COMMENT
Centro chief executive Geoff Inskip, who chairs the Passenger Transport Executive Group (pteg), speaks to RTM about the prospects for more control over rail budgets and decisions being devolved from the centre.
E
nough time has now passed since the release of Sir Roy McNulty’s value for
money study for key players in the industry to get a sense of whether his recommenda- tions are being taken seriously. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) was set up imme- diately and has met twice – although the separate ‘independent change team’ seems to have been killed off.
So what fate awaits Sir Roy’s recommenda- tion on devolving more railway budgets and decision-making to the Passenger Trans- port Executives (PTEs) and local authori- ties? He said there was “substantial scope” for this, thanks to their local knowledge of spending trade-offs “and hence mode sub- stitution”, and the potential for improved utilisation through better integration with other modes and services in the local area. He said locally-made decisions on infra- structure, such as heavy-to-light rail con- versions, could have more public support than those seen to be ‘imposed’ from Lon- don.
RTM spoke to the chair of the Passenger Transport Executive Group (pteg), Geoff Inskip, who is also chief executive of West Midlands PTE Centro, to get his thoughts on progress so far.
He said: “I think some progress has been made. Obviously the Rail Delivery Group has been set up, and that’s kicking things off. But there is a lot of work to do, I think. It’s accepted that there’s no particular one thing they have to concentrate on, but a whole raft of things. It’s about bringing the industry together.
“McNulty talks about fragmentation in the industry, incentives needing to be in the right place, and the industry needs to work together to make sure that takes place.
“The RDG is a good starting point for it. We’ll all have to wait and see how it actually gets on. McNulty certainly identified where there is a big scope to make big change, and let’s hope the train operating companies and Network Rail, jointly through the RDG, can make good progress.”
As a nation state, the UK is remarkably centralised and unitary by European stand- ards, especially in public finance terms, notwithstanding devolution to Scotland
24 | rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 11
and Wales, and Northern Ireland having its own approach to railways through Trans- link.
We asked Inskip for his thoughts on cen- tralism and devolution, and he said: “It’s interesting, isn’t it – everybody else across Europe decentralises, we seem to bring all the monetary issues back into the centre all the time, and concentrate very much on central control.
“It’s about the ability to identify ‘who knows best’ for the passengers in their area. Clear- ly, we are responding all the time to what passengers want. We know what our local communities need, and therefore we’re well-placed to identify what that need is and ensure it’s properly served.
“I do accept that on the railway, local ser- vices do not run in isolation from inter-city services, cross-country services, and the rest, so there needs to be a co-ordination role there so the railway as a whole works in a positive way.
“It’s important that it is co-ordinated so that where compromises have to be made, people can get around the table and make those compromises.
“But nevertheless, on a local footing, we do feel that we’ve got local overcrowding on our trains and we need to resolve this. At the moment, it’s not being resolved in London, so we feel again that there’s a good case for us to be resolving those issues by paying for those local additional services on a local basis.”
For his part, Transport Secretary Philip
Hammond says he recognises the issue, saying: “We will work towards devolving more responsibility for commissioning services from the centre to local bodies, which have greater accountability to local communities and passengers, and a better understanding about the local consequenc- es of the decisions that they take and the priorities that they set.”
But one of Sir Roy’s concerns about devolv- ing more money and power to the local level is that he wants the over-riding focus to be on cutting unit costs; he suggests, pointedly, that PTEs and local authorities might be too keen to be crowd-pleasing, and could choose to focus their energies on cutting fares and increasing services, rather than devoting themselves to making the railway cheaper overall.
He also notes a number of other possible barriers: the potential for loss of econo- mies of scale and density, transition costs, a loss on alignment between the service provider and the infrastructure provider, a failure to optimise the network (for freight, for example), a “spreading and thinning” or procurement expertise, an increase in overheads and organisational boundaries, and a potential inability to co-ordinate be- tween the PTEs, councils, regions and the Government because of their “widely dif- ferent” priorities. He does, however, also suggest potential mitigation measures to avoid each of these pitfalls.
He concludes: “A resolution of the above is- sues would open the way for greater local- ism, with more involvement in England of local authorities and/or PTEs and with lo- cal decision-making brought more closely
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