Rail Minister Lord Hendy has expressed pride in the progress that has been made to bring track and train together ahead of the creation of Great British Railway (GBR).
Speaking at last week's UK Rail Summit, which was organised by Transport Times and hosted by KPMG in London, Hendy said a lot of progress had now been made on creating integrated railways with fully accountable management teams.
"Whatever anybody says, you can't accuse this government of not getting on with it," he told delegates. "The Public Ownership Act was the first piece of legislation that this government passed ... And we've got on with taking train operations into public ownership.
"I am so keen on this because what I see every day ... is people who wake up and want to know what's going on on their railway, and if it's no good they go and fix it.
"It's really important because the railway has lasted for years and years and years with a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of people saying 'oh well I could have done that but it's somebody else's fault'."
Hendy said this integration was already improving the customer experience across the country. He offered the example of the new East Coast Main Line timetable, which was planned, agreed and implemented in a way that reflected a new collaborative and customer-focussed way of doing business, rather than one where "everyone brings their contracts and their lawyers into the room".
GBR's plans will begin to reveal themselves over the coming months and the Minister said: "You might like everything that's in them but what's in them shouldn't be a surprise. We're not trying to do anything other than what we need to do."
GBR will be an enormous operation, bringing around 97,000 people together from around 17 different organisations. But Hendy says it will be run by people in the regions and will not become "a bloody great bureaucratic organisation run from some place like 222 Marylebone Road where the British Railways Board was".
He said: "We will treat the Combined Authority Mayors and Local Authorities as people we do things with and not people we do things to ... Combined Authority Mayors have money, they've got power, they've got the lives of millions of people in their hands, and they should be partners in the railway's endeavour, even though railway geography isn't very good at replicating political boundaries."
Meanwhile, in response to a question from the audience, Hendy turned his attention to the issue of accessibility.
"We will have a commitment to buy new trains with level boarding," he pledged. "There should have been that commitment for the last 20 years but there hasn't been."
Providing evidence of the increased integration between track and train, Hendy's speech was followed by a joint presentation by Alex Hynes, Chief Executive of DFTO (DfT Operator Limited), the government's public sector rail owning group, and Jeremy Westlake, his opposite number at Network Rail, the publicly-owned infrastructure controller. This duet was intended to show how track and train are starting to sing in perfect harmony.
Hynes remarked: "Hopefully you got a sense that we've got momentum. We've got direction of travel. And we are not waiting to set up Great British Railways to improve the railway."
Southeastern, Southwestern and Greater Anglia have already been integrated and West Midlands and Thameslink will follow before the creation of GBR. And integration is also happening at senior levels.
"We share an office," said Hynes. "Jeremy and I and our teams are based down the corridor from each other. We are bringing track and train together. Not just on the shop floor of the railway but also at the corporate centre - and this is why Great British Railways is going to be better - because we are going to make better decisions more quickly, in the interests of the people who depend on the railway."
Standing beside Hynes, Westlake said: "We're not waiting. You might think that we're waiting for legislation before we get on with it, but we really aren't."
He continued: "We see the railway people starting to talk as one team in a way that they didn't before. We have pretty much taken away the contractual differences ... That's actually fairly massive."
There are now joint performance strategies for the railway, and there is enthusiasm among the 200 civil servants who have now transferred across from the Department for Transport to DfTO.
"It's a big change for them," said Westlake. "How do they feel? Amazing. The buzz is really good. One senior former DfT director said to me, who is now based in Waterloo ... 'I feel the passenger experience in a way I never could before'."
Hynes echoed Hendy's remarks about the highly devolved nature of GBR.
He said: "When Jeremy and I spent lots of time in our teams in meetings discussing how we are going to structure ourselves, we literally draw the organisational chart upside down, because our integrated railways will be at the heart of Great British Railways. Why? Because they are closest to the customer. They are closest to the places. They are closest the mayors.
"Great British Railways is going to be a highly devolved organisation ... because those people who are closest to the communities, all other things being equal, will make better decisions.
"Some people are worried that Great British Railways might be a very large, unresponsive organisation. It's not going to be. It's going to be far more responsive than the railway is today because it's going to be highly devolved."
Hynes and Westlake continued to pass the mic back and forth as they addressed the issues freight, community rail and housing developments on railway land,
On freight, Westlake said: "We are really invested in delivering on freight growth, not just passenger growth ... The freight industry is worried that they will get edged off the network by GBR's focus on passengers - it won't."
On community rail, Hynes said: "Community rail is really important. The community rail movement is astonishing in this country and again, because GBR is going to be highly devolved, we want to see a greater role for community rail, not a smaller one. For every £1 we spent on community rail, we get a £17 return on social returns."
