Maintenance underspends and deferred renewals contributing to delays on the railways.
ORR/23/13
Previous underspends on maintenance work, deferred plans to renew infrastructure, and other factors including engineering works overruns are contributing to delays to rail passenger and freight services, according to new data published today by the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR).
ORR’s latest analysis of rail performance highlights that more than half of delays on the network are caused by problems attributable to Network Rail. While the company has made progress in reducing delays associated with civil engineering assets, such as bridges, approximately half of the delays attributed to Network Rail are a result of infrastructure failings. Asset failures are also on an increasing trend – particularly those related to track faults, telecoms failures and cable faults.
Between April and October this year, there were nearly 16,000 infrastructure incidents across the network, nearly 5% more than over the same period last year, despite benign weather conditions. These incidents caused almost 1.7 million minutes of delay to trains nationally.
ORR’s evaluation attributes some of the increase in delays with Network Rail’s deferral of works for parts of the rail network such as tracks, level crossings and electrification. Network Rail has also significantly under-spent allocated funds. The company’s own regulatory accounts for the first four years of the control period show that it under-spent nearly £1.2bn meant for maintenance and renewal of its assets. The regulator recognises that the company faces the challenges of managing traffic growth and timetabling on a congested network, as well as constraints on the access needed to work on the track. However, ORR has urged Network Rail to make good use of the funds provided to renew the network and address the problems affecting performance.
Alan Price, ORR’s Director of Railway Planning and Performance, said:
“Safety has to be Network Rail’s top priority. Beyond that, its focus should be on delivering improved performance and increased capacity on the railways. The company is currently operating with a large underspend and a significant shortfall against the performance targets it signed up to. It is also behind schedule on its own maintenance and renewal plans. These factors are now contributing to delays to rail passenger and freight services. Network Rail must utilise its funding efficiently to address the increasing backlog of maintenance and renewals works, and improve performance, as it enters a new five-year delivery plan with more stretching targets.
“ORR has set new regulatory targets from 2014 for Network Rail’s asset management, particularly focusing on how it manages, maintains and renews the rail network. We want the company to move from a ‘find and fix’ approach to maintenance to a ‘predict and prevent’ culture, to reduce the amount of failures affecting services. We see signs of good practice and want to see Network Rail working with train operators to deliver better for customers from the outset of its new delivery plan.”Network Rail is between 0.9 and 5.1 percentage points short of the current funded punctuality targets as 122,600 trains missed performance targets between July and October.
In the next five years, the regulator will monitor Network Rail more closely to ensure it can deliver on its funded targets. Having studied the factors that led to underperformance in the past few years and consulted train operators, ORR is focusing on ensuring Network Rail has the right asset data, analysis tools and technology to support its maintenance and renewal teams.
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