West Midlands
The West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration is focused on an improved passenger experience at Birmingham New Street.
On a multi-user complex rail network it’s much better if we work together to deliver for passengers, rather than attempting to do it in individual silos.
Malcolm Holmes, Executive Director, West Midlands Rail Executive
Hands up if you like Birmingham New Street station. Having recorded more than 47 million entries and exits in 2018-19, the major interchange sits well within the top ten busiest stations in the UK (and is the busiest outside London). But is it also one of the most popular?
The answer to this question is a categorical ‘yes’, according to the most recent National
Rail Passenger Survey (spring 2020) conducted by Transport Focus.
With 89% of passengers reported to be satisfied with their overall experience of the station, it is currently ranked eighth for popularity among all 20 stations managed by Network Rail - ahead of many of its similarly sized rivals, including Edinburgh, Leeds and Bristol.
However, anybody who has used this gateway to the UK’s second most populous city will know that this represents a fairly recent reversal in fortunes for a station voted in a 2003 BBC poll as the nation’s worst.
This is because after the original Victorian station was demolished and then entombed in concrete in the 1960s, Birmingham New Street became a byword for the worst excesses of the much-loathed Brutalist architecture so widely used to reconstruct inner-city post-war Britain. Ugly on the outside and devoid of natural light within, the station’s satisfaction rates subsequently plummeted to as low as 52% in spring 2013.
Designed to accommodate 60,000 people per day in the 1960s, the main concourse, entrances and passageways around the station were by then positively groaning under the weight of more than 140,000 passengers every 24 hours.
As overcrowding became an increasing problem, work finally began in 2010 on a longoverdue £ 750 million redevelopment project, to add much-needed capacity to the station and improve the image it portrays both of the city and the wider West Midlands region it serves.
Officially reopened by Her Majesty the Queen in November 2015, Birmingham
New Street now boasts a concourse some three-and-a-half times larger than the one it replaced, with capacity to handle up to 300,000 passengers per day. Meanwhile, its domed atrium, designed to let in ample natural light, forms the centrepiece of the new 60-store Grand Central shopping centre.
The redevelopment project earned many plaudits, including RAIL’s National Rail Award for Project of the Year in 2016. Network Rail, Mace and Atkins received particular praise from NRA judges for co-ordinating and executing this large-scale and complex project while keeping the station fully operational.
However, despite the undeniable improvement in the look and feel of the station at street level, the ‘new’ Birmingham New Street has not proved universally popular among all passengers.
Complaints have risen in particular from passengers changing trains, who have observed little or no improvement in their ability to navigate between the station’s 13 platforms. And a new airport-style system of colour-coded lounges to access platforms has been described as ‘bewildering’ by many nonregular users of the station, compounded by a lack of passenger information screens away from the main concourse.
Meanwhile, getting between these lounges usually requires the need to pass through the ticket barriers - an additional obstacle for making connections between services.
Last but not least, as the redevelopment focused almost exclusively on the areas of the station at street level, the largely untouched platforms beneath remain dark and dismal with all the ambience of a vast but noisy and fume-filled underground cavern.
The good news for dissatisfied users of Birmingham New Street is that none of these criticisms have gone unnoticed.
With the station sitting at the heart of Birmingham city centre and both the regional and cross-country networks, improving the passenger experience has become a key focus of a new partnership organisation called the West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration (GRC).
Established last September, the GRC brings together Network Rail, Transport Focus and four of the train operating companies that serve the station, including West Midlands Trains ( WMT) and Avanti West Coast.
There is also full participation from local government via the West Midlands Rail Executive ( WMRE), and representation from both the Rail Freight Group and the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education (BCRRE).
Independently chaired by transport and logistics consultant Alex Warner, all members of the GRC are committed to working together to tackle train service performance, improve
the quality of trains and stations, simplify fares structures, and deliver resilient timetables in the most reliable and efficient way.
WMRE Executive Director Malcolm Holmes explains: “We wanted to create a strong collaborative arrangement with the industry to provide a better experience for passengers, and so the GRC was born from that vision. It seeks to recognise that on a multi-user complex rail network it’s much better if we work together to deliver for passengers, rather than attempting to do it in individual silos.”
