The text of Mark Bradshaw's George Bradshaw address to Rail Partners today has appeared
from the DfT» ("Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered"). Here's a few bits of it:
And in the end it’s rail’s customers that suffer. Like on the East Coast Mainline, where passengers still await the full benefits of billions of pounds in taxpayer investment and years of infrastructure upgrades. I know this first hand. As a backbench MP▸ , when I was trying to get a Sunday train from my constituency to London, I remember constantly refreshing the First Great Western timetable to find half the trains weren’t running. Like many passengers, I had no choice but to give up and take the car instead.
Andrew, who was then running First Group, probably remembers my rather irate emails from the station platform, interrogating him about why the service was so unreliable. Four months into this job, I now know why. I possibly owe him an overdue apology. It wasn’t entirely his fault. Because Sunday services are essentially dependent on drivers volunteering for overtime. Which means, despite best efforts, we can’t run a reliable 7-day-a-week railway on which customers can depend. It’s why I and the Rail Minister, Huw Merriman, have been clear throughout this period of industrial action that modernising working practices must be part of reform.
So, we have a broken model. Unable to adapt to customer needs and financially unsustainable. Left untreated, we will drive passengers away with poor performance, that will lead to fewer services, that will drive more passengers away and so on and so on. Only major reform can break that cycle of decline and Keith’s blueprint is the right place to start. So yes, we will create a more customer focussed and joined up railway. But we want to go further, I want to go further, and actually enhance the role of the private sector. Not just in running services but in maximising competition, innovation, and revenue growth right across the industry. Which the benefits of the private sector has delivered time and again.
However, turning towards customers requires us to turn away from the current industry structure. So, we will establish Great British Railways, or GBR▸ . As we prepare for that, we’ll pick up the pace of reform. I am pleased to announce that the winner of the GBR HQ▸ competition will be revealed before Easter. And by the summer, we will respond to the consultation on GBR’s legislative powers.
The role of ministers is to provide strategic direction and be accountable to Parliament. It is not the role of ministers to pore over operational decisions. For example, I shouldn’t need to approve whether a passenger train ought to be removed from the timetable to allow a freight train to run instead, as I was doing earlier today. That will be left to industry experts in 5 regional GBR divisions working in partnership with regional bodies such as the Greater Manchester and the West Midlands Combined Authorities.
There's several topics in there that need to be taken on their own, but not as if that speech is definitive. There are many steps to go yet, and major changes may happen at each: this response to the GBR consultation, the bill, the act as passed, the blueprint for implementation, what gets implemented, and what actually happens operationally. And that assumes the act gets passed while this lot are in government ... which means it's all got to happen pretty fast (probably).
