Having read the paper that went to the TfL Board then the following was due to be decided
a) award of the new franchise contract to the winning bidder
b) the termination of the contract arrangements with CARE and WARE for the maintenance and upkeep of the City Airport and Woolwich Arsenal extensions
c) the dissolution of the CARE and WARE companies and subsidiaries. TfL took over these companies in 2011.
d) termination of the maintenance contract with COLAS for the Stratford International line.
The above allows the new franchisee to have a much larger maintenance responsibility and removes interfaces over operation, maintenance and upgrade works.
There is no change to the arrangements with CGL Rail for the lewisham extension as that contract runs to 2021 and is presumably too expensive for TfL to "buy out" at this stage in the contract.
The new contract includes additional provisions for DLR Limited (the TfL owning bit of DLR) to have far greater oversight and transparency about what the franchisee does to manage maintenance work, work banks, asset management etc. This is a way of ensuring they use best practice and are not avoiding doing work so they can squirrel away money to the shareholders. It also allows TfL to understand what is being done to the railway and why and to aid long term planning for asset upgrades / replacement.
DLR Limited will fund and specify all capital investment. Previously it was a shared responsibility with Serco. DLRL had guaranteed a level of capital expenditure to keep the railway "healthy" which is a good way of avoiding the franchisee pricing in risk monies for uncertainty or concerns about needing to spend more on maintenance if replacement or renewal was to be postponed due to funding cuts. The new contract also ensures TfL gain a share of cost saving initiatives resulting from capital investment. Capital projects which are already known about have been "pre-priced" in the new contract to avoid the risk of monopoly pricing once the contract was in place. Clearly this is a good idea but can't cover every eventuality so some changes will be subject to negotiation.
There appears to have been some strengthening of health and safety duties for the new franchisee and some additional responsibilities in terms of stakeholder management / participation on H&S matters. I wonder if that is borne out of experience with past incidents?
The railway's performance regime has been tweaked to remove the old "fee per passenger" incentive as TfL have taken full responsibility for marketing, revenue risk etc which was shared under the Serco regime. The targets and incentives / penalties on departures, on time performance etc have been tightened up and a new Excess Journey Time metric will be introduced into the perf regime. Financial elements have also been rebased as you would expect to maintain an adequate and affordable incentive regime. There are also "customer facing" targets on London Overground. I'm having flashbacks to PPP Contract Performance Management Days
- all sounds very, very familiar.
The paper includes some of the contract target levels and how the incentives / penalties ratchet up and down.
Some of the anciliary activities that DLR currently do in house will move to the wider TfL organisation so expect the "DLR-ness" of the DLR to disappear somewhat. It's always felt that little bit divorced from TfL with a more local feel but I suspect that'll go now.
It would seem that the bidder with the lowest costs, lowest contract fees and lowest prices for variations got the highest rating in the evaluation process. Not unexpected but you have to wonder *how* much lower the fees are for Keolis compared to the established operator Serco.
Bidders were asked to provide a separate price for taking over the CARE and WARE owned infrastructure and maintaining it. The bids for this were evaluated on the same basis as those for the main DLR railway.
There is nothing in the TfL paper that says that the main split of responsibilities of TfL specifying the service and the operator running it has changed. The only publicised improvements to DLR have been the dualling of Stratford to Bow Church and the possible purchase of extra trains. It is worth noting that TfL's forecasts for the DLR show it having a patronage and revenue dip once Crossrail comes on stream and people change journey patterns. I expect the Woolwich and Beckton branches will be hit hardest. Nonetheless this is likely to only be a short term dip as people always appear to fill up any spare capacity, particularly in the peaks.
I can't see anything "big" happening to the DLR Network until we get a new Mayor who may have a more radical vision as to the future of the network. In the meantime I'd say the challenge is to keep on top of asset health issues and maintain a reliable operation. The expansion works at Bank LU have the potential to affect DLR operations for a number of years.
