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Strategic report Limited Annual Report and Accounts 2019

Members of Team Victoria

South East

3,500 500m 344 2,000 20%+ employees passenger journeys stations miles of track freight growth in CP5 per year

The South East route is the busiest and most congested in Freight demand is also predicted to increase, on top of the the country, connecting the capital and its southern and 20 per cent growth experienced since 2014. This has been south eastern suburbs with , , and driven by the booming construction industry and supports Channel routes to Europe. businesses and boosts economic growth. Around 5,000 passenger run every day over almost As part of Network Rail’s ‘Putting Passengers First’ 2,000 miles of track and we manage four of the busiest programme, the South East route will split to form the stations in the country – Victoria, London Bridge, Sussex and Kent routes. Together with the Wessex route, London and London . the three routes will form the Southern region. This will make us more responsive to the needs of our customers and After extraordinary growth in the last decade, we now passengers, helping us drive up performance. deliver almost 500 million passenger journeys a year, which is a third of the national total, and still rising.

39 Network Rail Limited Annual Report and Accounts 2019 Strategic report

Key scorecard targets South East continued

Minimum Target Maximum

2018/19 55.7% Scorecard Outturn 2017/18 70.7% 2018/19 Safety 2017/18 2018/19 Financial Performance 2017/18 2018/19 Investment 2017/18 2018/19 Asset Management 2017/18 2018/19 Train Performance 2017/18 2018/19 Locally Driven Customer Measures 2017/18

We have exceeded our targets across all three of our major While we’ve made good progress year on year, we have to be passenger train operators this year. honest with ourselves and our passengers and admit it’s still not good enough and we have to keep striving for better. That was in part down to our joint performance teams with Southeastern and GTR, which have changed the way we Despite our strong focus on safety and wellbeing, our look at performance and give us a much deeper efforts were overshadowed this year by some tragic understanding of how our railway operates. incidents, including the death of a colleague on the railway near Purley. Our principal performance measure on South East is Right Time, which measures trains arriving at their destination Another of our colleagues suffered severe burns in an within 59 seconds of their published time. electrical fire while working on a substation at Godinton, near Ashford. For Southeastern, we delivered a Right Time moving annual average of 66 per cent, which was above target. For GTR, we We’re determined to learn from these tragedies to prevent achieved 57.5 per cent against a target of 54.6 per cent, and incidents in future and we are striving to embed a positive for ’s Overground services, we finished the safety culture across the business. year on 90 per cent against a target of 88.9 per cent.

Putting passengers first Team Victoria Passengers are now much more satisfied with their experience at , thanks to the Team Victoria initiative, bringing the Network Rail and train operator teams together in one uniform, serving passengers as one team. This is a perfect example of how we are putting passengers first and has helped increase passenger satisfaction by 13 per cent in just 12 months. In what has been described as a first for Britain’s rail industry, our staff, along with employees at train Case Study Case operators Southeastern, Southern and , waved goodbye to their individual company uniforms in favour of a new purple Team Victoria outfit. It’s not just a cosmetic change though, as staff were retrained to assist every passenger regardless of the service they’re using. This means passengers no longer need to seek out or be pointed towards specific staff to help with their particular issue or query and provides a better level of customer service. In 2019 this initiative will be rolled out to London Bridge, London Charing Cross and London Cannon Street.

40 Strategic report Network Rail Limited Annual Report and Accounts 2019

South East continued

Financial performance in 2018/19 was positive overall, We delivered all our planned efficiencies, including the thanks largely to improved operating performance which move of the route’s headquarters from London Bridge to meant lower compensation payments to train operators, Southwark, which also contributes to the efficiencies being and the cost of compensation for engineering work delivered for Control Period 6 (CP6). possessions was less than expected.

