The whole point of the current delay attribution system is to, erm, attribute delay! It turns out that most delays can be attributed back to Network Rail, but it's only because of this system of accounting that it can be quantified. Although there are perverse incentives such as not holding connections, having an incentive for all players to minimise delay has helped improve timekeeping massively since BR. Schedule padding is seen as a bad thing by some on here, but nothing is ever 100% reliable so there needs to be some way of absorbing delay such that the service doesn't completely grind to a halt. I will also mention here that the grass-is-greener Swiss railways heavily utilise schedule padding, at the expense of capacity (since their railway isn't so heavily used as ours, they can afford to do this).
Since delay attribution shows that NR is the root cause of a lot of the delay, it should therefore be NR who get the most help in fixing it. Without the accounting that couldn't be known with any certainty. Under the proposals in the Telegraph article, which seem to punish the TOCs regardless, what incentive is there for NR to get its house in order? Although a Tory government may not like it, the railway isn't some modern, dynamic, thrusting free market thing that can choose its infrastructure supplier. There's only one infrastructure provider: NR. I'm sure we could debate for hours as to why NR has problems, but that doesn't change the fact that the TOCs are basically powerless to change its reliability.
They say everything happens for a reason, but what is the reason for directly fining the TOCs? Is this in preparation for NR to be smashed up and merged into local TOCs? Is this just a new guy in the office trying to "leave his mark" with blue-sky thinking? Is the DfT just stupid?
