Return to Archive -by date - by topic - 2001.
Talking to a senior railway manager we mentioned that one of out local services was much the same as ever. He was delighted. He had just instituted a major structural change in the franchise and we, the customers, had not noticed.
Sadly, he missed the point. We were taking the long view. Five years after the service was privatised, everything was much the same as ever subject to five years of wear and tear. Same trains, same stations, same tracks, give or take a few TSRs, and the same people in the station offices.
As the big crises domonate these pages, it is all too easy to take the working railway for granted. The trains run, the staff turn up, people and freight are moved. But the flywheel of the mother railway', that combination of human and financial capital, is losing momentum.
In his new post as Chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority Richard Bowker will have to think big. That was what we expected Sir Alastair Morton to do: but he tinkered while the railway went nowhere. Now Bowker has to stabilise an impossibly complex situation. Like a surgeon in casualty he has to take bold and bloody decisions if the patient is to be saved.
To do this, the support of an effective back office is essential. The Strategic Rail Authority is renowned throughout the industry as a flabby bureaucracy, a far cry from the lean mean franchising machine that Roger Salmon created. Under Chairman Sir Alastair Morton and Chief Executive Mike Grant, the awkward squad, the career railway men and women, have left.
If Mike Grant is clearly not the right man for the job, we are not sure who is. With no time for executive search Richard Bowker should declare himself Chairman and Chief Executive. He then needs to restructure the Board and senior officers with people who work his way, bringing back the hard cases and delegating the really demanding detail of which there is plenty.
While this is going on he needs to establish his independence. If the first six months of a new job your new boss is pleased they got you. After that it is all downhill. So Richard Bowker needs to do something highly embarrassing to the Government , the more head-on, the better. Sir Alastair left it too late. Richard needs to tell it how he finds it warts and all. Nole mi tangere is the new SRA motto.
Next he must get a grip on the mother railway the TOCs. It is their performance, particularly that of the London commuter services, on which he will be judged. He needs to defuse upcoming embarrassments, like cup and cone and the collapse of the South Central SPV, not to mentioning deteriorating performance. Giving everyone on a seven year franchise an automatic two year extension will buy time. Forget negotiating customer benefits and new performance regimes, just demand that they run the present railway properly for an extra two years.
As a precaution he should call in all the balance sheets of all the TOCs and cast his expert eye over them. Arriva Trains Northern is not the only TOC feeling the financial squeeze. Bowker has the skills to identify the next dominos in the chain. Remember, for his political future and to restore City confidence the watchword must be no more surprises. Byers has set the tone with Railtrack shoot the walking wounded if they threaten to hold up the advance.
Of course, the biggest surprise is the West Coast Route Modernisation where Bowker is debarred from involvement. He needs to deputise a heavyweight team to deal with that problem a railway manager, a lawyer and an engineering project specialist. By the time they have sorted out a compromise Bowker should be out of quarantine and can start knocking heads together to implement what will inevitably be a controversial solution.
But of all the challenges, the greatest is Railtrack. While Stephen Byers is promoting the company limited by guarantee (CLG) solution as returning a rehabilitated Railtrack, freed of its money habit, to decent railway society, this is only a cover story to hide the truth namely that the men in Whitehall don't know what to do next. Certainly putting back the CLG into the same structure of regulated track access rights that led Railtrack astray will not serve.
Worryingly the Department of Transport seems to believe that a not for profit CLG will have a greater incentive to control costs. Yes really. But in truth, the CLG will need just as much money as Railtrack and probably more. Remember how Railtrack screwed down the contractors? They won't sign up for more of the same.
So Bowker's top job will be to ensure that the new structure for the railway is practical and sensible and contributes to the performance of the mother railway: putting it in place will probably occupy most of his first three year term of office,. Ptractical cpommon sense is not a characteristic of railways devised by civil servants, (see the one we've got) and Richard Bowker will have to be very forceful and obdurate if Sir Richard Bowker is to enjoy a second term.
And what of the Regulator whose willingness to speak the truth and shame the devil has won him the adverse attention of the Prime Minister? Bowker and Winsor are two of a kind. It should not be overlooked that, reputedly, Bowker helped draft the letter from the Association of Train Operating Companies to Stephen Byers threatening to veto the transfer of the CLG out of insolvency if they didn't have a Regulator to protect them from a Government which had just totalled Railtrack. Whatever the structure that evolves, Bowker will be trying to control a bunch of monopolies. Winsor and his team are good at that.
To help him manage his few big decisions, Richard Bowker needs a few good railway men and women. This could be the last chance to save the railway and get the flywheel accelerating again.