Examination of Witnesses (Questions 9380
- 9399)
9380. Just tell the Committee please about your
practical experience and involvement in the management of the
railways in this country.
(Mr Gisby) I was involved in railways a little earlier on
and I then went off to do other things and I came back and joined
Railtrack in early 1997. I did a number of posts there. I guess
the most significant one in relation to my current role is that
I went to run one of the zones, as they were, of Railtrack at
that time, immediately after the Hatfield incident, in York. Most
of my time thereafter was about restoring the performance of the
services, about dealing with the maintenance issues and the infrastructure
issues that were apparent in Railtrack at that time. As Railtrack
moved on to become Network Rail, I became part of the senior management
team at Network Rail. I am now accountable for the operation and
performance of the network, the timetabling of it, dealing with
access issues and so on for the day-to-day running of the railway
across the whole network.
9381. I have said a word or two about the structure
of the rail industry which my Lords had heard in any event from
Mr Berryman. I want just to take you, if I may, to the position
under the safety regulations and the question raised by my noble
Lords, Lord Colville and Lord Snape, about the situation described
by the TfL paper where one had responsibility on Network Rail
as infrastructure manager under the safety regulations, but there
would be commercial provision through TfL of maintenance and operation.
Can you just help with that?
(Mr Gisby) I have to say, I have no experience of that and
I think that was more difficult than actually the situation Railtrack
was in. Railtrack, as is well known, had contracted out maintenance,
but at least the contract had been let by Railtrack directly.
Of course, all the work that we have done in the last few years
has been to reintegrate that and to transfer, I think it was,
some 16,000 staff from the maintenance contractors back into direct
employment by Network Rail. I have no experience of being accountable
for the safe operation of the network in which another organisation
would be letting the maintenance contract for that network.
9382. Has any decision been taken by Network
Rail whether it is prepared to take responsibility for safety
in a situation where it was not the infrastructure manager for
the whole system?
(Mr Gisby) No, it has not and it would not be, given that,
as was made clear earlier, from last summer onwards we never contemplated
that we would be in that position.
9383. I want to come to performance briefly,
if I may, and we do not want to weary the Committee with this,
but we have got some exhibits in tab 5.[23]
Do you have those?
(Mr Gisby) Yes. These show the main basis by
which the industry measures train performance. This has been referred
to elsewhere as the `public performance measure'. You can see
the big dip in 2000 immediately after Hatfield. That would mean
that little over half the trains were arriving on the on-time
measures that we use. You can see a steady improvement since then.
The dip during the year was the traditional autumn issue which
increasingly we have got better at dealing with, and you can now
see that we are running at an MAA, which is a moving annual average—
9384. CHAIRMAN: What is it?
(Mr Gisby) It is the moving annual average, so you are taking
the position over the previous 13 periods. We run 13 four-week
accounting periods, so it averages out with individual days or
individual seasonal things or floods or other things that affect
the railway. These figures are now about four or five weeks old
and the industry collectively has achieved a tremendous target
where we are now running at 90 per cent PPM on the moving annual
average. I think the first page really summarises where we are
and the next couple of pages refer to that.
9385. Just before you leave that, is this an
example of PPM?
(Mr Gisby) This is the network-wide PPM for all trains.
9386. So it is an example of a PPM?
(Mr Gisby) Yes, this is what has happened over the last four
or five years. This is the total position for the 20,000-plus
trains that we run.
9387. I perfectly understand that, but we have
always had difficulty with all these acronyms, and I am not alone
in not knowing what a PPM is, but now this is an example of one,
is it?
(Mr Gisby) Yes, it is.
9388. MR PURCHAS: We can go to the next
sheet.[24]
(Mr Gisby) Yes, I think the second page just
notes that punctuality on the railway is now at its highest level
for nine and a half years. I would also point out that that is
more trains and many more people on those trains. Considering
the position that the industry was in nine and a half years ago,
it is now handling more passengers than, I think, since records
began outside the unusual circumstances in the Second World War.
