---

Sustainable Railways

I am disappointed that even Sir Nicholas is not waiting. But I take it that the hon. Gentleman may be waiting. The Select Committee report was rightly critical of the engineering overrun of new year 2008, describing ““serious deficiencies”” in respect of control. Of course, the debate in the House and comments in the report said that engineering overruns were quite unacceptable. That is true. It was brought out during the debate in the House that a number of those delays were absolutely avoidable and predictable, because Network Rail was warned as far in advance as 12 December 2007 that there were going to be problems, but they carried on despite the problems that would lead to the overrun. To be fair, that was 2007-08 and Network Rail has certainly made some improvements since then, and the Government cannot be blamed for the operational problems of Network Rail. However, it is right that the Government can be blamed because they set up Network Rail, which, structurally, is not accountable to passengers and is not given strong enough incentives to respond to what passengers actually want. All too often, Network Rail believes that its customer is the Government or the Office of Rail Regulation.