(Agence France Presse distributed the following article on October 17.)
LONDON — Britain’s run-down train network needs nearly eight billion pounds of public money spent on it in the next five years to improve services, the country’s rail watchdog said.
The government-appointed Rail Regulator Tom Winsor said that urgently needed repairs and improvements to rail infrastructure required government spending of 22.7 billion pounds rather than 15 billion pounds as budgeted for earlier.
The sums — far in excess of what Britain’s government had planned to spend — highlight the dilapidated state of the country’s rail network since it was privatised and broken up in 1996.
Such problems were emphasised by Winsor in his draft final conclusions on the rail network’s funding requirements for the five years from April 2004, published on Friday.
There he emphasised the task faced by Network Rail (NR), the non-profit private company set up by the government to run rail lines and stations after previous incumbent Railtrack went bust in 2001.
NR had inherited from Railtrack “a legacy of poor planning and project delivery; inadequate arrangements for managing suppliers and subcontractors; poor customer focus; and an insufficient grasp of the causes of and cures for poor day-to-day performance,” Winsor said.
However NR itself also had “huge inefficiencies”, Winsor added, costing up to 30 percent of its total spending. The extra money will be conditional on the company improving its performance.
“My draft conclusions mean that NR will receive through access charges more funding than at present, in return for which it must increase the amount and quality of maintenance and renewal work that it undertakes, delivering genuine improvements in the overall condition of the network,” he said.
“That, in turn, will mean a more punctual and reliable railway.”
Critics of railway privatisation charge that the fragmentation it caused — Railtrack was tasked with running stations and line infrastructure, while a series of other private firms ran trains — led to confusion and mismanagement.
They point particularly to a series of fatal train crashes since the abolition of the old publicly-run British Rail, such as the May 2002 accident at Potters Bar, north of London, which killed seven people and injured 76 more.
Safety inspectors later blamed poorly maintained track — work which was farmed out by Railtrack to yet another private firm — for the crash.
Winsor’s funding plans were hailed by passenger groups and trade unions Friday as an important step forwards for a rail network that many Britons decry as out-of-date, dirty and unreliable.
However Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, part of a Labour government deeply sensitive to accusations it already spends too much taxpayers’ money, was cagey as to whether the plan would be approved.
“Before we ask anyone to put their hands into their pockets, we have to be satisfied that every pound we spend on the railways actually brings a pound’s worth of benefit, and that has not been the case in the past,” he told BBC radio.