And finally, commenting on the 'Platform4' initiative to build up to 40,000 homes on surplus, disused railway land over the next decade, Westlake said: "We have quite a lot of brownfield land that we can redevelop, which is why we've set up a property company that is focused singularly on that. It has new powers. It has the ability to buy up land adjacent to the railway. We couldn't do that before."
Concluding the joint presentation, Hynes said: "We're not creating Great British Railways because we fancied a re-org. Great British Railways is going to be a new company with a new culture and a new way of working - and it's one that will be focused on the people that we serve, the people of our nation.
"We've had 30 years of privatisation, fragmentation, profit maximisation. The next however-long-it-is will be characterised by pride and service to our nation."
The challenge of integration
The second session of the UK Rail Summit explored vertically integrated railways in more detail. Marie Daly, Chief Operating Officer at Transport for Wales (TfW), spoke about the experience gained there. The Core Valley Lines (CVL) in Wales are a prominent example of UK rail vertical integration, where has TfW owned, managed, and operated both the infrastructure and services since 2020.
Daly said function must come before form. "Be clear how the system works, end-to-end integration needs to be designed in - and then align roles, governance and culture to enable it," she explained. "This needs to be underpinned by a long-term culture change programme underpinned by colleague voice."
TfW focused on quick, visible integration wins to demonstrate one-team working and challenged entrenched behaviours around blaming and gaming, recognising that systemic change takes time. "Shared consequences drive shared ownership, but only if leaders consistently challenge legacy behaviours across the whole system," said Daly.
As Managing Director of South Eastern Railway, Steve White has led the integration of track and train - and the clearer accountability that brings.
Introducing himself to the audience, White said: "Lord Hendy wrote my job description. It says 'One person to blame for (literally) everything'. But if I am honest it doesn't feel like that. We set up our integrated railway 312 days ago and I've never had more fun trying to run a railway. Because it felt like 1,900 people in Network Rail arrived with curiosity, passion and a desire to help us serve our customers. So we are enjoying the experience."
Getting the teams to gel and start acting as one meant holding a lot of barbecues last summer. In practice, it has meant sharing data "like never before" and a "hyper focus" on route level performance.
A recent survey found that 84% of staff say, "I understand the reasons for integration". But White said this was not British Railways, "the world has moved on".
Summarising his remarks, White said: "Integrated railways aren't a panacea. If they were you'd never see a single fault on the District Line. But integrated railways do have the potential to be safer and better, at a lower subsidy, if we exploit the opportunity."
Thomas Ableman, Founder of Freewheeling and formerly of Chiltern Railways and Transport for London, focussed on a different kind of integration - the connections between different modes of transport to create a more convenient and comprehensive offering to users.
Starting out with a LinkedIn post a year ago, he championed a plan to trial a 'Mini-Switzerland' in the UK, whereby buses and trains work fluidly together, before later proposing the Peak District's Hope Valley as a good location for a trial. The Better Connected national integrated transport strategy for England, published by the UK Government earlier this month, announced £6m of support for a 'Mini Switzerland' pilot in the Hope Valley - meaning that Ableman's dream will soon become a reality.
"In the UK just 14% of public transport journeys are multi-modal," said Ableman. "And when you think of the numbers of people who pour off the train onto the Underground at Waterloo every day, that basically means no-one anywhere else is making a multi-modal journey.
"It's a bit like the classic transport planning joke, 'There's no demand for a bridge because no-one crosses the river'. We have terrible connections but 'we don't need multi-modal journeys here - it doesn't happen'. Let's see what happens in the Peak District."
Ableman believes that better connectivity may partly explain why rail trips per capita in Switzerland are roughly double the level in the UK, and why passenger numbers have actually increased there since the Covid pandemic.
Later on, in response to a question from the audience, Ableman said the Better Connected was not a true integrated transport strategy.
He explained: "It was more of an integrated national transport strategy - i.e. It took a bunch of strategies and integrated them into one document. But it fundamentally was a series of modal activities put into one document. It did not read, yet, as a strategy for integrating transport."
Ableman said that a real strategy would have included targets - for example, to increase the 14% of UK public transport journeys that are currently multi-modal.
He added: "The reason we integrate public transport is to improve access. So in villages your public transport access opportunities increase dramatically if the buses connect with the trains. Let's have a per-person access measure and let's target improving that."
Other things to define include who is actually responsible for integration, and what levers do they have? What does integrated ticketing look like, and who is responsible for setting overall strategic framework for integrated fares?
Concluding his thoughts on Better Connected, Ableman said: "Great that it exists ... Let's use this as a baseline and next time publish a strategy for transport integration, not an integration of transport strategies."
The devolution revolution
Speaking in a session about making devolution work, Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, pointed out that there are now 14 directly-elected mayors and more are on the way.
