21 October 2022
The Railway Industry Association (RIA) has today published its own Rail Network Enhancements Pipeline (RNEP), three years after the last announcement was made public by the UK Government.
Created in 2019, the RNEP was billed as a ‘new approach for rail proposals’, which would provide certainty and transparency through the annual publication of a pipeline of enhancement projects in England and Wales. However, Friday 21 October 2022 will mark three years since the publication of the first and only iteration of the RNEP – since then there has been a reduction in the CP6 rail enhancement budget, and the lack of any subsequent update has led to considerable rail supply sector uncertainty and concern.
RIA has published its own RNEP, based on publicly available information, to give some understanding of enhancement projects to its members. The trade association has analysed all 58 projects included in the original RNEP and given each one a red, amber or green rating, based on:
- Green: scheme is complete, under construction or there is public information confirming that the project will be delivered;
- Amber: public information suggests the project development is progressing, but there is not yet certainty it will be delivered. In practice this usually means that the project is progressing towards a Strategic Outline Business Case or an Outline Business Case; and
- Red: no information about the status of the project; or there is a large amount of uncertainty over whether it is progressing.
The Briefing