There is one other way of it being measured, if I may go to the
next slide with the bar charts.[25]
We obviously, in working closely with the train operators, measure
things as they are our customers in their terms, which is the
trains that run on time. In addition, we look at the delay minutes
that we cause and these are adding up all the minutes attributable
to our own performance from things that happen day to day on the
network. We are set targets every five years by the Office of
the Rail Regulator. We then set ourselves tougher targets because
we like to do better, and this is the position over the last couple
of years. The actual position four or five years ago immediately
after Hatfield, that number would have been something like, I
think it was, 14.8 million minutes, so we have continued to bring
that down. This is a different way of looking at performance,
but it is the total minutes that are attributable to us and, if
I may go to the next slide headed `Safety', of the indicators
that we use, I think it is a comfort to everybody that those are
in better shape than ever and have continued with year-on-year
improvements.[26]
We do get broken rails on the network, and it is a consequence
of essentially the friction-based system of a steel wheel on a
steel rail, but those are record low levels. Of significant tragic
accidents in the past, one thinks of Ladbroke Grove and Southall
and so on, trains passing signals at red, so a tremendous reduction
in the last six or seven years, as much due to the efforts of
the train operators as ourselves. Regrettably, we have had two
workforce fatalities this year, but actually again, if you go
back in the statistics, those are at very low levels compared
with the safety record—
9389. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: Were
these separate incidents?
(Mr Gisby) They were separate incidents, these two, yes.
Those again are at low levels, looking back over the last five
or ten years. The one other aspect is where the railway touches
on other parts of life at level crossings which remains one of
the significant safety risks for users both by road, rail and
on foot, and those again are at the lowest levels. While doing
that, we have been building and expanding the railway. There are
some figures on the next slide called `output volumes'.[27]
These are a few measures of things that we do. They are referred
to often as `engineering works' and they appear often in the press
where we appear to be disrupting people, particularly at weekends
and bank holidays and so on. S and C units are sets of points,
individual sets of points that connect two different tracks, and
you can see from six or seven years ago that we put in 130 of
those, so maybe two in a weekend and we now do seven, eight, nine,
ten in a weekend. It is a bank holiday this weekend and we will
do significantly more than ten, I expect. We replace the ballast,
the stones underneath the track, and you can again see more than
a doubling of the volume that we are doing that at, and you can
see in the right-hand column the number of miles of rail that
we replace every year, so we are now replacing more than ten miles
a week compared with less than half that figure six or seven years
ago.
9390. MR PURCHAS: Before you go on to
that, we are going to come to fragmentation in just a moment,
but how important from the public point of view and the efficiency
of the railway is the planning and co-ordination of works of that
kind?
(Mr Gisby) Well, it forms a significant part of what I am
accountable for. Access to the railway to do this work is critical.
We all know that there is a sense, particularly at weekends, that
too many people go on buses for cancelled trains and so on, so
organising access to do a significantly increased volume of work
while continuing to run the service for the benefit of people
who want to use it and drive up performance is several different
ends of quite a difficult challenge, but I think over the last
two or three years we have done that quite well. What, without
doubt, has made it significantly easier compared with where we
were pre-Network Rail and when things were contracted out, if
it is all within the same organisation, it is just easier to manage
and organise these things than if it was more widely dispersed.
That also, if I may go to the next slide, has helped with this
issue here.[28]
These are percentage reductions in our costs that we are asked
to make in what is referred to as "CP3"—I regret
yet another railway acronym—that is the third control period,
a five-year period that ends March next year. Prior to this five-year
period the Office of Rail Regulation set out what it expected
us to achieve in terms of reducing our operating costs, our maintenance
costs and the costs by which we carried out renewals on the network.
Those are significant numbers. Overall, we expect to have taken
a third of the cost out of delivering improvements on the railway
over this five-year period. That is many, many millions of pounds.
The discussions we are having with the Office of Rail Regulation
for the next control period of five years, the total figures in
there are well in excess of £20 billion over five years.
