NETWORK RAIL STATEMENT - REGARDING HEADCOUNT REDUCTION

Thursday 13 Nov 2003

NETWORK RAIL STATEMENT - REGARDING HEADCOUNT REDUCTION

Region & Route:: National

On 2 October, Network Rail announced its plans to reduce the number of senior and middle managers by 15% - around 600 staff, within six weeks. This forms part of the previously announced programme to reduce headcount by 2000 over three years which will help the company to achieve 20% efficiency savings (£1.3 billion) by 2006/7. Today a series of face-to-face meetings are taking place to personally inform these 600-700 employees who have been affected by the need to reduce costs. It is expected that they will be leaving the company during November and December. Only management grades are affected, with front-line and operational employees left untouched. A full redundancy package has been negotiated for each employee with counselling and work placement schemes in place to help ex-employees find new jobs and careers.

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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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