Britain’s infrastructure manager Network Rail is in the midst of a huge investment programme to modernise the railway and expand capacity, while at the same time trying to reduce costs. David Briginshaw talks exclusively to Network Rail’s CEO Sir David Higgins about the challenges the organisation faces.
ggins steers work Railʼs pacity
uplift
Punctuality has improved dramatically from a nadir of 78% in 2001-02 to 91.4% today, while NR has taken maintenance in-house to give it far better control of the cost and management of maintaining the infrastructure than Railtrack ever achieved. Its maintenance philosophy has changed from “find and fix” to “predict and prevent,” and there has been a concerted effort to understand the condition of the assets and to improve safety.
N NR has been quite successful in
reducing costs during the last few years, so I started by asking Sir David Higgins, NR’s CEO, how this has been achieved? “At the start of Control Period 4 (CP4) in 2009 we launched a company-wide transformation plan to address the challenge of increasing efficiencies by £5bn - that’s an average saving of £2.7m every day in CP4,” he replies. “Major initiatives included a review of our asset policies, improved work bank planning, increased use of competitive tendering, improved maintenance productivity and the creation of our operations strategy to move more signalling and control into regional control centres.
“Last year we devolved a much
greater level of decision-making to our routes and launched a review of the way we manage the delivery of our infrastructure projects,” Higgins continues.
Another initiative last year was the
creation of an alliance between NR’s Wessex route and South West Trains which Higgins says should help “drive out duplication of work.” He says the alliance has initiated new-found
CP3 covers April 1 2004 to March 31 2009, which means NR is currently in CP4 which started in April 1 2009 and ends in March 31 2014. The next period is CP5 which will run from
N
ETWORK Rail divides its spending periods into five- year Control Periods (CP).
ETWORK Rail (NR) has come a long since it took over from Railtrack in October 2002.
cooperation and mutual trust between NR and SWT staff. “With one unified management team, it is now irrelevant - as well as increasingly difficult to tell - which parent organisation each person comes from,” Higgins reveals. “NR staff now have a better understanding of the impact of our work on the train operating company and passengers, and SWT has a greater understanding of the issues we face in gaining access to the track for essential maintenance and renewal. Both sides can see that there are few easy wins, but more to gain by working closely together. For example, we have been able to rebalance priorities on key stretches from Wimbledon and Barnes into London Waterloo and we expect greater efficiencies as we transfer capital budgets into the Alliance.” Nevertheless Higgins does not regard alliances as a panacea. “It will not be replicated wholesale across the country,” he says. “The key to improving performance is understanding the nuances and the differences in each area and making sure that our solutions - whether through an alliance or other forms of closer working - deliver the best possible results.” The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) has been relentlessly trying to drive down NR’s costs, and the 2011 McNulty report put Britain’s national railway in a poor light compared with other European rail networks. So the question is whether NR can continue to cut costs. Higgins believes NR can: “In our strategic business plan we have shown that, following a 27% efficiency improvement in CP3 and 20% in CP4, we believe we can continue to reduce costs in CP5 by a further 18%,” he
Network Rail jargon-buster
April 1 2014 to March 31 2019. NR is divided into 10 “routes” which
are actually geographic areas each covering part of the 32,000km network. There are eight routes in England plus one each for Wales and Scotland. The routes broadly mirror the larger passenger franchises.
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Photo: Stu Thomas
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