The UK rail industry is on the verge of a long overdue transformation. "I've been waiting for reform since the timetable crisis of 2018," Lord Hendy told a packed audience at the Transport Times Rail Summit this week. As rail minister he will have a key role in steering the complex legislation to set up Great British Railways as a single "directing mind" for both track and train through Parliament. In turn, this will transform the culture of the railways where, currently, any problem results in a dispute between track and train operators over where blame lies.
The former commissioner of transport for London and chair of Network Rail said: "When anything went wrong at TfL it was in the end my fault. There was no one else to blame. What you want is not recourse to blame, but someone to fix the problem."
A consultation on the forthcoming Railways Act opened last month. Hendy said he expected the bill to be presented to Parliament later this year. Once it receives Royal Assent, GBR "will be up and running within 12 months". But preparations were already in hand: "We're already doing what we can now, so GBR can hit the ground running," he said.
Setting up GBR will be a hugely complex task, however. Transport Focus chief executive Alex Robertson warned the session on Getting the Basics Right of the pitfalls that could await rail reform – on the basis that with forewarning, they could be guarded against.
GBR would bring together 17 different organisations and 100,000 people. There was a risk all the focus would be on making the new structure work, on engineering, operations and process, so that customer focus and the opportunities to do things differently are missed. Creating a customer-focused organisation meant "getting 100,000 people behind it". Long-term solutions to create rosters that work and a workforce that feels "empowered and supported" were needed.
There was also a risk that the DfT might "never lose the habit of micromanagement" so that GBR is never truly able to plan long-term.
The new organisational culture would be key. Quoting the saying "culture eats strategy for breakfast", he said "strategy and plans are important, but we won't get those right if we don't have a customer-focused culture".
Chief executive of Transport for All Caroline Stickland voiced concerns about accessibility. Last year a Transport Select Committee inquiry into accessibility concluded disabled people are being let down and called for a long-term plan to achieve equal access to transport.
Instead, she said, the Rail Reform consultation "does not include a clear requirement to engage disabled passengers", and it "omits earlier proposals to deliver the necessary steps toward real, meaningful change – repeating the same pattern the Transport Select Committee warned against."
Calling for support from those in the room and those in power, and said: "If we want a rail network that gets the basics right, we must have legislation that enables this. History has shown that without statutory obligations and strong regulatory enforcement, progress on accessibility stalls."
Cllr Liam Robinson, leader of Liverpool City Council, said that procurement of Merseyrail's new train fleet was "a once in a generation opportunity" to address the problem of level access between trains and platforms. The new Class 777s feature a sliding step which senses the platform edge and adjusts itself accordingly. Even so, around 100 platforms still needed some form of modification.
Merseytravel also assembled a panel of 40 users to design the interior of the trains, from wheelchair and bike spaces down to ledges for coffee cups and mobile phones.
He said that across the network, 21 stations are still not step-free, but the target is to deal with as many as possible by 2030.
In the session on Ramping up Rail Freight, Maggie Simpson, Rail Freight Group director general, stressed rail freight's fundamental importance to the economy, and its role in decarbonisation. For big businesses with complex logistics, such as supermarket chains, transferring to rail was "one of the few ways to decarbonise their operations".
It was important that plans for rail reform "provided certainty of access for rail freight investors", who were ready to invest in new freight terminals and rolling stock. There must be flexibility to support new freight flows, she said. There was a need for a strong appeal function to the ORR – proposals in the consultation document do not appear to be very strong. Though the proposal for GBR to have a statutory duty on freight is welcome, there needed to be a wider statutory framework to support rail freight growth. "If we get it right there are a lot of opportunities for rail freight," she said.
Programme director for freight reform at the GBR Transition Team Richard Moody said that freight had not been standing still. A single railfreight team had been formed across the transition team and Network Rail. There is a control period regulated rail freight growth target as well as a long-term growth target.
An access charge discount policy has been launched to help stimulate new to rail freight traffic. Five new flows have arisen due to this policy, contributing to 0.4% growth compared with last year. Overall growth is at 4%.
He added that GBR will have a statutory duty to promote freight, and the secretary of state will set a growth target. GBR will set charges, opening up the possibility to broaden discounts and incentives.
In the session on New Funding Models and Revenue Sources, Transport for London chief operating officer Claire Mann stressed the need for long-term investment. TfL had the ambition to support progress on the Government's aim to boost economic growth, jobs and productivity. She stressed that investment in London's transport improved access to jobs and regeneration in London, but also had benefits across the whole of the UK. For example in 2022/23 and 2023/24, TfL spent £11bn with more than 3,000 UK suppliers.
She welcomed the latest £485m investment in last autumn's Budget. But she added "We can't make the major decisions that London's people and businesses need without long-term certainty."
With a multi-year sustainable funding settlement TfL could properly maintain and renew its assets, deliver promised upgrades and bring forward programmes such as the DLR extension to Thamesmead, the Overground West London Orbital and the Bakerloo Line extension, "with the potential to unlock hundreds of thousands of new jobs and new homes and opportunities to attract inward investment."
Professor Mark Barry, professor of practice in connectivity at Cardiff University, described how a campaign over many years had led to the development of South Wales Metro. It was needed to support economic development, reduce car dependency and the cost of associated externalities such as road traffic accidents, to reduce CO2 emissions and address issues of economic inactivity and deprivation. Following persistence and a collective effort from the Welsh government, Transport for Wales and a wide range of others to persuade Westminster, £1bn is being invested between 2024 and 2026. This is doubling the capacity of the rail network centred on Cardiff, serving 1 million people and providing new rolling stock (with the first trains running last November), electrification and better integration.
This was "the start of a journey to the Net Zero Wales target of trebling public transport by 2040," said Barry.
