It is fascinating to read Rob’s comments on where Network Rail has got to in its journey to devolution - a journey that has been seriously underway now for a good four years, underlining the relatively slow pace of change in such a large, complex
organisation. Despite the time taken so far, and the progress made, there is clearly still a long way to go both organisationally and culturally before a truly devolved route (or collection of routes) is in place.
Rob highlights very well the difficulty in pinning down who is Network Rail’s true customer. In truth, there are many - stakeholders, funders, train operators, lineside neighbours, regulator (the list goes on) - but ultimately it is the fare-paying passenger or freight forwarder who will be the real judge of whether the important changes that need to happen have worked or not.
There is much in what Rob says that is absolutely spot-on, including: the importance of delivering today’s railway safely and punctually in order to earn the right for future investment; the need for looking at the asset as a system as opposed to disparate individual items (and progressing the ‘flight engineer’ role to improve reliability); the importance of getting the early specification and design stages of projects right; and the challenge of dispersing the ‘accountability fog’.
From my own dealings with his route, Rob has already instilled a very customer-focused culture, one in which his team is keen to understand and respond to the needs of operators, and to find a way of delivering those effectively. We’ve seen this with the impressive response when we moved the Sleeper service to King’s Cross during the Lamington Viaduct closure, and we are seeing it again as we discuss our strategic plans with Rob and his team.
How the organisation is structured to respond to the many competing priorities, and to deliver what is affordable to time,and to budget, remains a challenge. It’s all too easy to be distracted by internal matters, and to lose sight of the needs of the end customer (of whatever shade).
With the potential creation of a Northern route, and the other structural changes to achieve more devolution to routes along with the setting-up of the system authority role, there is much to occupy and possibly distract the time and energy of Network Rail colleagues. And so it is essential that any change is delivered swiftly and with as little impact on customers as possible.
But the changes do need to happen, particularly to make it easier for potential funders to invest in the rail network and thus achieve their objectives. Traditionally, third party investment in the network that has actually resulted in change ‘on the ground’ has often felt that it happened despite the best efforts of the industry to prevent it!
It’s interesting to consider Rob’s observations on the culture of being ‘done to’ in the routes - being told what to do and how to do it (and success being measured by compliance in this respect), as opposed to being able to develop and deliver better ways of doing things locally. Being involved in trying to deliver this sort of change in the earliest days of devolution, immediately after the era of ‘command and control with an iron grip’, it was always evident to me that for many people, simply complying with a set of instructions on how to do things was actually easier and less risky than being challenged to find ways of delivering differently.
The comfort zone of layers of bureaucracy, with little individual accountancy, requires strong leadership and support to break out of, so that colleagues at all levels can believe they can make a difference and do things better. Encouraging people to have a mindset that says they can challenge standards, challenge processes, challenge costs and timescales, to find better ways of doing things, is of paramount importance if we are to justify and afford the investment which the network so clearly needs.
Achieving this change in people’s mindset is perhaps the greatest challenge – and the greatest opportunity - that we face to really transform delivery, be it the day-to-day railway or the range of investment programmes needed to cope with growth. Identifying some ‘quick wins’ which demonstrate that this approach works should help to build the momentum.
However, alongside the need for truly devolved routes with empowered teams, there will also be a need for the ‘national’ picture to remain joined-up and co-ordinated - not only because most train operators run over more than one route, and so require a high degree of consistency in how they interact with routes, but also because of the number of ‘national’ programmes that will continue to affect what goes on in any specific route.
This will perhaps be the biggest challenge of devolution: balancing the different needs and priorities of each devolved (and individually regulated) route with the bigger picture of ‘one network’ and operators who run over several routes. Rob’s description of how he is reviewing the ETCS programme for the East Coast Main Line is a good example of how this can work.
There is also a need to be able to capture the best ways of doing things and transfer these effectively between routes. No doubt route-based regulation will provide a sharper focus on the differences between routes, and encourage competition as well as co-operation between routes to the benefit of the wider industry.
Historically, it’s been all too easy to try to explain away differences in costs because each route is ‘unique’, with its own peculiar set of geographical, customer or historic challenges which are used to explain away variances in unit rates. And while this is true to an extent, as Rob highlights (citing the lack of ECML investment in recent years as an example), the more these differences are exposed and properly understood the more chance we have of improving. Perversely, making the routes much more separate as entities may well be the key to delivering more efficiency and consistency, if this challenge is properly embraced!
The Route MD role can feel like a massive plate-spinning exercise. The long list of competing priorities, different customer needs and impatient stakeholders, along with the normal day-to-day challenges, shows no signs of letting up. But this is all about how we move forward as an industry, and the potential which is there to make the changes to deal with the growth which is coming.
It’s really encouraging to read his views on how he is going to achieve this on LNE and East Midlands, and the positive changes which he has already made. I wish him and his team the best of luck as they grasp the opportunities which are so clearly there.
