Vaccines and railways

Kate Bingham’s Vaccines Task Force has powerful lessons for rail

“Just imagine the railway being led as successfully as Kate Bingham led the Vaccine Task Force.”

IT might seem odd to write a good chunk of a RAIL Comment about how Kate Bingham has run the Government’s Vaccines Task Force - but just look at its incredible success… and bear with me.

Kate Bingham was appointed by Boris Johnson in April last year to lead Coronavirus vaccine development and procurement. There was much sour media comment about private sector cronyism (she’s married to Conservative Minister Jesse Norman, she was at school with the PM’s sister Rachel, and she is a venture capitalist) and criticism that she was unqualified in vaccines and was wasting public money.

She set to work amid scepticism that it would take a decade and more to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance was appalled about the level of Government ignorance over vaccines - ministerial leaks spoke of civil servants’ briefing notes containing fundamental errors.

At the time, the UK had a single vaccine factory, in Liverpool, making seasonal flu vaccine. It’s hard to imagine a more depressing starting point for Bingham.

She surprised everyone when just nine months or so later, the first safe and effective vaccine was approved, with the first doses administered before Christmas. In a (for Britain) truly astonishing display of logistical, management and practical expertise, the Government achieved its target of protecting the 15 million most vulnerable people by February 15, with hopes of everyone aged over 50 vaccinated by April/May. This will pave the way for a summer easing of restrictions. On the best days, half a million people were vaccinated.

That single flu vaccine factory is now merely a small part of a complex national vaccine manufacturing and distribution supply chain and delivery system, run by a web of scientists, doctors, nurses, cybersecurity teams, testers, military specialists, lorry drivers and a nonuniformed army of cheerful volunteers. There are new vaccine plants in Oxford and also in Scotland - whose specific job is to produce a live, inactivated vaccine which will be rapidly adaptable to new variants of the virus.

Yes, Bingham’s team even foresaw and prepared for the variant phenomenon, which the rest of us only became aware of in the past few weeks. A vial filling plant in Wrexham was secured for the next 18 months. All in about ten months.

Within two weeks, Bingham’s rapidly appointed specialist team sifted hundreds of early bird vaccine projects to just 23 - and promptly invested heavily in the seven most promising, in return for guaranteed supply.

Bingham got it right. Five of the seven vaccines she supported were successful in clinical trials and three were quickly approved by the UK regulator. This gave Britain one of the fastest vaccination programmes in the world - certainly the most effective in Europe. Within weeks, Britain had vaccinated more people than France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined: a stunning achievement.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone last summer in doing repeated double-takes at news stories about millions of doses of vaccines being ordered, until the tally was more than 400 million - enough to protect the entire UK population of more than 60 million souls six times over. Last summer, while the media focused on Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s photo-op as a waiter to help the ‘Eat out to help out’ campaign, Bingham’s team was just getting on with it - quietly, rapidly and effectively.

Bingham’s task force, who routinely worked by Zoom and most of whose members never even met her personally, gave new meaning to collaboration. And, importantly, one expression we never heard was ‘red tape’. There was open acceptance of what Government is not good at and so Public Health England set aside its own logistics and brought in Army expertise, honed in Afghanistan, to quietly and effectively drive vaccine distribution, while cold logistics specialists Boots and Superdrug were recruited for distribution. One minister described this as “the best decision we made”.

Bingham succeeded by being ‘quick and nimble’. She refused, in the words of one commentator, to allow her team to be “smothered by process and mediocrity”, and despite not being the largest buyer, Britain created one of the fastest and most effective vaccination programmes per capita on the planet.

The Spectator reported that one minister said of this exemplary effort: “Is it possible to get things done at this speed and with this competence outside of a pandemic?”

And that key ‘takeaway’ is why I’ve devoted around 800 words of my 1,100 words here to Kate Bingham’s fantastic achievement. Just imagine the railway being led as successfully as Kate Bingham led the Vaccine Task Force.

I believe - no, I KNOW - that our railway has plenty of equivalents of Kate Bingham and her team, all equally capable of leading a similarly effective and successful initiative to figure out what our post-pandemic railway will be for, what it should look like and how it should be operated, staffed, maintained, and enhanced. But rail’s ‘Kate Binghams’ will need the same freedom she deployed after being told by the Prime Minister to “save lives, as soon as possible” - a commendably clear goal.

Kate Bingham’s success is powerful validation of what has been RAIL’s opinion on this key question for many months now: that we must have a new arm’s length body, similar to the Vaccines Task Force, to strategically plan and organise our railways… and quickly, too.

It will need a similar clear brief from Government and independence of action to enable it to match Bingham’s agility and flexibility, underpinned by a likewise clearly understood and protected budget.

In the absence of any realistic alternative, I still believe this new body should be a rebooted and reconfigured part of Network Rail. We really don’t have time to waste in reconfiguring a post-pandemic effective and value-for-money railway. We must also avoid politicisation - a fundamental of Bingham’s success is that crisis drove us to the elusive sweet spot of truly effective teamwork and collaboration between public and private sectors. It must be the same with the railway.

Listening to BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster on Saturday February 13, former Labour Leader and three-times Prime Minister Tony Blair unwittingly made rail’s case especially well.

“There’s no doubt as to why the Vaccine Task Force worked,” he said. “Government set an objective, then handed it over to a small group of people who knew what they were doing, who knew their field, and they were allowed to get on with it. And that is a critical lesson in Government - and that’s frankly why we were 10-12 weeks ahead of Europe, which did it differently.”

Let’s learn from the VTF experience with Kate Bingham, shall we - and just get on with it?