, along with drainage of the formation itself, was not seen as sexy during the Railtrack era. There is a large amount of work to do here to bring the building blocks of our permanent way up to an acceptable condition.
In summary, Network Rail needs to be cut some slack to tackle the infrastructure areas I have highlighted. Equally the industry needs to support it to modernise the possessions regime. I would prefer to see more resource being applied here over the next five years - if necessary, at the expense of pausing one or two other enhancement schemes.