Activities in the year

New seating at London Victoria station

2018/19 has been a year to remember for the South Passengers at London Victoria station will soon enjoy clean, East route with passengers reaping the rewards of our modern, reliable and comfortable toilets thanks to a major hard work. revamp. And they still won’t have to spend a penny as the toilets will remain free to use. New seats were also installed We started the year with the official opening of London at London Bridge and London Victoria stations. Bridge by His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, following a five-year transformation that nearly doubled Passengers are also soon to benefit from improved passenger capacity and allowed for 30 per cent more trains. accessibility at stations as part of the Government’s Access for All programme. Work at Plumstead, , And we closed with the successful completion of one of the East, Carshalton, Coulsdon South and biggest projects in our route’s history on the Main stations will all be completed later in 2019. Line, where we tackled the root causes of delay to give passengers a more reliable service. We also made great strides for the passengers who pass daily through one of our busiest junctions at Pier, Completing the work over an unprecedented nine-day on the approach to London Victoria, by completing a blockade plus 15 weekends – instead of the alternative of replacement over Christmas. 79 weekend closures – has meant we were able to fast track the benefits for the 300,000 daily passengers. Passengers, businesses and residents also largely supported our plans to remove Britain’s biggest railway Less happily, we recognise that we let passengers down bottleneck at at a series of consultation events. with the May 2018 timetable troubles. A whole system The 300,000 passengers who travel through this crucial approach to timetable planning must be the way ahead junction every day will enjoy a step-change in reliability if and December’s timetable, which introduced modest we realise our ambition to remodel the junctions with new improvements, was a step in the right direction. flyovers, so trains can pass each other without having to Winter weather conditions in 2018 were the most wait at red signals. challenging we’ve seen in the South East for more than a But our work didn’t only focus on running the railway. decade. Unfortunately, this led to a very serious incident in Working with community groups and renowned artists, we , and we’re determined to learn from what also helped transform 15 of London’s historic railway happened. Working with our colleagues at Southeastern, we bridges into stunning pieces of art, which are inspiring pride have identified and implemented a number of in people’s neighbourhoods and reducing graffiti. improvements to how we handle stranded trains.

41 Network Rail Limited Annual Report and Accounts 2019 Strategic report

South East continued

Efficiencies A major part of our efficiency savings during CP5 was the relocation of our route headquarters and 740 employees from London Bridge Cottons Centre to James Forbes House in Southwark. In order to realise the significant £7m route saving over CP6, we had to move quickly. Despite difficult market conditions, we secured a sub-let of our space at the Cottons Centre in London Bridge, which required a fast exit months earlier than our anticipated move. We therefore had to accelerate our

Case Study Case programme to keep the deal and maximise our efficiency. We completed the move in September in just one weekend, with no disruption to the day-to-day operational business. Throughout CP6 we have a target of £300m in further efficiencies, which we must deliver. The team is already delivering year one targets and these are reported against periodically.

In the year ahead

We have received a record £4.3bn to spend over the next five We’ll also complete upgrades of the signalling on the lines years to run, maintain and upgrade the railway. That’s over from Deptford to Woolwich and Lewisham, and between £1bn more than we received in the last funding period. Hither Green and New and Elmstead. We now need to spend this money wisely to address We will also complete a huge package of work to renew historic under-investment in the South East. That means critical junctions, including at North Kent East, Hither Green prioritising investment in maintenance to keep our and Ashford. Old track will be completely replaced on infrastructure running reliably, while we use the extra sections of line across the route including at Canterbury funding to renew critical infrastructure to improve East, the Catford Loop, the approaches to Cannon Street, at performance in the longer term. Gillingham and at Forest Hill. Improvements to signalling are also planned, as well as the Our proposals to redevelop station to introduction of digital traffic management to help our provide a railway station that works for passengers have signallers operate more efficiently. been approved by all funding parties. Work on this major redevelopment plan will start later this year. Major improvements Proposals to address the major bottlenecks on the to provide more reliable, more frequent and In the year ahead, we will continue transforming our faster services will continue to be developed and we’ll keep stations, working more closely than ever with our train making the case for this critical investment. operator colleagues to improve passenger experience. Our people are our biggest asset and fundamental to our On the Kent route, working with our colleagues at success. So as part of our plan to create a great place to Council, we will complete a jointly funded regeneration work, where our people feel valued, we are focusing on four project that will breathe new life into the area around main areas: more effective induction; training, including Chatham station. practice using realistic simulation environments; improving diversity to create an environment where everyone feels Kent passengers can also look forward to a bigger, better included, respected and can be themselves at work; and and more attractive Maidstone East station as wellbeing initiatives such as our Occupational Health Centre redevelopment continues. at London Victoria station.

John Halsall, 15 July 2019 route managing director, South East

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