I mean it seems highly unlikely that the ORR were committing perjury by saying something to the court that wasn't true so I'd have assumed we could just take them at face value. However, apparently, we cannot take them at face value because there must be something else behind WCRC other than intransigence.
Thankfully the ORR publish all sorts of documents including the impact assessment that they relied upon in court on their
website (a copy is also attached for posterity). From which we can see that the ORRs basis is as follows:
The whole thing is quite interesting in a technical sort of way and they did actually ask for some consideration of a design from scratch fitment rather than just using existing designs which came out at a higher figure of £50,000 per vehicle, still way short of WCRC £7m or £12m cost. Obviously these costs are all from 2020/21 so add a lot of inflation to them but it still seems utterly improbably to the point of insulting ones intelligence to suggest that the costs would have risen to the millions of pounds.
There's also an interesting bit at the very end which again goes to show that the ORR are quite willing to work with operators
as long as there is a plan:
Again, WCRC would have been perfectly entitled to spread the work out over a number of years and during the off season to avoid losing out on making money. I have very little doubt that the ORR would have happily gone on issuing exemptions on that basis to allow them to carry out a planned fitment over a period of time that was compatible with their financial and physical capacity to do the work.
WCRC chose instead to try and argue that the law, which has been law for over twenty years, was in fact not the law. Indeed the ORR also give quite a handy background:
The sector has had since 1999 to get its house in order and the warning shots started coming across the bow in 2018. If WCRC have decided to ignore all of that, have decided, even now when the ORR would probably still agree to an exemption, to still ignore the law and instead take costly legal action (I wonder how many carriages they could have paid to have fitted with CDL for all the legal fees?) and now try to then fight it out in the court of public opinion when they're told they're on a hiding to nothing by the court then really they only have themselves to blame.
I cannot understand the people who are still insisting that it's the nasty ORR who are somehow at fault here.
