JOHN HUMPHRYS: Right well, Gerald Corbett, Chief Executive of Railtrack. The next three years, you have heard there, you have got to deliver something that you are not delivering at the moment in terms of investment, improving the rail track and giving them extra powers and all of that sort of thing. It's your fault, in short, what's been happening. GERALD CORBETT: No, I don't accept that. Things aren't as good as they should be, but you have to see it in perspective. Things..a lot of progress has been made. I mean the very fact that there are twenty-five per cent more trains than there were three years ago, we have provided that extra capacity. The performance of the newly privatised railway, every single quarter has been better than before privatisation. The fact that this year it's not enough, but we are investing two billion pounds, that's over twice what we were four years ago, and on average is over twice what BR spent on the infrastructure these last ten years. So a lot of good things have been going on. HUMPHRYS: Well let's look at that investment then and there will be a few figures here which might confuse some people, I apologise for that but it's important to get into this in a little bit of detail. You had expected to invest twenty-seven billion pounds or so over the next twenty years and that was on the assumption that there would be a thirty per cent increase in passengers, more or less, these are very broad figures. Right, now you have accepted that the increase in the number of passengers will be greater than that, it will be about fifty-five per cent...fifty-three per cent. Do you accept therefore, that you will need much more than that twenty-seven billion pounds, indeed the figure the BBC has worked out during the work it's been doing on this, is a total of forty-one billion pounds. Do you accept that there is that size of gap? CORBETT: Yes I do. HUMPHRYS: Accept the BBC figure? CORBETT: Not absolutely.. HUMPHRYS: Give or take.. CORBETT: The twenty-seven billion is an investment programme over the next ten years to provide for a further thirty per cent growth. It now looks like the growth is going to be of the order of fifty per cent. We have had another strong year of passenger growth and we are going to have to adjust our plans and the number will go up. HUMPHRYS: Right, well now. Where is the money going to come from. It's an awful lot of money, there's a big difference between forty-one billion and twenty-seven billion. We're talking about what - I can't do the figure off the top of my head instantly but we're talking about one and a half billion pounds a year extra than you had expected. CORBETT: Yes I think that's right and the money can come from several sources. Part of it can come from the growth in the fare box and the kind of deals we are able to do.. HUMPHRYS: In other words the money that they are going to hand over to you. CORBETT: Yes from the extra growth, passengers paying fares and they will hand that over to us following a negotiation as part of their franchise extension. So that's one part of the pot. HUMPHRYS: And you accept incidentally that you will only get the money if you deliver the services which is what the train operators are saying. CORBETT: Yes we don't want to be paid for nothing. I mean we have got to be paid on results. The second way the money is going to come is from the financial markets. We have the capacity to be able to raise billions of pounds from the financial markets to invest in the railways. We've done it already, we're borrowing at the moment one and a half billion, we issued a five hundred million pound convertible bond last year. HUMPHRYS: You've got to double that borrowing though. CORBETT: We're going to have to borrow a lot more and we may have to raise what we call share capital. HUMPHRYS: People may actually, having looked at what they perceive to be your record, people might say 'oh, I don't know about that?' CORBETT: Well I don't think. I think the record, which is by now means perfect, but the record is okay. I think the problem is the risk and there's huge risk in Railtrack, in that there's political risk as we've seen in the last six months, there's big regulatory risk as we've seen in the last year, our shares have come down from seventeen pounds down to eight pounds and we are, sort of, we are in the middle of the Bay of Biscay and a force ten and that's not the right environment from which to be able to raise all this money. HUMPHRYS: Precisely, so therefore you have to get, you've said those are two of the sources of extra money, extra investment, what's the third? CORBETT: The third is public subsidy. More money from the Treasury. A large part of the rail network at the moment does not make a commercial profit, there are huge social benefits, Scotland, Wales, the regional railways, they are always going to need a subsidy. But the three sources of money, are the public purse, increase in the fare box and the financial markets. We can deliver on the financial markets, but we actually do need the government to deliver a stable framework for us and that's what I hope Lord MacDonald is going to talk to us about. HUMPHRYS: Well I'm going to ask him now in just a moment. But, before I do that, the problem is this question of trust in Railtrack isn't it. I mean there has been again this week another damning report, the HSE, the Health and Safety Executive, basic failures in maintaining the track. This is not the sort of environment in which people, the public are going to say, yeah, let's give Railtrack all the money they need. CORBETT: No, I agree, that is a big problem. That particular report refers to data that was for the year to the end of March, so the data is nine months out of date. HUMPHRYS: Not much though. CORBETT: Well the fact of the matter is that year to date, the number of broken rails has come down. The initial report that was prepared by the HSE had all the good things that were going on in the network in terms of safety but they decided to take that out because post Paddington they didn't think it was appropriate. We do, the railway does, it's always been like this, it's in a goldfish bowl, you can talk to Peter Parker, you can talk to either of the Bob Reids. It's always been difficult, people always remember the trains that are late, they will never talk about the good things that are happening and it's not all bad. HUMPHRYS: So they should, that's the point, we expect good things, we don't pay our taxes and our fares and all the rest of it for bad things do we. CORBETT: I think that's fair enough and we have to be squeaky clean and we have to get everything right and we haven't got everything right and we are only three years old. Three years ago we were still a government department. We are facing huge challenges in terms of doubling our investment programme, in terms of the extra growth from the network in terms of driving down minutes delay. There's tremendous amount to do and there are some things that we haven't done as well as we should have done. HUMPHRYS: Do you think you've been used as a bit of a whipping boy? CORBETT: Yes, if you want my honest opinion. I think we have and I think that's understandable because it is a public service and because two million people a day go on it and it's always going to be high up the political agenda for that reason. But the problem with being used as a whipping boy is that it makes it terribly difficult to manage, it makes it terribly difficult to plan and it makes it almost impossible to raise the necessary money. And that's the situation which we find ourselves in. We know we have got to do better but at the same time we are hungry for a regime and a stability and a former relationship with the government and our regulators that enables us to get on and do the job and raise the money. HUMPHRYS: Doesn't help your public image when they take away the tube from you, for instance, does it. CORBETT: No, it doesn't but I guess that solves, sorts out other problem, it's... HUMPHRYS: It's a problem you don't have. CORBETT: Well it may be a blessing. HUMPHRYS: Alright.