Network Rail has been fined £14 million because works carried out over the Christmas and New Year period at Liverpool Street Station, Glasgow and Rugby were not completed on time.
What is the point of fining a public sector company? It is taxpayers' and passengers' who will have to pay. It may be possible for NR to pass the fine on to its consultants, but I doubt if that will happen.
The reason for the over-run, apparently, is the shortage of qualified people to put up the overhead electric wiring, like those in the picture. If there was even a small rolling programme of electrification, there would have been more trained staff available, but it turned out that workers were being poached between sites by team leaders desperate to get the work completed.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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