Thursday 5 Feb 2009
GREEN LIGHT FOR MULTI-BILLION POUND INVESTMENT PROGRAMME AS NETWORK RAIL ACCEPTS REGULATOR'S BUDGET
- Region & Route:
- National
£28.5 billion is to be spent on Britain's rail infrastructure over the next five years as Network Rail today accepted the Office of Rail Regulation's (ORR) rail spending budget for 2009 to 2014.
From 1st April 2009 to 31st March 2014 (control period 4, CP4), Network Rail will invest almost £7.6bn on projects designed to relieve crowding by lengthening platforms and increasing capacity to enable more trains to run. £10.8bn will be invested in renewals - replacing older parts of the network (rail, signalling, bridges) with new.
A further £10bn will be spent on day-to-day maintenance and the costs of operating and running the network over the period.
Iain Coucher, chief executive, said: "The next five years will see unprecedented investment in expanding the network and improving services for passenger and freight users. The task the ORR has set us is a tough one with ambitious savings to be made and further service improvements to deliver, but we are determined to succeed."
The ORR, in its final determination issued in October, set some challenging targets including:
- Delivering £7.6bn worth of rail expansion projects
- Increasing train punctuality to record levels - an average of 92.6% of trains on time over a 12 month period by 2014
- Cutting costs by a further 21% - on top of the 27% savings Network Rail has already achieved since 2004
The nature of the final determination and its challenges, coupled with current market conditions, has meant that Network Rail's plan to raise around £6bn of corporate debt (debt without the support of a Government indemnity) has had to be postponed. The money will still be raised through the bond markets but with the government indemnity attached. The company believes it is still in its best interest to raise totally independent finance and will continue to review the prospects of going to the market in its own right, later in CP4.
Notes to editors
Network Rail’s funding is reviewed every five years (a control period).This iterative, two year process is now at a close with Network Rail accepting the ORR's final determination Control Period 4 starts on 1st April 2009 and runs to 31st March 2014 and Network Rail will publish its detailed five year delivery plan at this timeContact information
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We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.
Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.
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