Network
Contributing Writer rail@bauermedia.co.uk
ENGLISH train operating company leaders are calling on the Government to offer more freedom with contracts, in order to bring more investment and revenue into the rail industry.
Southeastern Managing Director Steve White told the Railway Industry Association annual conference in London in November: “Southeastern has been on short-term contracts since 2014, and some of that shows.
“If you commute into London you might travel on a Networker that is the same vintage as a Ford Sierra. And I can confidently say that if I ask people to stand up in the room if you commuted today in a Ford Sierra, there wouldn’t be many standees.
“We want to make this case for investment. If we invest, we support the supply chain and the wider economy. And if we do the right solutions and deliver them on time and on budget, we can deliver for customers, which in turn brings additional revenue and drives down our subsidy, and creates headroom for future investment.”
White added that Southeastern “takes taxpayer subsidy of over £1 million a day” and argued that the industry as a whole needs to “become financially sustainable”. South Western Railway MD Claire Mann took a similar view, telling delegates: “I now cannot just do what I want with my budget, unless it has been agreed in advance on an annual basis with the Department for Transport. The freedom to just do stuff has gone, and the new financial reality is a massive gap that we need to fill.”
She added: “There’s no point in running a business that has a finishing date of May 2025 [when the current National Rail contract expires].
“We need to look at what the business wants to be. The railway is at the heart of everything, to connect our people -our customers -with their lives and their jobs and the economy. And if we cannot look to the future of the railways and have vision for what that should be, we should give up now.”
Mann said discussions with the DfT about moving to revenue-based contracts were ongoing, but cautioned: “We’re not at a place to agree to that yet, but it is certainly being discussed.
“We really need to look at what we can do in terms of understanding our markets and growing our revenue, but the challenge is that the cost case is the focus at the
