Steve Marshall
Chief executive of Railtrack during its troubled final year
STEVE MARSHALL, who has died aged 60, was chief executive of Railtrack, the privatised owner of the UK rail network, before the Blair government forced it into administration and replaced it with Network Rail.
A genial and unassuming numbers man, Marshall seemed ill-prepared for what one newspaper called “the toughest job in the country” when he was promoted in November 2000, after less than a year as finance director of Railtrack, to take charge of the company – following the resignation of Gerald Corbett, the chief executive who had born the brunt of political and public anger fuelled by the Hatfield rail crash a month earlier.
Marshall had previously run Thorn, the television rental business, and had no experience of railway management. But he recognised that Railtrack had failed to maintain an adequate pace of investment in rail infrastructure and safety since its flotation in 1996, and set out to redirect its priorities towards “restoring engineering skills and focusing on customers”.
In the face of a mounting revenue shortfall, however, there was little he could do to advance those aims except beg for more taxpayers’ money. One reporter noted that “his grey suit matched his pallor after months of round-the-clock crisis management”. In April 2001 he asked the government to accelerate £1.5 billion of earmarked funding.
Eventually a first tranche was paid but on October 7 2001, the transport secretary Stephen Byers pulled the plug, claiming Railtrack was on the verge of bankruptcy and announcing that it would be superseded by the “not-for-dividend” Network Rail.
Byers (though later cleared of “malfeasance in public office”) was widely accused of distorting the truth in order to hasten Railtrack’s demise for political reasons, on terms unfavourable to the private investors whom one of his advisers dismissed as “grannies”. Marshall immediately resigned, and later called the government’s behaviour “shoddy”. But he kept his dignity while serving out several months’ notice and remained a non-executive director of the residual company as Railtrack was unwound, helping secure a settlement which delivered £1.5 billion back to shareholders.
The son of a London nightclub owner, Steven Marshall was born on February 11 1957 and educated at Isleworth grammar school. He began his working life as a trainee management accountant at British Oxygen and went on to work for Black & decker, Burton and Grand Metropolitan, where he was investor relations manager and later European finance director for the group’s wines and spirits division.
He joined Thorn EMI as finance director in 1995; after the demerger of the EMI music business from Thorn which operated Radio Rentals television shops, Marshall oversaw Thorn’s sale to Nomura, the Japanese-owned private equity group – on terms which left some holders of Thorn’s bonds very unhappy.
In his later career, Marshall built a reputation as a company doctor, involving himself in the restructuring of a succession of troubled companies – with mixed results. This included stints as chairman of Queens Moat Hotels, the software retailer Torex and the engineering group Delta. He also joined the board of the construction and infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, stepping up as executive chairman while it fought off a takeover bid from its rival Carillion in 2014, but encountering criticism for a doubling of his own salary while Balfour Beatty’s shares slumped after a series of profit warnings. He was latterly chairman of Biffa in the field of waste disposal, and the transport group Wincanton.
Marshall was a lifelong fan of Brentford football club. Another aspect of his life was a passionate concern for animal welfare; he was a trustee of the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust and contemplated becoming chief executive of the RSPCA when he took time out after his bruising experience at Railtrack. He was unmarried.
Steve Marshall, born February 11 1957, died September 28 2017