Andrew Haines
NETWORK Rail has “possibly neglected the skills and processes of operating the railway in the interests of asset management, major infrastructure projects and the safety of our workforce”.
Speaking at an event on January 25, Chief Executive Andrew Haines said that rail operations as a profession “has not, in general, been cultivated and valued as it should have been. And dwindling expertise has contributed to our collective failure to make sure the railway works seamlessly as a system. We are paying the price for that in the level of performance that we are delivering.”
Haines pointed out that today’s railway is busier than at privatisation, and that secondary delay now accounts for 70% of attributed delay - far more than disruption caused by the original incidents.
He also said that sub-threshold delay has rocketed, accounting for around 35% of all delay on the network. These amount to 720,000 minutes per period, and that on key parts of the network more than half of all delays go uninvestigated.
“In an industry that has highly geared financial incentives around performance, this is a scandalous statistic and a massive missed opportunity. Individually, small delays are cumulatively having a huge impact on the reliability of our network,” he said.
Haines highlighted changed structures on the railway that have hindered providing people with experience in all aspects of operations, as well as franchised operators working to different performance targets unaligned with Control Periods and judged primarily in financial rather than operational resilience terms, as contributory factors to the problem.
“The upshot of this is that the way franchising was done made the system harder to operate. In that context, the most experienced operators were no longer incentivised to use their expertise to best serve the system as a whole.”
Haines was critical of NR’s focus on project delivery, saying that operations were “squeezed” and that “as a profession, operations was gradually devalued and neglected. As the network got busier and busier, as secondary delay grew, the loss of operational expertise really started to show. On a network running at or near to capacity at peak times, you need an operating function working at the top of its game.”
He added that train operators and infrastructure operators must have aligned targets, and that all operators must have “top-notch competence and experience, excellent leadership skills, and a system overview that allows them to work effectively together to deliver the best outcome for passengers. That is not where we are today.”
He highlighted a lack of formalised training, clear competence standards and clear career paths within NR, operations apprenticeships which do not offer the rigour of maintenance apprenticeships, a lack of rehearsal and simulation of incidents to allow operational teams to practise incident management and recovery, and structural issues as weaknesses within NR.
“When it comes to running the
railway, experience matters,” he added.
Haines promised to restore pride in operations as a profession. He said NR will co-locate operational staff wherever it can (so that they can collaborate more easily and make operational decisions jointly), make immersive training and incident simulation standard for all routes, set clear competence standards, and work with operators to ensure training helps people to grow their competence and understand principles such as train diagramming and crew rostering.
The Level 2 infrastructure operator apprenticeship will be extended to other areas of operations, and leadership training will improve.
“I’m not going to say much about the challenges facing Keith Williams and his team, other than that for me it boils down to just three things: our ability to make trade-offs in a system under pressure; incentives that mean all parties are aligned to deliver for end users and taxpayers alike; and fostering behaviours that mean that we work together even when the going gets tough.
“At our best we do these things already, and we do them really well,” he concluded.
“And importantly, they are all things that we can work on now, without waiting for an external review or for primary legislation that could wait years in the postBrexit queue.”