Proposals to devolve control of local passenger rail services, plus more independence for Network Rail in planning routes could be a problem for the future development of UK’s railfreight industry. This is because most rail freight services travel cross-country and planning for this needs a centralised system.
Railway professionals believe that both road and rail freight movement would benefit from integrated UK transport planning covering both networks. This means that the next stage of the Road Investment Strategy (RIS2) should be co-ordinated with the High Level Output Specification for Network Rail’s infrastructure development Control Period 6 (CP6 HLOS).
This would be worth doing just to protect the rail freight industry, with a turnover of nearly £2 billion a year and with over £30 billion of goods carried. Typical cargoes range from wine, whisky and luxury cars down to supermarket supplies, automotive spares and components, cement and construction material such as stone.
Channel Tunnel traffic – as well as coal and steel cargoes – has declined sharply but long distance container traffic and construction materials could easily expand to bridge the gap. At the moment 25% of imported consumer goods leave the ports by rail and 40% of construction material reaches London the same way. There is a large suppressed demand for rail freight currently blocked by lack of adequate rail capacity out of ports like Felixstowe, Southampton and Liverpool.
Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) impose nine times higher external costs than railfreight. An HGV is 6 times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident than a car. HGVs pay less than a third of the costs they generate in terms of road congestion, collisions, highway damage and pollution. This means the Road Haulage Industry gets a hidden subsidy of £6.5 billion.
Over the years, HGVs have contributed noise, smoke, danger and damage to our towns and highways – but not enough to cover these costs.
What we now need is co-ordinated national transport planning and a continuation of the centralised rail freight route planning system. The confidence in that planning system has resulted in £2 billion of investment being made by the industry itself.
Network Rail can and should be improved – but not at the risk of damaging the successful and still under-utilised rail freight industry.