Peer Review: Adrian Shooter
Former Chairman & MD, Chiltern Railways
Long after he left office, John Major was heard to say that he had come to think that he should have been much firmer in advancing his ideas for rail privatisation.
He had advocated a small number of vertically integrated companies, much as Japan had created in 1987. But he was up against an unholy alliance of civil servants and aviation lawyers - the former were deeply suspicious of the private sector, and the latter were intent on jobs for the(ir) boys.
Neither understood, or cared, that a railway is a system - that is to say, an entity with many interdependent components. They completely failed to understand that unless you manage it as one entity, you will get sub-optimal performance and greater costs.
The British Railways Board did understand this, but failed entirely to engage with politicians to explain this basic concept.
None of them seemed to care about the lot of the passenger.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the newly created Railtrack set about systematically destroying much of the corporate knowledge that BR had about its infrastructure. And for most of its existence, it didn’t even have an Engineering Director! Furthermore, according to a Railtrack Director I spoke to in 1996, it also never had train performance on its board agenda.
Other things went wrong as well. The whole idea at privatisation was that the railways were in gentle decline and (the civil servants hoped) would quietly expire before too long. Some of us realised that this was complete nonsense, and staked our houses on the notion that if you provided a few simple things that passengers might value, you could get lots more of them.
As we know, this is just what has happened… in spades.
No wonder, then, that Tim Shoveller has inherited such a mess. I have had the privilege of seeing (a little) behind the scenes, and I have been delighted to see many amazing outbreaks of pure common sense.
For me, one of the most significant things he has done is to give Network Rail staff free travel. Why do I think that? Because it sends out a really powerful signal that “we are all in one team”. All the (bleeding obvious) ideas such as building carriage sidings, High Output Renewals Train, SWT drivers crewing engineering trains and a thousand other ideas will come if the boss sends the right signals. He is doing so
Tim Shoveller is much to be applauded for the energy and
persistence with which he has driven this project, and I find it absolutely astonishing that there are still apparently sensible people who cannot see the absolute necessity of extending this concept much more widely.
As Tim has admitted, it takes a little time to see the benefits. But without similar approaches elsewhere, we are condemned to (forever) having an expensive sub-optimal railway.
