16 January 2004
The Department for Transport has emphatically dismissed claims that it scrapped a Strategic Rail Authority report highlighting chronic underinvestment in the rail infrastructure.
A DfT spokesman told Public Finance: 'It is complete rubbish that the department suppressed or binned the report. Ministers have not even seen the report. The Strategic Rail Authority and department agreed to delay the publication of the report until after the Spending Review in July when there will be a clearer financial picture.'
The SRA's draft annual report, leaked to the Independent newspaper, showed that targets to increase passenger numbers and the amount of freight transported on the rail network will be missed unless the government sanctions a massive increase in funding.
It said that the £64bn earmarked for the Ten-Year Plan for the railways will be swallowed up just in maintaining the current network, and that the gap between income and state subsidy had risen by £500m to £2bn in 2003/04.
A spokesman for the SRA concurred that it had been decided to delay the report until after the Spending Review. 'We've decided that it's the right thing to do so we know what budget we have before we go forward,' he told PF. He said the rail regulator's projections for Network Rail's funding and the SRA's own franchising projects would all feed into the Spending Review.
But he denied suggestions that transport ministers had instructed the SRA not to publish. 'Our chair Richard Bowker and [secretary of state] Alistair Darling never discussed the report.'
The spokesman added that predictions that rail targets would be missed were not new and had been voiced by the SRA a year ago, in its annual report relating to 2002/03.
'We said last year that targets wouldn't be met but we are probably the only railway in Europe that is still growing and that's a success story,' he said.
In December, rail regulator Tom Winsor allocated £22.2bn to Network Rail for the next five years – £7bn more than expected although £2bn short of what Network Rail had requested.
PFjan2004
