Lilian Greenwood – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lilian Greenwood on 2016-01-25.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what annual fee his Department will pay to (a) Ernst and Young in the UK, (b) Arup and (c) Interfleet for their advice to him on fulfilling his duties under Section 30 of the Railways Act 1993; and for what period those companies are contracted to provide him such advice.

Claire Perry

Following a successful procurement competition using the new STAR (Specialist Technical Advice for Rail) Framework Agreement, the Department has appointed a partnership comprising Arup, SNC-Lavalin Transport Advisory (InterFleet), and EY to provide services to support the Secretary of State in connection with his duties under Section 30 of the Railways Act.

The contract is for 2 years and commenced in November 2015. It has an optional extension of 12 months which is exercisable at the Department’s discretion. The fees payable to the partnership are capped at £616k (excluding VAT) for the two years of the contract. In addition to core contractual commitments, further fees are payable at agreed daily rates for other services which include, but are not limited to, the full mobilisation of a public sector train operator.

Following the successful award of the East Coast franchise to Virgin East Coast last year, it was not a good use of taxpayers’ money to maintain DoR’s full corporate structure on a ‘just in case’ basis. We have scaled back Directly Operated Railways operations and brought it in-house with the Department for Transport.