Alistair Morton – 2001 Speech to the British Chambers of Commerce National Conference

The speech made by Sir Alistair Morton, the then Chair of the Strategic Rail Authority, on 30 March 2001.

The purpose of the SRA is easy to sum up in a few words. I established it at the request of John Prescott to pull together the elements of the private sector railway system we shall need in 2010 to complement our other transport systems. Recent events and your own experiences may make you believe that’s a useful objective. IT IS. I totally agree with Gus Macdonald when he said a few minutes ago that transport, particularly rail, investment is a major ongoing growth area.

Let’s face it: for environmental reasons – both noise and emissions – and for reasons of landtake and casualties, we are close to the limit of what we can carry by road south of the M62 and in the populous areas north of it. That is a small area – we have to use it efficiently.

We have a railway system, the SRA’s role is to get it fit for purpose, and to do that in a massive partnership between private enterprise and public funds.

I took this job, which by the way is structured as a part-time job (my mistake!), because I believed – as the 20th Century ended – that Britain had finally emerged from the ice age of bloated state capitalism – the biggest nationalised industry sector outside the communist world – and that we had passed through the market fires of rampant Thatcherism and reached the saner, more temperate climate in which we could blend public and private capital in market-led structures under private sector management disciplines.

I can give you a short list of the components necessary to deliver a good partnership between the sectors to develop our rail system.

How are we doing? In reverse order, the last of those is down to Mike Grant and me and is Work in Progress; the next above is down to the Treasury, who are struggling. They keep suffering relapses into their old ways and resist the obviously necessary, but we are working on them. The first component is definitely still under development in the rail industry – people as well as assets.