Examination of Witnesses (Questions 9520
- 9539)
9520. Is there any part of Network Rail's case
that it wants to be involved in those access rights as such?
(Mr Gisby) What, it being a beneficiary of it?
9521. Or even applying for them?
(Mr Gisby) No, we do not do that.
9522. You do not do that. I want to be clear,
the assurance you seek is not one that necessitates you taking
that role under regulation 16?
(Mr Gisby) No, compared with perhaps most people's first
reading of it, operation to us does involve planning timetables,
reaching the right judgment on the allocation capacity and drawing
a balance between capacity and performance, but we do that on
behalf of people who are then beneficial users of what we provide.
We have no interest at all in doing it ourselves.
9523. My Lords, I have no other questions unless
Mr Gisby can assist.
9524. CHAIRMAN: I think we have asked
our questions. Go ahead.
9525. LORD SNAPE: I have one or two questions.
I do not want to keep the rest of you from your lunches. I am
conscious I would be very unpopular if I did so.
9526. CHAIRMAN: You might be finished
before lunch.
9527. LORD SNAPE: With that stricture
in mind, my Lord Chairman, I will try and keep it brief. Have
you a copy of the offending email in front of you, Mr Gisby, the
one we have been referring to?
(Mr Gisby) I have a copy of the attachment to it, not the
email itself. It is going up on the screen.[37]
9528. In the second paragraph of the letter
from the MD Finance from TfL he sets out the objectives on maintenance
so far as the central section is concerned. His first point is
ensuring—talking about maintenance—that it is "priced
reasonably". Do you see that?
(Mr Gisby) Yes.
9529. Do you think that is there because there
is a feeling within the railway community, as I indicated earlier,
that sometimes your pricing appears—how does one put it
as diplomatically as possible—exaggerated?
(Mr Gisby) That is a question you should put to Mr Allen
not me, my Lord, but I am aware of those views. I think suffice
to say price and cost in things that we do are all set by the
Office of Rail Regulation. I showed you in tab 5 earlier some
very, very good reductions in our costs of the order of 30 per
cent over five years.
9530. That rather proves my point then, does
it not?
(Mr Gisby) I would expect to have to continue to do those
over the next five years and in the three-ring circus in which
we live we will have to continue to reduce our costs and prices
at that level, we will have to drive up performance further and
run many more trains, so I can understand the gentleman saying
this, but I can also confirm that where we have to we are quite
open about our pricing structure and, of course, it is regulated
anyway.
9531. The email goes on to talk about efficiency
and maintenance, et cetera. Are you familiar with Birmingham Moor
Street Station?
(Mr Gisby) A little, yes, not as familiar as the other stations
in Birmingham, but I will see if I can help.
9532. Was your company responsible for re-modelling,
if that is the right term, the terminal platforms of Moor Street
where Chiltern Trains introduced a more intensive service to London?
(Mr Gisby) I believe we were, but I am not sure of the details.
9533. That was done a couple of years ago, was
it not?
(Mr Gisby) That was certainly done a couple of years ago,
yes.
9534. Those platforms are still not open, are
they?
(Mr Gisby) I believe that might be the case, but I am not
sure.
9535. You can take it from me that is the case.
Do you believe and understand then that the reason why they are
not open after two years is because Network Rail has failed to
connect up the signaling system in order that they should be open?
(Mr Gisby) That might be the case, yes.
9536. Is that two-year delay the reason behind
the strength of feeling within the railway industry that there
should be some price comparator and somebody else that can set
a price alongside the work that Network Rail does?
(Mr Gisby) They are perfectly entitled to do that at any
time. Mr Allen, I am sure, is perfectly entitled to do that here.
I do think that the reductions we have made are huge. We have
been quite open that if other people want to come and do work
on and around the network, they are more than entitled to do.
If I could quote the examples of the opening of the railway to
Abervale, which I think was handled by other people apart from
ourselves, I believe it cost more like £40 million than £30
million. To quote the opening of the Stirling Alloa-Kincardine
branch which I think was managed by Clackmannanshire Borough Council
as opposed to ourselves, I think that has come in tens of millions
of pounds above. Not everybody gets this right all the time. What
I would also point out here is if you want to do this efficiently
and you want to meet the scale of cost reduction that is required
to make the railway cheaper, which is what we all want, that in
turn will involve massive capital investment in higher performance
and more productive ways of carrying out maintenance. The minute
you Balkanise the railways and start breaking them up the individual
bits, you cannot afford the capital intensity of some of that
kit. My company is investing at the moment in some very large
bits of kit that will re-lay tracks and points and all sorts of
things in the middle of the night in very short order and high
intensity testing regimes that will do this automatically, so
we do not have track workers on a track which led to the two fatalities
we had last year. I think it would be very disappointing if that
high intensity, high efficient equipment came up the Western Main
Line, got to Paddington, turned around and went back again. It
would be much more efficient for everybody if it could continue
through this tunnel and deliver a low cost output for everybody.
9537. Finally, do you see anything inherently
unsafe in what TfL are proposing?
(Mr Gisby) I think that is a difficult question to ask because
I am not altogether sure of the details of what they are proposing.
9538. The interface between the contractors
which would inevitably be a consequence.
(Mr Gisby) At this stage and given the nature of these proceedings,
I would say I think it makes it more difficult to run things in
the way that we now like to run them. It does get doubly more
difficult if the maintenance contract is let separately by the
facility owner outside the infrastructure manager. If I draw your
attention to some of the stuff that was on the previous display
about the accountabilities that we have under ROGS, I would go
back to a comment I made earlier to Lord Brooke, that one would
have to think very carefully about who that contractor would be
if it was done separately.
9539. CHAIRMAN: We did get through! Mr
Purchas, you have another witness, have you not?
37 Committee Ref: A54, Correspondence between TfL
and DfT, Crossrail Centre Section, 10 April 2008 (SCB-20080430-040) Back
| 
