The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has a key role in making sure all new, upgraded or renewed rail infrastructure and rolling stock meet certain criteria to be able to enter into service.
This is known as an authorisation.
An authorisation letter is issued at the end of a project, which allows the placing into service of the new or updated station, infrastructure or rolling stock. Between 2019 and 2020, ORR authorised more than 100 projects.
Over time, we’ve wanted to improve this process to establish a smoother path for authorisation.
To help us understand how best to do this we sought some assistance to undertake a review of how other regulators best manage their authorisation role.
We undertook some benchmarking work and discovered that other regimes successfully used a “stage gate” approach during the lifecycle of a project.
We certainly see the benefits of this – notably, spreading work associated with authorisation more evenly across the life of the project, increasing awareness that gaining authorisation is not a barrier to meeting project milestones and minimising or eliminating the need to place significant conditions on an authorisation.
We felt this was the right approach to take moving forward. We’ve now launched a new guidance document to help explain this approach in more detail and our team of engineers will be speaking to projects over the coming weeks.
It has been great to receive a big thumbs up from the discussions we’ve already had with projects and stakeholders so far, with a number of projects already keen to adopt the introduction of a stage gate approach as soon as possible.
As this progresses, we’ll work with the industry on this approach and will undertake a review of its effectiveness after 12 months.