Dawlish and the need for redundancy

On the 4th of February 2014, a major storm destroyed the railway along the sea front in the town of Dawlish in South West Devon. Rails were left hanging over an abyss in front of a raging sea. This event cut the only rail connection to a large area distant from the capital. There is a 100 miles of peninsula to the West of the City of Exeter, while Penzance (the Westernmost town in Cornwall) is further from London than Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The railways have long been aware of the vulnerability of the line at Dawlish. In 1937, the Great Western Railway secured an act of Parliament to authorise a new inland by-pass line. Work began, but ceased at the outbreak of war. There were, however, at that time two other inland alternatives: the Teign Valley Line (just West of Dawlish) and the Okehampton Line across Dartmoor. Both were closed in the 1960s, the latter as part of the major programme of closures proposed by Dr Richard Beeching in his notorious reports of 1963 and 1965. The Department of Transport is currently considering the need to re-instate the Dartmoor Line at a possible cost of £100 million. Meanwhile, repair work continues in Dawlish, probably also costing several million pounds. The business lost to the South West because of the closure of the line has been estimated at £20 million/day.

How was it that a seemingly-rational accountant like Dr Beeching (supported by assorted politicians, senior civil servants and media commentators) implemented the closure of the only alternative to a strategic but vulnerable railway line? The answer, I believe, lies in the kind of flawed rationality dominant in political decision-making both then and now. The key flaw is to equate ‘efficiency’ with the maximum possible use of resources. Resources that are not being used are regarded as costly and redundant, and are to be stripped back. For Beeching, this  involved eliminating railway lines that duplicated routes between cities. The Dartmoor Line was one of the two lines remaining between Exeter and Plymouth, and was therefore deemed redundant.

But this definition of ‘efficiency’ only makes sense if the demand for resources is constant and unchanging. If demand fluctuates or if some mishap closes down a key resource, then public services fail without a stock of redundant resources that can be quickly deployed. Heathrow Airport experiences long delays when there is a snowfall or extremely cold weather. This is not because the airport is inefficient or badly-managed, but because in normal conditions it is highly efficient in its use of its resources. Its two runways operate to near-maximum capacity, and there is therefore no stock of ‘redundant time’. In very cold weather, it takes longer to prepare planes for flight because they need to be de-iced and swept. As a result, the number of flights/hour is reduced, and delays inevitably increase. A similar problem occurs with the many hospitals which usually operate near full-capacity. During spikes in admissions (often during very cold weather), staff face the option of either transporting patients at great expense to a distant hospital, or discharging patients before they are ready to return home. Failing to allow redundancy can therefore be very expensive.

As well as short-term fluctuations in demand, there may also be long-term shifts. Another common flaw is to assume that any long-term change will be a continuation of the most recently-observed trend (called the ‘extrapolation error’). Dr Beeching had noted the steady decline in rail traffic in the 1950s, and assumed this would continue until rail travel was reduced to a few inter-city mainlines. This assumption was widely-shared among policy-makers at the time, and was based on a belief that the USA offered the path to the future. This vision of apparent modernity was characterised by motorways, cheap petrol and a sharp decline in public transport. The USA is, of course, a very different place from the small crowded UK, and a better model for modernity would have been the other countries of Western Europe, which generally kept their extensive rail networks and urban tramways (as well as building motorways).

In the years since privatisation, there has been a continuing expansion of rail transport in the UK, with a 50% increase in passenger-miles in the last ten years. This has led to major investment in expanding the rail network, and in creating urban tram systems. In many cases, this expenditure restores systems torn up in the 1950s and 1960s. Edinburgh once had an extensive tram system, which was closed in 1956. The Scottish Government has now spent over £700 million to build a smaller (and much-delayed) network. Another, and cheaper, example is the doubling of some of the railway track between Worcester and Oxford. This only(!) cost £70 million, but it involved restoring track that had been removed in the 1970s. There are many other examples.

The closure of the Dartmoor Line shows a further kind of flawed rationality. As a good accountant, Dr Beeching attempted to estimate the profitability of each individual part of the business (in this case, railway lines between specified destinations). But this assumed that a railway line is a self-contained entity rather part of a system. People therefore use one railway line to reach another one. The closure of the Dartmoor Line meant that Tavistock, a town of about 11,000 people, no longer had a railway station. Before the closure, people living there who wished to go to, for example Taunton or Bristol, would have caught the train to Exeter and changed there for a main-line train. After the closure, they could have driven to Exeter and then caught a train. But of course, once in a car, they might as well complete the journey up the M5. Closure of small lines therefore reduced passenger numbers on the main lines that Dr Beeching had calculated were profitable.

This failure to see society as a complex system is endemic in political life. Long-term psychiatric beds are closed, and there is an unexpected rise in the number of homeless people and people with mental disorders in prison. Local authority expenditure on social care is drastically reduced, and there is a sudden mysterious rise in emergency hospital admissions. This complexity marks out public life as a very different matter from running a business. In a business, there is a limited and defined list of products, each of which is targeted at a particular set of customers, while there a simple and appropriate measures of success (sales and profit) can usually be calculated. This simplicity is appealing for politicians and senior civil servants, and a series of businessmen (beginning with Dr Beeching) have been brought into government to ‘solve’ complex problems. Governments have also turned to management consultants, who invariably suggest outsourcing public services so that governments act as a ‘purchaser’ in a sort of quasi-market. In the absence of indicators like sales and profits, endless sets of ‘targets’ are specified, leading to demoralised and confused staff, and simple-minded decision-making.

Needless to say, the contracts for these outsourced services costs millions of pounds to negotiate, for both the government as purchaser and the provider agencies. A substantial proportion of these millions is of course spent on buying advice from the management consultant agencies that recommended the whole system in the first place.

See also:
Not staying focussed