Ian Prosser, HMRI Chief Inspector of Railways and Director of Railway Safety for the Office of Rail and Road, responded: “You will not get that change until Network Rail has strong leadership from top to bottom. Until you have that, there will not a complete culture.”
Len Porter, until recently head of the Rail Safety and Standards Board, elaborated: “You cannot delegate accountability. You can delegate responsibility - get somebody to do something. But someone must remain accountable, to wield that authority. If the Network Rail board wants to offer serious leadership, then it needs to be accountable. At the moment it is not clear to me that it has authority or accountability.
“Do we trust the Network Rail board to lead? I think the answer is no. There is a muddle of accountability, responsibility, authority and leadership. Who actually has authority? It’s not Network Rail. It’s not the Rail Delivery Group and it’s not the Rail Supply Group, it’s not ATOC and it’s not RSSB. And it’s not the Department for Transport. It has to be somebody. It has to be clear. It isn’t.
“The Network Rail board is, in effect, accountable because it works for the Government. It therefore must have the authority to deliver.
“What the Government then cannot do is meddle with the actions of that board. The board would have to resign in its entirety - it was made accountable, but that accountability is being taken away by Government meddling, making the board’s role impossible.”
Stephen Joseph, Chief Executive of Campaign for Better Transport, said accountability had to filter through to platform level.
“Cultural change is absolutely critical. The people who are supposedly accountable and responsible are being told rubbish by the people on the ground. So the people at the top don’t actually know what is happening. You can have the greatest strategy, but on the ground there are breaches of basic safety rules.”
Joseph drew comparison with the health sector. “The NHS thought it ran safe hospitals until the Mid Staffordshire crisis. It then discovered that the culture on the ground was driven by targets which meant all sorts of horrible things were happening - individuals were treated very badly, so lives were lost. Accountability has to reach down to the grass roots. Unless people at the bottom think their work on safety matters, they’re not going to do it.”
It was agreed that solving the issues surrounding accountability and authority would allow the industry to achieve the next big priority:
Long-term planning
“There are lots of pressures on Network Rail,” noted Ian Prosser. “On health and safety maturity it scores 3 out of 5. It’s not broken - we have the safest railway we have ever had. But we are at a critical point. The railway is coping with real growth on infrastructure that was not built for it.
“I don’t believe the way that growth impacts on the infrastructure is fully understood. Network Rail is struggling with delivering both maintenance and renewals volumes, leaving it less space to prepare for that growth.
“It does not have the strongest safety culture. The pressures on it could cause failure - it only needs one small part of the organisation to fail for it to be really serious. We need stronger and more mature management for safety to improve.”
Len Porter: “The key problem is Network Rail’s asset performance. It still does not fully understand what it owns. It needs to know what effect improving its assets will have. That will reduce cost while improving safety.”
Anthony Smith: “This stems from the board of Network Rail. If you don’t have strong leadership at board level, and at chair level, the organisation won’t go anywhere. It’s my perception that’s how Network Rail has been in the last few years.”
Jeremy Candfield, Director General of the Railway Industry Association: “What Ian is saying about safety is in many ways similar to the view of suppliers. What matters is a predictable railway. A predictable railway is also a safe railway.”
Len Porter: “It does not understand the condition of the assets and the risks that poses. At Potters Bar we had bolts coming off a stretcher bar. They were known about but there was no system for understanding what the effect would be. It was an inherent problem and it was not being dealt with.
“Five years later came the Grayrigg derailment. You’ve got a similar problem. If you were an inspector, in winter, where would you start your inspection? You’d go to the risky bit at the end. You wouldn’t go to four and a half miles of plain line. They didn’t look. Then Bang! They didn’t even understand the risk was there.
“Arguably, several years on, the biggest risk on the railway is the civil asset base. It’s all down to knowledge that Network Rail does not have. That data would improve performance, reduce cost and increase safety. Its risk and reliability modelling remains poor.”
Stephen Joseph: “The most blindingly obvious thing coming out of this whole discussion is about the lack of long-term planning based on reliable information. You need a 30-year schedule. When I talk to suppliers, they say dealing with Transport for London and Transport Scotland is a much easier process, because they offer some sense of certainty about future direction. They have a clear view. That is an argument in favour of devolution, but it is also an argument for what needs to happen nationally - a strategic plan.”
If long-term strategic planning was achieved, it would enable:
Better engagement with suppliers
“The Southampton tunnel project had nearly a year taken off it by the early involvement of the contractor, Carillion,” said Jeremy Candfield.
“Procurement is an enormously powerful tool. It is capable of screwing up the industry when it is not used well. It is challenged by a lack of information and by the unpredictability of demand.
“Passenger rolling stock and electrification procurement resemble massive yo-yos going up and down without any degree of predictability to them. People wonder why the railway costs so much, and why it takes time to get people in place, trained and working well. This is fundamental to the industry.
“We need to tackle churn - the period of a few weeks before the spade hits the ground. In particular on track work and signalling. The amount of change which takes place in those final few weeks is very large. Typically 30%-35% of the project. The lack of supplier engagement at an early stage is a major driver of cost and time. Inefficient contractual relationships cost a huge amount.”
“Here is the risk,” said Neil Robertson, Chief Executive of the National Skills Academy for Railway Engineering. “Skills are the means to delivering. Half of the skilled people in the industry will leave in the next ten years.
“That is a worry. It also brings a great opportunity to change the culture, but also a great opportunity to push up costs if we don’t get it right. We think it will increase costs by 30% in the next decade - that is a conservative estimate. A shortage of skills increases wage inflation pressures. For the Government it also increases migration pressures.”
Chris Fenton, Chief Executive of RSSB: “I don’t see skills anywhere near high enough on Network Rail’s agenda. It has first-rate apprenticeship programmes. You could double them. I don’t see enough engagement with the supply chain on skills. I see other industries working much more effectively with their supply chains. But not Network Rail, or the industry as a whole.”
Len Porter: “In the oil industry, better engagement with suppliers brought costs crashing down. This is why I was so opposed to the Rail Delivery Group - it was just operators and Network Rail. They wouldn’t let the supply community in. That’s like the aviation industry saying it would let Ryanair and Easjyet to the top table, but not Rolls-Royce or Boeing.
“This gets to the heart of the leadership debate. Who is accountable? You have RDG telling Network Rail what to do! It is such nonsense. You couldn’t make it up. Network Rail has deeply entrenched views.”
Better engagement with suppliers should be followed up with:
Communication with customers (passenger and freight)
Enormous growth in passenger numbers is changing the nature of the railway. That growth is fundamentally shifting the economics, and a huge revenue stream is being generated. Yet passenger trust is being eroded, argued Anthony Smith.
“There are serious issues about value for money. Passengers do not care a jot who runs the railways. They want a value-for-money service that turns up on time, and which is safe and clean.
“But the industry’s ability to handle both short and long-term change is extremely worrying. The incentives are not there. As a result, a lot of the customer-facing experience is light years behind what is being provided in other transport sectors. The pace of change on ticketing is a particular issue. The railway is chronically poor at this.
