SIR JAMES CROSBY steps down as chief executive of HBOS, the high-street banking group, this week and immediately heads off for a world tour with his wife and four daughters. He leaves his troubles behind him, except for one unsolved problem: what to do with Charles Allen.

Crosby is on the board of ITV, and Allen’s future as chief executive of the £4 billion media group is coming under increasing scrutiny. As my colleague Mark Kleinman revealed last weekend, Allen is considering his future after a share slide and falling revenues. The speculation refused to subside all week and there was a deafening silence from ITV’s headquarters.

However, for the time being, Allen still has the backing of his board. They recognise his achievements in cutting costs and reducing the pension deficit. And they accept that the problems facing the commercial television industry are bigger than one man can solve, that they are structural rather than managerial. The grey area is how much that support is being chipped away at by Fidelity, ITV’s biggest investor.

Sir Peter Burt, ITV’s chairman, is coming under pressure to find a replacement for Allen. Fidelity wants a businessman with vision to guide the group into the new digital age. The institution, which is not universally supported by ITV’s other big investors, does not believe Allen has the credentials.

Others are also critical of the strong line-up of finance men on the board. Many have rich business backgrounds, but are now removed from the huge challenges facing the media industry.

Allen wants to stay, but he will not put up with being a punchball for fund managers venting their frustration at a share price that has sunk as fast as the viewing figures.

ITV’s critics point to the successes enjoyed at Channel 4 and BBC and compare it with the leadership vacuum at the independent broadcaster. ITV has a massive programming budget of about £850m, but this is not matched by rising viewers across all its channels.

The Allen “will he or won’t he go” show will rumble on for a few more weeks yet, but sooner or later the board has to come out and back him publicly or put in place a succession plan. They may decide to involve Allen in that, but a decision needs to be made.

There are several candidates including Stephen Carter, the former head of industry regulator Ofcom.

Allen is a great survivor but his departure clock is ticking and the board must act decisively. As a result Crosby may well find himself patching into a conference call from some remote location in Hawaii.

Off the leash

WE Britons have an unhealthy fascination with the railways, a mix of pride at having invented them and loathing at how badly we sometimes run them.

Those with anorak tendencies should watch this week for what on the surface will look like an innocuous announcement from Network Rail, but is in reality a big shift in the development of the railways, a decisive move away from government involvement to private-sector control.

Network Rail will say that it is now big enough and ugly enough to borrow money on its own. Since it took over Railtrack, which collapsed into administration five years ago, it has had to rely on a government guarantee to underwrite its borrowings. The guarantee is highly unusual — ministers are not normally in the habit of guaranteeing the debts of private companies — but it was necessary.

After the government pulled the plug on Railtrack, the money markets were understandably highly nervous about lending money to the railways, and Network Rail, an odd third-way creation of a private company without shareholders, was never going to be able to raise the billions needed on its own.

But now the company has a track record (no pun intended), and profits. Punctuality and reliability of train services has improved, and in this financial year Network Rail should make a pre-tax surplus of about £1.3 billion. That should be enough for it to tear up the government guarantee and go out and borrow off its own bat.

It’s an interesting development, and one with far- reaching ramifications. It will take pressure off Gordon Brown, who had been criticised for not including the £18 billion raised to date by Network Rail in government borrowings.

And it raises the prospect of much greater private-sector control of the railways, and even — although the idea will be anathema to many — the prospect of Network Rail one day being turned into a real private company with shareholders. In other words, a Railtrack reborn.

The Reit course?

PAUL MYNERS, the former chairman of Marks & Spencer, is a recognised change agent so his arrival at Land Securities, Britain’s biggest property company, will be watched with interest.

Under Francis Salway, Land Sec’s chief executive, and his predecessor Ian Henderson, this £9.2 billion company has already undergone big changes.

But Myners will ask the same questions again in a different way. Does being big add value? Should the company be broken up? Should it expand on to the continent — a strategy it has consistently avoided. And is converting into a tax- efficient real-estate investment trust the right course to take? When the company was chaired by the late Sir Peter Hunt, his comments at results time were read as a bellwether for the sector. His successor Peter Birch opted to take a lower profile, but Myners could well adopt a higher one. It is something the industry and the sector needs.

Suicide by gas

SAM LAIDLAW, Centrica’s chief executive, is starting to realise he needs an army escort in his new post. He received a caning last week after Centrica’s loss-making subsidiary British Gas raised prices for a third time in a year to absorb the high cost of wholesale gas.

British Gas Residential made an operating loss of £143m for the half year while its parent company made a pre-exceptional profit of £569m. The last thing customers want is another price hike, but companies that continue to lose money go bust and they cannot be subsidised by other parts of the business.

Centrica has made strategic mistakes in the past. Laidlaw and his chairman Roger Carr are trying to fix them but one thing they can’t do is magically reduce the price of gas. That is called commercial suicide.

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