"The future is devolution and certainly working with GBR," said Brabin. "I know that this is how we are going to absolutely revolutionise transport across the country."
"We absolutely, as Combined Authorities, stand ready to collaborate and to seize that opportunity - that once in a generation opportunity - to do things differently.
She added: "What it says on the tin a mayor should do is deliver growth - and we all know that if you want growth, transport is the answer. Connectivity, bringing people to opportunities, that is how you grow the economy."
Spring 2027 will see local bus services start to return to public control under the new 'Weaver' network brand, and Brabin spoke of extending that new identity and multi-modal connectivity to rail.
She said: "Rail must be woven into our Weaver network, delivering real integration - that seamless transition from train, to tram, to bus and to active travel, as we have heard happens in Switzerland, where it's easier to stand on your drive and decide to leave the car keys behind and to go on public transport."
Brabin was also one of a number of speakers who addressed the issue of diversity, and the importance of having a management and workforce that fully reflects the communities that are served by public transport networks.
"As something that serves the public, it is an outrage if we don't represent the public," she declared.
Geoff Hobbs, Director of Public Transport Service Planning at Transport for London, said he represented a "Maxi-Switzerland" showcase of multi-modal integration.
He told delegates that the creation of GBR offered much to be excited about, but he said there were concerns about network access.
"A quarter of all national rail journeys are made in and around London on services which are devolved to us," said Hobbs. "Unsurprisingly I care an awful lot about that because I'm the fella at TfL who writes the timetables for these sorts of things ... And because we rely on our colleagues in Network Rail now, and GBR in the future, I want to make sure that they are delivered as well as they ever possibly can be."
He added: "We worry, however, that just as freight and open access might be slightly sidelined, we are anxious that we are not as well. We have to be part of the industry conversation ... in order to make sure that we have fair access.
"It's almost unthinkable for myself and my Network Rail opposite number to fall out, but were we to do so we had the benefit that I could always say 'See you at the ORR [Office of Rail and Road] and we will discuss it there'. And I will have less ability to do that in future, so making sure that the process is a fair one is something which I am anxious to ensure will be there."
Alex Robertson, Chief Executive of passenger watchdog Transport Focus, called for clarity on who is responsible for decision-making in an increasingly devolved environment.
"We are at a juncture now where we can decide the scale of ambition for devolution," he said. "No-one is against it in principle any more, but the hard decisions I feel are ahead of us. If you set priorities you will also create losers, or at least benefit some more than others. My worry is that we will keep violently agreeing it is a good idea for so long we won't realise we haven't made any decisions about how it will work in practice, other than the most compelling and uncontroversial cases."
He concluded: "We will know we've moved on when we know who is going to explain the decision to everyone who has lost as well as whoever has won. For that to work we need transparency, predictability and accountability in how those devolved decisions are made."
Keeping innovation alive
The final session of the UK Rail Summit addressed innovation and the need to keep it alive within the rail industry.
Toufic Machnouk, Managing Director of GBRX, the strategic innovation body for Britain's railway, said the fragmentation of the post-privatised railway had inhibited innovation, requiring "stubborn outliers" to work around the system.
GBRx will publish a plan in the next two weeks focussing on the areas where it intends to help drive innovation in the rail sector.
"We have an incredible opportunity with reform, shifting the narrative about what's possible in our industry, bringing the industry closer together to really embrace and take on some of the big strategic and technological opportunities that will improve how the system works for people," said Machnouk.
"The key thing for me is that if it was naturally doable in the system with its incentives it would have been done - you don't need us. But where these areas do not work through the system, and even with reform you still have a very complex industry, ... it requires purposeful action."
Catriona Meehan, Director of Public Affairs at rail booking platform Omio, called for a level playing field once GBR has been established.
"She warned: "If GBR becomes the system and the main gateway into the system, without clear separation, without fair access, without the same rules applying across the board, then we risk repeating the same pattern - less innovation, less investment and ultimately a weaker experience for customers."
Michael Hart, Chief Revenue Officer of Vix Technology, said he was encouraged by the evidence of culture change that had been spoken about at the UK Rail Summit, and what it might mean for innovation in the sector.
"With GBR acting as a co-ordinating body, the potential to really change the passenger experience in terms of retail, ticketing, validation and planning is enormous and really exciting," he said. "What we can do for places ... through technology is probably significantly greater than investment in hard infrastructure.
But he warned that structure alone will not deliver innovation.
"This centralisation introduces a risk," he said. "There's a risk that innovation could slow down if standardisation does not keep pace with it. Any of you that work in tech and UK rail will know the legacy that we face every day of these historic systems that we need to integrate in order to deliver a coherent passenger experience. We need those to progress."