The GRC has an additional function to act as the West Midlands Supervisory Board.
These local boards have been set up across the country to broadly mirror the areas covered by Network Rail’s devolved Route businesses, and to oversee and co-ordinate all railway business that takes place within them.
Most of these boards meet on a quarterly basis, as a forum for senior representatives of NR, train and freight operators and Transport Focus to work together to align objectives and gain agreement for clear action from participants to deliver tangible improvements for passengers. The Supervisory Boards then feed into a national structure which reports directly to NR Chairman Sir Peter Hendy CBE.
Warner, who took over as GRC Chairman from West Midlands Mayor Andy Street in May, says: “Other Supervisory Boards have different styles and different areas of focus from us, but being part of the bigger picture means that we can impart best practice to others and get a view of how we as a region sit within the national picture.
“The whole key to making this work is getting the operators engaged. But we also have to be cognisant that if you run CrossCountry or Avanti West Coast, then the West Midlands is just one part of a much larger network across the country, so being part of a national Supervisory Board is key.”
Since its creation less than a year ago, much of the GRC’s initial focus has been absorbed by the performance problems suffered in the autumn by West Midlands Trains.
With punctuality nosediving and both overcrowding and cancellations on the rise, a new simplified timetable was introduced in December amid threats from the Mayor that he would ask the Secretary of State for Transport to strip Abellio of the franchise.
But with performance gradually improving and the threat of franchise change now lifted, the GRC soon faced its next major challenge when the entire country was gripped by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Warner says: “The GRC really came into its own in April and through our response to COVID-19. What was happening previously was that each TOC was doing its own detailed work around the pandemic, but it wasn’t being collectively pulled together and shared. We had a number of working groups and shared the plans, which we found were good on the whole but a few small things had fallen between different stools.
“Transport Focus was also in the working group, and the key before wrapping up any of our meetings is that TF (and therefore passengers) must be happy with the response and the trajectory that we’re taking to deal with COVID-19.”
He adds: “The passenger view is extremely important - we’re very mindful that we don’t want to do things in the old way by putting up lots of black tape and officious notices. We also don’t want staff who are reticent, cautious and not anticipating customer needs, but to create an environment that is safe but attractive for customers who do want to come back and use the railway.”
Rather than it serving as an unhelpful distraction to the wider work of the GRC, Network Rail’s Central Route Director Dave Penney feels that the industry’s response to COVID-19 has acted as a vivid reminder of the urgent need to improve the passenger experience at Birmingham New Street.
This is because the availability of customer information and signposting in the station is not just a source of irritation to passengers in ‘normal’ operating conditions, it’s imperative to ensuring that new guidelines on social distancing and safety can be complied with.
“It’s now more important than ever to sort out New Street because it has always been one of the pinch points for poor customer service when the timetable isn’t working,” he says.
“We have to make sure now more than ever that the station is nimble enough to cope with delays and maintain a high level of customer service.
“But all this started before I formally came across as route director [in December 2019], because once you start to peel the layers away at New Street you see that it’s a hugely complex problem. Although the station was rebuilt ten years ago when the new concourse and Grand Central retail operations opened up, it still left the rail side of the station quite difficult to navigate.
“That was identified as one area to improve. Another was the customer service presence on the concourse, which was actually quite limited. There is also the way in which customer information is given, particularly when you have late platform changes, because the way that information is fed to the passenger information screens means that staff on the ground have to react to delays and changes at the last minute.”
According to Penney, these issues were not helped by the fact that the overall management of the station was split into various units, with concourse-based staff reporting to a regional NR office, despatchers on the platform reporting to NR’s Route business, and retail staff coming under the control of a central office in London.
With nobody previously feeling wholly accountable for the station, Penney was handed full control of Birmingham New Street in his role as Route Director, as part of NR’s devolution strategy and ‘Putting Passengers First’ programme.
He adds: “This allows me, with the help of the GRC, to bring together all those strands of how we want to improve New Street and to set up working groups now that I have the power to make changes where necessary.”
