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Strategic thinker becomes biggest victim of system he created to revive industry
Robert Lea01.07.09
THE departure of Richard Bowker from National Express comes laced with irony.
"He is the man who set up this blasted franchise system and he is the one who is now its greatest victim," one rival railway executive told the Standard today.
Others pointed to a further irony: it was Bowker's desperation for National Express to land the most lucrative franchise on the network, the East Coast Main Line, that may ultimately have plunged his company into the deepest of crises.
Bowker first made his name as the head of the Government's Strategic Rail Authority from 2001, the body charged with bringing joined-up thinking to the railway industry amid the confusion of the collapse of Railtrack.
His job was to redraw and re-award the network's train franchises in an attempt to clear up glaring inconsistencies from the Tory privatisation half a decade earlier.
Young (he is still only 42), he resonated the easy charm of his mentor and former boss Sir Richard Branson. He went tie-less - his trademark garb was chinos, white T-shirt, pale-blue button-down shirt - and liked to talk up big ideas with gusto. His regular lapses into management jargon and business school-speak, however, were less easy on the ear.
Bowker was no outsider. He had worked for Virgin Rail and cut his teeth in the labyrinthine structures of the London Underground.
But within three years at the SRA he was a victim of the bitter in-fighting and notorious jealousies of the rail industry and had been stabbed in the back by his employer, the Department for Transport, who feared losing control of a sector which the taxpayer was still having to bankroll to the tune of tens of billions of pounds a year. The SRA was wound up, Bowker made redundant and the DfT took control of a train franchise system which Bowker could rightly claim to be his creation.
Within two years Bowker was back in the industry, taking over, as chief executive, at National Express what had been the country's largest train operator. But National Express's rail business was in steep decline.
In a series of franchise re-tenders and re-draws it had lost the Gatwick Express, Midland Mainline, Silverlink, Wessex Trains, Great Northern, Central Trains and ScotRail.
Worse, as new franchises came up for grabs National Express was not winning a thing - giving the stark impression that Bowker's bids were apparently being ignored by his old bosses. When Bowker finally won a bid it was the biggest in the business, the East Coast Main Line into and out of King's Cross.
But the gasps were audible when it transpired National Express had pledged to pay projected excess profits of £1.4billion back to the Treasury over the seven years of the franchise.
Bowker's bid had been by far the most financially ambitious and was regarded by some as reckless, given that National Express was inheriting a train service clearly in trouble as its previous operator, the financially-strapped GNER, had been forced to walk away in 2006.
It is another irony that East Coast Main Line, long regarded as potentially the most lucrative on the network, has seen the financial demise of two operations within three years.
Reader views (2)
Bowker is not a victim he is the lead perpetrator of this which yet again the real victims, we taxpayers, pick up the tab for.
His type are dangerous because like banking chief executives, Goodwin and Hornby, their arrogance is boundless even when they stiff the taxpayers for billions and walk away.
Having done nothing to censure Goodwin and Hornby in the banking sector, could the Government and regulators at least ensure that Bowker (don't forget the name BOWKER as he is the sort of arrogant character that will deny his mistakes and want to come back to a similar role in the UK in a few years to cost us billions more if he is allowed to) does not get offered a role that has any influence or access whatever on/to taxpayers money.
- Jim, London
Only if your definition of victim is a man who totally fails at his job, costs the taxpayer millions and walks off into another well paid job with a large sum of money.
- Terry Gee, UK
