The Transport Committee’s latest report, Rail investment pipelines: ending boom and bust, delivers one of the most comprehensive examinations yet of why UK rail continues to struggle with fragmented investment, skills loss and a supply chain squeezed by uncertainty. For staff and managers across the industry, its message is familiar—but the urgency is sharper than ever.
The headline conclusion is blunt: “investment in that asset has too often been characterised by cycles of ‘boom and bust’, with uneven and uncertain funding and procurement putting the viability of employers (including SMEs) at risk and delaying much‑needed improvements to the network.”
Despite major projects such as HS2 Phase One and the Transpennine Route Upgrade, the Committee warns that long-term confidence has collapsed across much of the supply chain. As one witness put it, today’s outlook is “the worst that they have ever seen.”
A Supply Chain Under Strain
The report captures testimony from across industry—large contractors, SMEs, manufacturers and unions—painting a consistent picture of damaging volatility.
RIA Chair Noel Travers told the Committee that, across nearly four decades in the sector, “what we are experiencing at the moment is way beyond anything I have experienced in my career.”
Specialist skills, particularly in electrification, signalling and rolling stock engineering, are repeatedly being lost due to shifting priorities and sudden pauses in work. Elaine Clark OBE of Rail Forum summarised the situation facing SMEs starkly: “the SMEs are the ones that will get capsized by the ripples.”
The consequences are already visible. The report highlights recent layoffs across electrification teams following the latest pause on the Midland Main Line. Stephen Barber of the Permanent Way Institution said simply: “the industry has just recently laid off about 180 people from those disciplines.”
Electrification: The Case Study of What Not to Do
Few areas illustrate the boom-and-bust problem more clearly than electrification. The stop-start history of the Great Western Electrification Programme created what Arcadis described as a “politically toxic” environment for future schemes.
Sir Andrew Haines told MPs that the failures stemmed partly from ramping up capability from a near-zero baseline: “because of the political imperative, we ended up contracting too soon and bearing a lot of risk.”
The contrast with Scotland is repeatedly highlighted. There, a rolling electrification programme has maintained skills, reduced costs and avoided the need to rebuild delivery capability from scratch. Haines was unequivocal: “a steady, continuous pipeline is the most efficient way to deliver it.”
Yet the UK network remains only 39% electrified.
Rolling Stock: The 35-Year Pattern of Peaks and Troughs
The Committee reserves some of its strongest criticism for rolling stock procurement—an area it says exemplifies volatility.
It notes that order books have swung wildly for decades, with manufacturers often left facing multi‑year gaps. RIA warned that current order droughts risk “thousands of jobs”, while Siemens Mobility described procurement as “a moving target”.
A series of recent examples underline the structural issue:
- TransPennine Express began procurement in 2020, paused it, restarted in 2024.
- Southeastern started a process in 2017, cancelled it, then relaunched in 2024.
- Northern expected tenders in spring 2023 but received them only in January 2025—with the order cut from 450 to 131 units.
Sambit Banerjee of Siemens told MPs: “it is extraordinarily difficult for us as manufacturers to plan anything if it is a moving target.”
The Committee welcomes the Government’s plan to publish the first rolling stock strategy in 30 years, but stresses it must be tightly aligned with infrastructure timelines.
Control Periods: A Good System Undermined by Poor Profiling
While Control Periods remain central to the industry’s funding stability, the report argues they do not prevent damaging cycles within each five‑year block. Rail Forum noted that Control Periods create “artificial fractures”, while RIA reported that a slow start to CP7 meant many suppliers faced sudden reductions in work.
Sir Andrew Haines candidly admitted that historically Network Rail was “not very good at transitioning from one Control Period to the next”—a problem that has contributed to the stop‑start pattern the Committee wants to eliminate.
A Pipeline in Name Only
Perhaps the strongest criticism is reserved for the Rail Network Enhancements Pipeline (RNEP), which has not been updated since 2019.
Sir Andrew Haines described why bluntly: “it is owned politically and is therefore subject to shifting political priorities… very quickly the numbers don’t add up. The easiest way to not expose that is to not publish the pipeline.”
The Committee calls for annual publication, a higher bar for adding schemes, and clear funding lines for every included project—turning RNEP into a credible communication tool rather than, as RIA put it, a repository of “broken promises”.
The Way Forward: Strategic Clarity, Long-Term Certainty
Central to the Committee’s recommendations is the new Long Term Rail Strategy (LTRS) mandated under the Railways Bill. It insists the strategy must:
- Set out firm long-term objectives for electrification, rolling stock, accessibility and capacity.
- Align all infrastructure projects and rolling stock decisions to those objectives.
- Provide stable direction for at least 30 years.
On this point, the report is unequivocal: “Successive governments have failed to articulate what they want the railway network to achieve.”
The establishment of Great British Railways is seen as a chance to correct this, but only if GBR is protected from political micromanagement. Sir Andrew Haines warned that the system cannot be optimised if “very small increments of enhancements… end up being centrally controlled.”
For the UK rail industry, the Committee’s report is not just another critique—it is a comprehensive diagnosis of structural issues that many in the sector have been highlighting for years.
The message is simple: if the railway is to thrive, grow, decarbonise and serve the country effectively, it needs a stable, predictable pipeline of work—matched with a long-term vision and free from short-term political turbulence.
Image credit: iStock
