Transcript
EVAN DAVIS:
Which do we do better here? Do we do the engineering, the physical engineering, better? Or is it the financial side, the financial engineering that we do better – or worse?
ROB HOLDEN:
The engineering, I think, we’ve got correct, as we can see here. The problem for projects is financing and planning. Although when I think about planning, we’re not as bad as some other countries, particularly the United States. But the Hybrid Bill process ...
EVAN DAVIS:
Which is the process of taking a private project through Parliament if it needs to be taken through Parliament...
ROB HOLDEN:
It’s basically getting its permissions to acquire the land and do what it needs to do. Comes with a huge bill in terms of many, many undertakings and assurances, which adds to the cost.
EVAN DAVIS:
Because every MP can say, look, let’s put this in or that in. And some of those will go through. Just whacking up the bill for the developers.
ROB HOLDEN:
Yeah. And we had some hundreds on Channel Tunnel Rail High Speed One. Crossrail has 780-odd undertakings and assurances. And every one of those comes with a bill, sometimes millions of pounds. And what we’re not good at is sorting out the necessary from the nice-to-haves. And it introduces delay. So that helps complicate the financing.
EVAN DAVIS:
Innovation. We like it in this country, quite a bit. We want to have innovative companies. Was there a system in London and Continental Railways - as it was - was there a system for being innovative in the building of HS One? Or was it really just about being as uninnovative as possible and using everything, but making sure that you’re not trying things out and doing everything in the same old way?
ROB HOLDEN:
Being a cautious accountant, I’ve adopted the approach - and fortunately my colleagues followed it here - that we would not be innovative. I’m not ashamed to say that High Speed One Channel Tunnel Rail link is simply an extension of the French TGV network. It works, and it worked for us. And when I was at Crossrail, again, we took the approach that we weren’t going to use the project as an experiment. There are enough risks on mega projects without introducing unnecessary risks. And I think, with the success that we had here, it was the right decision.
EVAN DAVIS:
So the signalling system, for example, tell us about that.
ROB HOLDEN:
The signalling system here is a proven signalling system – in France. There is, at the moment, a European requirement to move to a signalling system called ERTMS Level 3. It doesn’t work at the moment, and it’s going to cost an awful lot of money to get it working. Big projects cannot afford to be the test bed of new signalling systems. So I’m sure I and my colleagues will be very happy to use ERTMS when somebody has got it to work successfully.