DDRF ANNUAL CONFERENCE
A great future for the rail supply chain in Derby – DDRF conference 2014
Adam Hewitt reports from the annual Derby & Derbyshire Rail Forum conference, which attracted some of the biggest names in the industry from the DfT, Network Rail, the operators and the supply chain.
L
eading figures from across the industry addressed ‘the challenge of CP5’ at the
Derby & Derbyshire Rail Forum (DDRF) annual conference, while Network Rail finance director Patrick Butcher revealed more about the ongoing changes at the company.
Butcher was joined by other key leaders including transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin; the DfT’s director general of the new Rail Executive, Clare Moriarty; Stagecoach chief executive and Rail Delivery Group (RDG) chairman Martin Griffiths; RDG director general Michael Roberts; Rail Freight Group executive director Maggie Simpson; and Carillion’s Paul Paddick.
The conference on 10 April was preceded by a dinner, addressed by shadow transport minister Lilian Greenwood MP, who was supportive of HS2 in her speech.
change”, she said) and the new people running franchising. But she explained that it is currently relying for 50% of its 100- 120 staff on limited-term contracts and secondments from the wider industry. She said a managing director is soon to be recruited for the new Office of Rail Passenger Services (ORPS) within the Rail Executive, to be launched in the autumn to handle franchise delivery and management.
Setting the context of rail’s recent growth – and the capacity challenges this has created – she also discussed the new Rail Supply Group, helping supply chain businesses grow and export.
Network Rail – spending but also cuts
Many of the speakers discussed the £38bn investment programme for CP5 in renewals, maintenance, enhancements and upgrades, as covered in detail previously in RTM.
But Patrick Butcher said there were
“misconceptions” that Network Rail – now reclassified as part of the public sector – had a “hosepipe of cash” coming in. In fact, it has just cut the number of management-grade jobs by 15%.
HS2 was also a big part of McLoughlin’s speech, as it has been at most of his public events since taking up his post 18 months ago. He also said there was “tangible evidence” that his government’s growth policies had helped the rail supply chain in Derby, and discussed training and skills in the rail industry.
Rail Executive
Moriarty explained more about the changes at the DfT, the formation of the Rail Executive from 1 April (an “evolution, not a radical
26 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 14
He explained: “We’re supposed to have lots more money. It doesn’t feel like that, I can tell you; we’ve just done a 15% staff reduction across all the management grades at Network Rail. 1,100 people have left the company over the last couple of months, and some will go over the next couple of months. It doesn’t feel like [there’s] a great big hosepipe of cash pouring into the company.”
When the management-grade job cuts were originally announced in September 2013, the TSSA union said it was in “shock” at the
Site supervision overhaul
Butcher also gave more details about the upcoming changes to site supervision, in which site safety and project supervision will be rolled into one post. RTM has covered these changes before, but Butcher confirmed the changes are coming in towards the end of this year. As Steve Hooker and Simon Kirby have noted in RTM, the current structure can mean situations where there is “someone from potentially the second or third tier running safety…Are they really going to feel accountable to stop the job when the person they’re trying to stop will decide whether they’ve got a job again next week?”
Butcher focused on the absolute commitment to safety, and the fact that the railways remain
scale of the cuts and their possible impact, “in particular the effect on safety and on the workload of those who may be left behind”. It opposed compulsory redundancies.
A ‘golden age’?
Discussing the efficiency agenda, Butcher said: “We took 15% [of costs] out during CP4, a bit less than we meant to, largely because of problems we had with track renewals, and those problems will continue into CP5. The impact of that should come through in reduced subsidy.
“This has got to be a grown-up debate. There is no hiding from the choice that if you put money into the railway and you expect the railway to fund the interest costs of the investment that has gone in, costs are still going to go up or stay flat.”
He spoke of a “golden age of rail investment”, but hinted that there would be “funding crunches” to come in the next decade.
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