Rail Reform Bill – too little too late

On 20 February, the Government published its Draft Rail Reform Bill. This proposes the creation a new Integrated Rail Body (IRB) that brings together decisions on infrastructure and train operations. The IRB would become Great British Railways (GBR) as proposed in the Williams-Shapps report that was published in May 2021.

This report was the result of the Williams review which established in September 2018. This in turn was the Government response to the May 2018 timetable debacle which highlighted how, in England, strategic decisions about trains and infrastructure only come together at Westminster.

Reaction to this draft Bill has been largely positive as the principle of GBR being a new strategic decision-making body is welcomed throughout the industry. It is common ground that bringing infrastructure and operational decision making together will tackle misaligned incentives which are the root of many of the railway’s problems and the reason why customer needs are not always put first.

Why a draft?
It is not clear why only a draft Bill has been prepared. The official reason is that:

“Given the scale and complexity of the changes being made to the sector, the draft bill will undergo pre-legislative scrutiny to provide parliamentarians and experts across industry the opportunity to review and test the legislation in draft.”

Yet surely the almost three years since GBR was first proposed should have been sufficient time to do this. Moreover, with a general election looming it could now be 2025 or even 2026 before a Rail Reform Bill becomes an Act of Parliament.

This is because this draft Bill is intended to ensure that GBR maximises private sector input by giving it a statutory duty to produce an annual report on private sector involvement. In contrast, the Labour Party’s plan is for an integrated publicly owned railway. Hence an incoming Labour Government would produce its own Rail Reform Bill which would then have to wait its turn in a crowded Parliamentary timetable.

No WISP
A key aspect of the Williams-Shapps report was its proposal that GBR would produce a ‘Whole Industry Strategic Plan’ (WISP) to identify key strategic priorities for the whole rail network over the next 30 years. Although the first such plan was to be published in 2022, to date no such plan has been published.

Having a WISP addresses a weakness of the current structure that no organisation has the financial, technical, and operational authority to oversee the design, investment, and management of the major changes to track infrastructure and on-train systems required for programmes such as decarbonisation and digital signalling.

Yet, in contrast to the emphasis on private finance, there is no requirement for a WISP in the draft Bill, nor does its impact analysis refer to the need for a whole system technical authority.

Hence, whilst it is good to see proposed legislation to progress the formation of GBR, producing a draft Bill which does not have cross-party consensus adds years to the rail reform timetable. It is also disappointing that the engineering benefits of a whole system technical authority do not now seem to be recognised.

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