HISTORIC PRESS RELEASE : Sir Alastair Morton to Depart the Strategic Rail Authority on Friday [November 2001]

The press release issued by the Strategic Rail Authority on 28 November 2001.

Sir Alastair Morton announced today that he will relinquish the chair of the Strategic Rail Authority this Friday, 30 November to enable Richard Bowker to succeed him on 1 December.

He said:

“I want to facilitate Richard’s arrival now he is available. I am pleased he is succeeding me and I wish him every success in a task that will not be easy. He knows the industry and has the talent and energy the situation demands. He will need, however, to get ministers and officials to back off and let the SRA raise its game and do its job.

“Most of our rail problems are structural and deep-seated. We have scarcely begun to reverse the legacy of decades of under-investment, and short-term remedies will achieve little. My vision of the future and my strategic recommendations are on Stephen Byers’ desk, not in the draft Strategic Plan awaiting Richard Bowker. That has been prepared by the SRA as Ministers wished – to fit within the resources available from the Government’s 10 Year Plan. At intervals since 7 June, but particularly since 7 October, I have advised Stephen Byers to restructure both Railtrack and the overall regulatory system, and then the public funding of a public service that can only be delivered adequately if an SRA-led government policy attracts private sector capital and management into partnership with it.

“I leave to Richard the tasks of reconciling structure to reality, resources to needs and, more immediately, of imparting direction and urgency to the restructuring and remanaging of Railtrack. That ought to be the major justification for and consequence of government pushing it into administration. Little of long-term structural significance has happened there in nearly two months since 7 October. The industry is drifting.

“I did not take this job as a career move after the successful completion of the Channel Tunnel, but to help improve an essential public service. I thank all those who have helped and advised me, particularly Mike Grant who has proved a tirelessly efficient guardian of the public interest at its interface with the private sector. There are many good people in and near the railway industry working hard to deliver what people want and need, but they are as frustrated as I am by its structure and by short-term responses to its long-term needs. No strategy will succeed unless it first deals with those fundamentals. I wish Richard Bowker luck, health and strength in addressing them.”