4. The joint venture route required £1,900 million of public sector money to be either committed or placed at risk during the early stages of construction. The Government felt that some of the risks could be better managed by the private sector and therefore decided that the project should proceed as part of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
5. In December 1991, the then Department of Transport formed a team to consider ways of involving the private sector and to propose a structure which would make the most of what a private sector promoter could offer. The investment bank, Samuel Montagu and civil engineers W.S. Atkins were appointed as consultants, while the Private Finance Panel of the Bank of England participated in the development of the policy. Between then and the end of 1993, this team reviewed the key features of other private finance projects and identified the factors which contributed to their success. The work also included a consultation exercise and a number of other studies in order to understand what the private sector would be looking for in a project like the Link and to determine how best to incentivise an eventual promoter to deliver the results the Government wanted.
6. During this time, Union Railways Limited (URL), which was then a British Rail agency company, was responsible for refining the route corridor announced by the Secretary of State in October 1991 into an alignment sufficiently detailed to be placed before Ministers and then Parliament. This involved examining route alternatives totalling more than ten times the actual route length. A few options were then subjected to further refinement with a report to Government in March 1993 being followed by public consultation and a further report in October of that year. In January 1994 the Government then took a number of decisions in principle on the route based on the results of this work. URL's work throughout was supported with a grant from the European Commission under the Trans-European Networks (TENs) programme. Once the route was determined in sufficient detail in early 1994, safeguarding was carried out to protect it from conflicting planning proposals and the drafting of a Hybrid Bill was put in hand.