Not all customers experience the railway through a single business unit. A significant proportion of journeys cross the boundaries between individual railways. The activities of many passenger operators and all freight operators cross business unit boundaries.
Almost all railway staff are required to engage with colleagues from other business units and with customers making journeys to and from other parts of the network. GBR must not focus solely on the vertical aspect of integration.
Success depends on recognising the whole network challenge. Customers must experience GBR as a single railway, not a fragmented railway. This is particularly important on routes and at stations with multiple operators. Similar challenges apply to network activities like timetable planning.
Creating strong bonds and frameworks across the national network must not result in decisionmaking becoming centralised. A single organisation must enable local delivery. Staff at the sharp end of running the railway need to be empowered to make good operational decisions and equipped to act in the interests of all customers and the whole network. Many staff have spent their entire career within the fragmented structure of the privatised railway. Investment in training and empowering staff will be critical to creating a sense of ownership“ right down to the station floor”.
Clear targets are essential to drive the right behaviours. Conflicting targets across the fragmented privatised railway have created barriers to good decision-making. CIRO’ s Fellows who were running the railway when it was last operated as a single national system emphasise the importance of clear and simple targets. Empowerment will be strengthened if staff are clear how winning is measured.
Devolution offers GBR a real opportunity to improve local accountability and place decision making closer to customers. Local collaboration must work within a clear national framework so that local priorities and the needs of longer-distance and freight operators are balanced.
Experience, for example the transfer of local services to Transport for London control, shows it is possible to strike this balance.
There is an important role for national and network bodies and functions to facilitate this. If best use is going to be made of network capacity, some elements of existing access frameworks will need to be maintained.
The industry has failed to exploit the benefits of technology in supporting good decision-making. The structure of the privatised railway means that roll-out of technology has been fragmented. We have identified improved technology as an element that binds together our other recommendations about responding to the whole network challenge, empowered decision-making and balancing local needs and longer-distance flows.
Government has set challenging cost reduction targets for GBR. There may be significant scope for efficiency savings in multi-operator routes where there are overlaps in capabilities and in the provision of services. More efficient and more effective use of traincrew is almost certainly possible, especially in multi-operator routes. However, the route to efficiency through workforce reform is more complex than it might seem. There are trade-offs between the benefits of operational flexibility and the costs of achieving it and in the short-term it will be better to focus on simpler actions. The industry will need to take a long-term approach to unwinding some of the inefficiencies.
This paper sets out CIRO’ s recommendations to make GBR locally empowered but nationally coherent. This work has been led by a group of CIRO Fellows, the most senior members of the Institution, whose collective insight can help create a better railway which can deliver for customers and the UK economy. CIRO’ s Fellows draw on their extensive UK experience but also their international insight, which is a requirement of achieving Fellowship of the Institution.
We offer this as a contribution to the work already underway. CIRO exists to develop the people who run the railway. We know, better than most, that the hardest part of any structural reform is not the legislation – it is making the new model work on the ground, with real people, making real decisions, in real time.
4 CIRO’ s Operational Agenda for Great British Railways