Beesley Lecture: Where next for utility regulation? A comparative analysis

Tom Winsor

Partner and Global Head of Railway Practice, White & Case

Biography

Tom Winsor's practice at White & Case embraces infrastructure projects, including regulatory dynamics, price reviews and connected matters. From 1999 until he joined White & Case in 2004, he was UK Rail Regulator and International Rail Regulator. In his period of office, Mr Winsor carried out two major reviews of the financial framework of the railway industry, setting Network Rail's income for the operation, maintenance and renewal of the national railway network at £22.2 billion for 2004-09. He also carried out major reforms of the infrastructure provider's network licence, its principal instrument of accountability to the public interest, and of the contractual matrix between Network Rail and the passenger and freight train operators.

Professor George Yarrow

Chairman, Regulatory Policy Institute

Biography

George Yarrow is currently Chairman of the Regulatory Policy Institute, Oxford; Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University; Visiting Professor at the Newcastle Business School; an expert adviser to the UK Civil Aviation Authority; a member of the Ofwat advisory panel; a member of the UK National Audit Office’s academic panel on regulatory impact assessment; a member of the Republic of Ireland’s Aviation Appeal Panel; and an adviser to the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Until April 2009 Professor Yarrow was a Board Member of the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority.

After graduating from Cambridge University, he held appointments at the Universities of Warwick and Newcastle before moving to Oxford, where he spent most of his academic career. He has also had visiting affiliations with Harvard University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Urbino, and Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

His principal work has been on the economics of competition, regulation and privatization, although he has also written on: energy and environmental policies; corporate objectives and the market for corporate control; aspects of industrial organization theory; monetary theory; health economics; and the reform of social security. His best known works are "Privatization in theory and practice", Economic Policy, 1986, variously reprinted and translated, and, with Professor Sir John Vickers, Privatization: An Economic Analysis, published by MIT Press in 1988, and subsequently in Spanish and Chinese editions.