“I think it does matter, personally,” says McIntosh. He then pauses for thought: “But what that means is a matter of perspective, so we have route boundaries designed upon the operation of the railway and the legacy design of the railway. We still talk about up to London and down to the country. The railway is built around people coming to and from London, and that’s how it’s operated now.
“So it does matter where those boundaries are drawn. The important thing in the Shaw report is that people called for a northern route because of the structure of Network Rail. People called for a northern route because they found Network Rail a difficult organisation to deal with. So whatever we decide to do with our organisational boundaries and our structure lines, what we can’t afford not to do is address the underlying issues that make Network Rail very difficult to deal with if you’re an external stakeholder.”
That’s a comment likely to have heads nodding in council offices around Britain - indeed, from anyone who’s ever tried to engage with the national track owner to improve the network. NR has taken a centralised view of what’s best for the railway and what’s best for different parts of the country. McIntosh doesn’t pull his punches: “It’s very difficult to find one person that can deal with issues on your behalf. I’ve developed a phrase in Network Rail that I call the ‘accountability fog’, because accountability is interpreted and spread across many parts of the organisation and so it becomes really difficult to say ‘there is the person that is accountable for whatever the subject matter might be’.
“It’s compounded by our legacy control hierarchy. Network Rail, quite rightly, does a lot of its assurance by control. It controls decisions centrally, and what that does is it makes the accountability difficult.”
When NR took over from Railtrack’s shambles in 2002 it needed to tightly grip the network, and imposed central discipline. Railtrack’s network had been collapsing under a welter of speed restrictions caused by gauge corner cracking, the track fault that lay at the heart of October 2000’s fatal derailment at Hatfield. Overnight, gauge corner cracking went from being an obscure term used by track engineers to national recognition.
What made matters worse was the different reactions from each of Railtrack’s zones. In Scotland, for example, the zone simply shut the West Coast Main Line north of Carlisle. As ScotRail Managing Director Alastair McPherson said at the time: “We are Railtrack’s biggest customer, and if this is their idea of customer service it certainly isn’t mine.”
NR needed an iron grip to rescue and restore the railway. Largely it has succeeded, and it now needs to move forwards. “The organisation is much more mature now and much more balanced, and the stakeholder needs are very different. So as the political with a capital ‘p’ devolution pushes forward, there’s less control from London and therefore a greater desire to deal with decision-makers locally,” argues McIntosh.
Devolution has been gathering speed within NR over the past few years, to the extent that McIntosh is happy to claim that he knows what a devolved route should look like: “Very simply, it looks like an organisation that can respond to the needs of its customers and the economies and communities that it serves.”
But who is Network Rail’s customer?
There is another pause: “It depends on your definition of customer, and it’s a complicated world. You could say your customer is someone who pays you money for something - we have operating companies that pay us money for something and they are our customers. But it’s not a conventional customer relationship. Certainly, if you speak to any operating company they will tell you they don’t feel like a customer when they engage with NR. I see that in some of the legacy behaviours with our people. They don’t treat them like customers because it’s not how it’s been in the past.
“You could argue, and some people have said in the past, that ORR was our customer because the ORR effectively set our targets for us and we responded. And the organisation behaved and responded in a way to those customer targets or those targets set by the regulator, rather than by its customers. The phrase that I use is that NR allowed itself to be managed by the regulator rather than regulated.”
What about the Department for Transport? After all, it buys considerable rail enhancements from NR.
“They’re a funder not a customer. There’s a difference between being a funder and customer.”
But DfT buys upgrades?
McIntosh speaks slowly: “They fund upgrades for us.”
But DfT says what it wants, gives NR money, and expects to see a product delivered. That sounds like a customer.
“They are not the end user of that…”
Only in as much as DfT doesn’t directly run trains. But it specifies franchises on the back of enhancements it has bought from Network Rail. This is a very difficult area for NR. It needs to face passengers and freight shippers, yet the reality remains that government pays for almost all of the railway’s improvements. DfT also owns NR and the Transport Secretary appoints its chairman.
