I’m pretty confident that many readers of RailReview are ‘of an age’ to recall and smile at the words: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…” from their childhoods and the days of black and white television. Because those words are most certainly applicable here. This is a ‘big read’!
I applied for an interview with ‘new’ Network Rail Chairman Sir Peter Hendy CBE back in July 2015, when he was appointed to succeed ‘invisible man’ Richard Parry-Jones.
The latter had spent most of his chairmanship out of sight and largely silent. RAIL maintains close relationships with many (most, some might say) of rail’s ‘movers and shakers’, but I neither spoke to - nor ever even met - Parry-Jones. I heard him deliver two speeches (both incredibly unimpressive, in my view), the last of which was at the 40th anniversary National Railway Musuem Dinner in York in June 2015.
He caused a mass narrowing of eyes when he lectured the audience about what he appeared to believe to be rail’s irrelevance to UK plc, as it only carried 6% of traffic, and that road was really ‘where it’s at’. He seemed to believe that rail’s relevance would remain unchanged “even if it doubled to 12%”.
Coming from somone who you would expect to be an industry cheerleader, this only confirmed my long-held belief about his own irrelevance. And this view seemed to be more widely shared - within just a few weeks the DfT replaced him at very short notice with Hendy, who arrived at Network Rail with his repuation for straight talking (and not mincing his words) in robust health.
Hendy had recently weathered a media storm after some extremely controversial comments where he said Southeastern trains are “shit, awful”, and that their revenue protection officers “look like the Gestapo, get on and fine everyone they can”. Hendy subsequently apologised for his outspoken comments (or at least for voicing them!) and that troublesome genie was thereby stuffed back in the bottle.
I was delighted to see his appointment, if completely blindsided by it - and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that. The grapevine says it was less than a week from first phone call to announcement of appointment, and to say it caused a stir is an understatement. Hendy has had a long career in public transport, not least in buses (see CV, page 8). And he has a reputation as being a shrewd, no-nonsense getter-of-things-done whose sharp intellect is closely coupled with a grass roots understanding and intelligence that makes things happen.
You only have to look at the spectacular progress made during his nine years as London’s Commissioner at Transport for London. For anyone else, getting something like the orbital London Overground metro financed and built alone in just three years would be a career pinnacle… but not for Hendy.
He would be the first to mutter something dismissive and Anglo-Saxon under his breath at this, but his knighthood for delivering a near-perfect transport system during the 2012 Olympics was an astonishing achievement. Yes, of course we know it was a team achievement, but all great teams can only function under great leadership. And Hendy’s leadership was inspired, inspiring and very effective. Hence the knighthood. He commands respect and is popular - and it is very difficult to be both popular and respected.
He also knows how to handle the difficult stuff. Assisted by the Mayor’s support, Hendy emerged bloodied and maybe a little bowed, but professionally and (incredibly) personally unscathed from a lurid tabloid story about an extra-marital relationship a couple of years ago. Maybe some of Boris Johnson’s well-known and now-legendary ability to not only shrug off ‘events’ that would have been a huge problem to anyone else, but also to turn them somehow to his advantage, rubbed off on Hendy.
King's Cross and Paddington
He also confounded more than a few ‘know-all’ commentators who predicted an end to his career, when he made a perfect, seamless and smooth transition from closely serving the left wing Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) to become the loyal and trusted lieutenant of the equally strongly right wing Boris Johnson, London’s mayor since 2008.
I like Hendy. Anybody who already has a well-nigh impossible transport job involving heavy, metro and underground railways, buses, taxis, boats and trams, and who then decides to celebrate London Underground’s 150th anniversary by pulling off a steam haulage programme using 19th century wooden four-wheelers under the streets of London, deserves respect.
I also like him for his approach to rail media. Hendy has always taken my calls, we have met and talked openly and honestly for several years now, and given that the TfL press office has no interest whatsoever in the rail specialist media (all that matters there is the Evening Standard), that friendly approach has been very useful and indeed productive for us both.
His appointment at NR came at a crucial time. To say that his new organisation was ‘on the ropes’ last summer would be an understatement. It had crashed into 2015 on a tsunami of bad news at King’s Cross and Paddington, where Christmas engineering work had been chaotically mismanaged by NR’s Infrastructure Projects (IP) division. Massive reputational damage had been inflicted on a company already on the back foot.
Further pain followed as Great Western and northern electrification projects went badly wrong, as costs soared and work fell horribly behind as a consequence of various technical issues. On the GW project, it was perceived that costs had virtually tripled from £800 million to well over £2 billion, amid reports of track possessions where either no one showed up to actually do anything or only a single mast was installed.
