Could the railway learn from other sources? Highways England perhaps?
John Preston, Professor of Rail Transport at the University of Southampton, thinks that the lessons from elsewhere are limited.
“Although aviation and road both also have capacity problems, the relationships between infrastructure and vehicles are much more flexible,” he says.
“But there has been some technology transfer. Aspects of air and road traffic control are being considered for rail, such as the applicability of airport slot auctions to train paths.”
Professor William Powrie, Dean of the Engineering Faculty at the University of Southampton, adds: “The physical inflexibility of rail limits transferability from other transport sectors. There are too many contractual interfaces in rail at present, where the temptation for companies to make money in transferring risk and blame can get in the way of providing a service to the customer. Where there are similar interfaces in the utilities sectors, such as between the power producer, infrastructure provider and the supplier to the customer, there seems to be less buck-passing when it comes to customer service.
“A lot of what is wrong in rail is essentially to do with individual players gaming the balance of risk and reward, and the absence of a controlling mind that sees the system as a whole and takes the long view.”
“Certainly Highways England has some similarities in terms of its contracting structure,” comments Carne. “But it has limited parallels in terms of system operation.”
Prosser came to the Office of Rail and Road as director of railway safety after a career at ICI.
“I’ve always used my experience with the chemical and pharmaceutical sector,” he explains.
“They were world leaders in risk assessment. I knew DuPont. That was where the idea started that good safety is good business. It developed behavioural safety and management systems.
“Along with oil and gas, this is where rail can learn a lot about structural change. Aviation is worth looking at, but how much change does it actually go through? It has been fairly stable.
“Highways England is looking at us to help them, so we won’t learn much there.
“The Grenfell Tower inquiry people are looking at rail’s regulatory processes as the best in class. This means we have come a long way. When Cullen investigated the 1999 Ladbroke Grove crash, a weakness that he identified was that regulation wasn’t good enough. And strong regulation is very important during structural change.”
The unions
On the role of unions, former Network Rail chief Mark Carne is outspoken. When he worked in the oil industry, employees were not heavily unionised. He sees the railway as the last remaining union stronghold, and feels that this is significantly holding back restructuring, so welcomes Keith Williams’ commitment to look at it within his review.
“The union power, clinging onto the archaic ways of working that the unions promote, simply has to be addressed,” says Carne.
“A lot of the challenges that the industry faces are due to antiquated ways of working. In many parts of the country, it’s a near permanent state of work-to-rule. These rules are ancient, and bear no relationship to the actual needs of an efficient railway. We must be the only industry left where this is allowed to persist.
“It happens because we are a monopoly. The unions have power out of all proportion. It cannot be right that you have a strike by two or three hundred drivers or guards, who stop a quarter of a million people from getting to work.
“You don’t have this problem in any comparable industries - not in oil and gas, nor in highways, water or power. In other industries, if the unions fight too hard the businesses go under and they lose their jobs. The car industry is a great case in point. The unions there recognised that they needed to reform and change with the industry, because if they didn’t become more productive they would be out of work.
“The rail industry doesn’t function like that. It seems to think it is fine to carry on with ancient ways of working, because the country cannot afford the railway to go out of business.
“Legislation needs to be introduced to outlaw strikes that have a disproportionate impact on the users of the services. This is sensitive stuff, and difficult for the government to tackle when it is so weak. But it has to be tackled. It is the unspoken part of the performance challenge that the industry faces.”
Safety first
“When we talk about parallels between different industries, the safety performance on the railway was really shocking when I first looked at the job,” says Carne.
“Workforce safety was so poor compared with other big business - not just oil and gas, but the big utilities as well.
“Safety and business performance go hand in hand. If your safety performance is not good enough, it betrays that your underlying operational performance is not good enough.
“So I made workforce safety a key priority. Partly obviously from a moral or ethical perspective - I don’t want people getting hurt at work. But also because I wanted to use it to drive a performance culture. If you have the right people with the right skills and the right tools and the right outlook, you also get higher productivity. We halved the number of workforce injuries in four years.”
But safety comes at a high price. If you need more lookouts, more time for checking workers are clear to go on track, there is a financial impact.
“I made Network Rail understand that they didn’t understand,” says former RSSB head Len Porter.
“They didn’t know what their primary risks were, and therefore were introducing risk into a system that the train operators were driving into blindly. We had to get more data and put it into a safety management system so that we could model risk.
“It worked. Before I moved from oil in 2003, the railway had killed about 50 people in the previous three years. After 2003, fundamentally we haven’t killed significantly.
“Change is all about understanding the system - getting the data that shows you what to do. Network Rail wasn’t good at it. Train operators weren’t good at it. ORR is not good at it. Nor is RAIB. We had to defend the industry against silly stuff from ORR and RAIB. Like Train Protection and Warning System. ‘You’ve got to replace it,’ said RAIB. Why? It wasn’t broken. We proved that it was not reasonably practical.”
