Central to ORR's decision to grant access rights to Alliance Rail for its London - Blackpool service (p1) was the Not Primarily Abstractive test. This is intended to stop open-access operators 'cherry-picking' routes with the highest revenue. NPA is also an important metric in helping ORR balance its conflicting duties to promote competition while having regard to the funds available to the Secretary of State. NPA is the ratio of new revenue generated by an open-access service to the revenue abstracted from existing operators. ORR say that it 'would not expect' to approve an application with an NPA ratio of less than 0.3, one that generates at least 30p of new revenue for every £1 abstracted.
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