But by eradicating what was a major blockage to effective decision-making at Birmingham New Street, it raises the question of why the GRC is needed in order for NR to make the increasingly obvious changes required to improve the passenger experience at a station that it manages.
That idea is quickly dismissed by Warner, who points to the forthcoming full resignalling of Birmingham New Street [due for completion by Christmas 2022] as a prime example of where all stakeholders will need to be brought into the planning discussions in order to minimise disruption and to achieve the best possible consistency in the passenger experience.
“I chair the resignalling working group, so I can look at it from the perspective of customer outcomes,” he says.
“The reason I’m an independent chairman is because I can be very much detached from NR and the TOCs and take an independent view on how it will have an impact on customers.
“When we have the meetings there is a lot of technical stuff that’s very important, but a lot of what I’m doing is looking at how and when we start advance publicity for passengers. What can we learn from the customer outcomes from other resignalling programmes that have happened elsewhere in the UK?
“We also want to create a shared customer service vision and standards. You can’t have a situation where Avanti West Coast customer service is different on the gateline to the platform staff and the people in the booking office. You want the customer to have
Being part of the bigger picture means that we can impart best practice to others and get a view of how we as a region sit within the national picture.
Alex Warner, Independent Chairman, West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration
a seamless experience with all the different companies and the people they’re interacting with.
“However great Dave Penney and his team are, they can’t do it all alone. You have to have the buy-in with operators, and that’s where it helps to have an independent pan-operator board.”
Penney agrees: “The New Street resignalling is going to affect the station over the next two years and we wanted to make sure we took a different approach. Traditionally the project would look at banging in concrete and signals and not necessarily at the impact it has on the station. There’s a lot of work to do, but the benefit of doing it under the auspices of the GRC is that we get a lot of help and oversight from operators and Transport Focus, so we can make sure we get the best outcomes.
“I need success from the resignalling, not just in terms of increased capacity, higher line speeds and a future-proofed station for the next 30 years, but for people not to say that the pain and disruption wasn’t worth going through.”
Aside from the station resignalling, the GRC has identified three other major challenges to prepare for in the short, medium and longterm future. One will be getting the region’s rail network ready for the influx of visitors expected to attend the Commonwealth Games that will be hosted by Birmingham in 2022. Meanwhile, further over the horizon, there is also the arrival of HS2 by the end of the decade and the construction of the city’s new station at Curzon Street.
But most immediately, the GRC must focus its attentions on bringing passengers back to the network as the country continues to recover from the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
As fulfilling this objective is indisputably of paramount importance to all in the rail industry, both Warner and Penney believe that it presents an unrivalled opportunity for the GRC to prove that its sum is greater than its parts.
Penney says: “It hurts me that people are not travelling, and we need to make clear that the railway is a safe and reliable means of transport. We need to work together in unity to give that clear message because, personally, I don’t want us to be just carrying around fresh air.
“NR has been reaching out to some of the UK’s major economic supply chains on how they are dealing with the pandemic, and we’ve started dialogue with them around where we need to be for them to change their [road transport only] policy stance. We can’t afford to indefinitely be in a position where industry is saying ‘don’t use public transport’.”
Warner concludes: “This poses a systemic threat to the future of the transport industry as we know it, so we are having conversations around how the GRC can communicate with the Chamber of Commerce and other bodies in the West Midlands on the benefit of having a wider campaign to reignite economic prosperity in the region by coming together.
“The timing is important. If you’d had that conversation a few weeks ago it wouldn’t have got any traction, because we were worrying about running a service full stop. But now there is some thinking around how to get bums on seats, which the GRC will do some work around.
“There is a sense that as we sit around in years to come at retirement parties we will be talking nostalgically - I’m not saying fondly - about the time when we were all in it together in this unprecedented era.
“Everybody else will be going through the same thing as the GRC with, I’m quite sure, the same conviction to fight the cause together and collectively.”
It hurts me that people are not travelling, and we need to make clear that the railway is a safe and reliable means of transport.
Dave Penney, Central Route Director, Network Rail