Throughout CP6, Network Rail has continued to face a legacy of challenges including an ageing asset base, poor train performance, escalating costs and low levels of public trust. In addition, the unprecedented challenges of Covid-19 and the longer term impact the pandemic has had on the railway means that for CP7, there is a further drive for efficiencies against a backdrop of the need to perform better consistently to gain back public trust and to demonstrate that investment is being made in the right place.
The impact of inflation and constrained public finances means funding will need to go further than ever before and therefore NW&C’s submission needed to be robust and evidenced with precision modelling and a data led Performance Delivery Plan.
We defined and engaged with all key stakeholders across the NW&C region to identify all current and potential future improvement opportunities and risks including all key projects that have the potential to impact performance during the Price Control Period.
We then undertook a detailed analysis of historical and current performance removing any outliers to identify any further potential for performance improvement opportunities.
Once we had identified all potential improvement opportunities and risks to performance, we estimated the incremental improvements and impacts for each which then enabled us to produce a performance model to a) ascertain the levels of performance to be delivered based on all identified opportunities and risks during CP7 covering all key performance measures (delay minutes cancellations, On - Time, T-3, T-15 and PPM) and b) the financial impact resulting from the rail industry performance regimes.
We were able lead the engagement with key Network Rail stakeholders and the ORR to agree all CP7 performance measure targets for NW&C with confidence, through our data-led approach, that although challenging, the desired levels of performance are achievable.
We secured the required level of funding to deliver the improvement actions and risk mitigation measures to meet our performance targets.
We were able to demonstrate, through our stakeholder engagement approach, that our Performance Delivery Plan had joint ownership and that we would be able to mobilise our plan together ready to start delivery at the beginning of CP7 to deliver the maximum benefit in the Price Control Period.
