“Sometimes we let passengers down,” he said.
Delivering the George Bradshaw Address 2015, he argued that in most competitive environments, if a service is not delivered to customers, they have the option to go elsewhere. However, passengers did not have the same option on the rail network.
“Reputations are hard won and easily lost,” and Carne argued that much of the negative media coverage of the railways was driven by a desire to hold the industry to account.
Addressing the audience, he stressed a determination to win the public’s trust, but in order to “stop being the company that people love to hate,” the public needed to see a high performance organisation that cared, not only for passengers, but for the wider community it affects too.
Carne urged those in the rail industry to support a change in culture, and spoke of the central need to improve both safety performance and business performance, with neither taking precedence over the other.
Passenger safety performance was the best in Europe, but there were still too many contractors and employees injured whilst working on the network.
He called for stronger relationships with operators, either through formal alliances or simply working closer together adding that he liked “working with profitable suppliers.”
Whilst resolutely an apolitical evening, the call for closer cooperation would likely please Labour ears. The party have proposed that a new passenger body would join with Network Rail to coordinate passenger operations. This would include managing infrastructure, ensuring customer satisfaction across the network, and oversee stations and ticketing.
Network Rail came under government control in September 2014 and will become liable to answer Freedom of Information (FoI) requests from March. Carne acknowledged that this would bring challenges, but said that “society has a right to know how we take decisions.”
Rail campaigners will be sure to maximise the opportunity afforded to them through FoI requests, and perhaps in this respect, Carne has underestimated the potential impact that such information will have on negative media coverage of the sector.
The challenge of recruiting women was something that needed to be tackled, noting that women made up only 14 per cent of the Network Rail workforce. To reach 30 per cent would take a further 65 years, but he admitted that more needed to be done to improve Network Rails attractiveness as an employer, which would include further engagement with schools and universities.
Carne said:
“Our country needs us to succeed.”
Event chair, former Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis said he had never heard a chief executive be so critical of their own organisation. Carne suggested he hadn’t intended it to be a “hatchet job”, but rather “lightly” provocative to a knowledgeable audience.
Christian Wolmar, a transport journalist who is seeking to become Labour’s candidate for the Mayor of London raised a concern about structured continuous improvement. He said that delays for unforeseen circumstances could end up pushing people to fail, as the figures would not match the target.
Carne disagreed, noting that large manufacturing companies were all focused on continuous improvement.
Responding to a concern over rail track maintenance, the so called “yellow-fleet” of trains which were “world-leading” in inspecting tracks, Carne admitted that passengers wanted more and more trains, which meant that inspections had smaller time frames to inspect the track. Smarter technology was crucial to bridging the gap, he argued.
However tough it was to fit new technology to existing infrastructure it could be done, and extolled the virtues of delivering a ‘digital railway’.
An audience member questioned whether the new fixed-term funding cycle for Network Rail would create a “boom and bust” in terms of contracting and project management. Carne refuted that, and claimed that 85 per of the money spend on enhancements for control period five (CP5) had already been contracted. This, he explained, led to long-term framework agreements, which would give contracts confidence in training requirements, equipment and purchasing.
Adonis concluded the session thanking Carne for being so frank and offered some last words of friendly advice, “good luck!”
Whilst luck may indeed be required, the assured funding, as laid out by the Coalition Government through CP5 will undoubtedly provide stability through to 2019, and allow Carne to focus on meeting the performance and safety targets that are critical to public trust in the railways.
Further information on the political parties’ transport commitments in the run up to the General Election
can be found here.