If you are receiving 20 or 30 per cent of that amount, that is
a significant amount to take out. It is just much more difficult
to do it if you have multiple interfaces with other organisations
as opposed to whether it is more integrated. That is not to say
that there is not a view out there—and I know Lord Snape
expressed that earlier—that we are still expensive and other
people at times think they can do some of this more cheaply. In
cases that may be the case, but certainly the transparency and
openness with which we now do this and the efficiency we have
made I think puts us in a pretty good place for the five years.
9391. MR PURCHAS: Indeed it was Lord
Snape's question, but under regulation 12 of the access and management
regulations, as infrastructure manager, is the machinery for the
ORR to approve the charges you are entitled to make?
(Mr Gisby) Indeed, it is.
9392. Is that a transparent process?
(Mr Gisby) All too transparent at times, yes.
9393. LORD BROOKE OF ALVERTHORPE: Could
I ask a question, if I may, at this point. Heathrow Express operates
as a separate and independent entity, I believe. What is the nature
of the relationship between yourselves and them?
(Mr Gisby) We operate that railway for BAA. We do not own
it, we operate it and maintain it to agreed standards and we integrate
the trains coming off it onto the Great Western Main Line and
the trains leaving the Great Western Main Line in the timetabling
process that we develop for all operators. The trains running
on that this morning and the pattern of services will have been
developed by us and all the other operators, starting a good 18
months ago actually and we would have worked out what is the right
pattern to work. We did have a discussion with BAA I think about—I
could check exactly—three years ago about how Terminal 5
would be developed and whether they might want to take it all
back themselves, run it differently, put their own signalling
system in and have their own signallers operate what we call "Airport
Junction" onto their bit of railway. After some fairly high
level discussions at chief executive level they decided that was
not the right thing to do and we could expand the development
of the service and do some things to the signalling at the junction
which would be a better way of doing it. We did not have to do
that and at the state we were in at the time that was quite a
bold thing to do because we took on another enhancement and development
which would have been critical to the opening of Terminal 5, to
be honest for no real upside. We do not make an awful lot more
money for doing that, we do not get much more to do, but it was
just the right thing to do and we delivered it on time.
9394. For the lay man like myself, they are
seen as an independent operator, an independent operation.
(Mr Gisby) It is a unique case, if I may, my Lord, that they
are both an independent train operator and they have their own
bit of railway as well as they come onto our network. That is
quite a unique position. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link is a bit
like that. They came to us and asked us to maintain and operate
the railway so it is planned, maintained and operated in a seamless
fashion where they, as a train operator, can bid for access all
the way into Paddington and stopping patterns between Paddington
and the terminals.
9395. Is that a model that could be replicated
elsewhere?
(Mr Gisby) Yes, it is. It works very well.
9396. CHAIRMAN: Are you the infrastructure
manager?
(Mr Gisby) Yes.
9397. BARONESS FOOKES: BAA have delegated
to you the whole of this in practical terms?
(Mr Gisby) Yes, for the maintenance and operation of the
tracks and signals, not the station, the central terminal area
stations and so on. We do not wish to seek to run things like
that, but the track and the signal and maintenance of it, we would
do that. Also if, for example, as we did last Christmas, we dug
up and put back the junction itself because it had not been working
very well, we would have organised that and what it meant for
getting passengers into Heathrow on Boxing Day and beyond when
we chose to do it and what it meant for passengers on the First
Great Western services. We would organise all of that in a balanced
way and we would make judgments about is it better to maintain
a Reading service and not Heathrow, or to get some trains into
Heathrow and not Reading, or stop the Cardiff service? That is
what we do day by day everywhere, what we are doing this weekend
in rather more places than people might wish.
9398. It is wholly integrated?
(Mr Gisby) Yes.
9399. MR PURCHAS: You have made a distinction,
my Lords, between running trains and maintaining and operating
the railway, which is your business?
(Mr Gisby) Yes.
23 Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Performance (SCN-20080430-030) Back
24
Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Performance (SCN-20080430-031) Back
25
Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Performance-delay minutes (SCN-20080430-032) Back
26
Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Safety (SCN-20080430-033) Back
27
Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Output Volumes (SCN-20080430-034) Back
28
Committee Ref: A54, Network Rail-Improvement in efficiencies
in CP3 (SCN-20080430-035) Back
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