­David Higgins talks to Andy Milne

One of the more cheerful songs doing the rounds this summer is Australian band, Cloud Control’s, ‘This is what I said.’

The lyrics underline Australia’s welcome reputation for cheerful optimism and blunt speaking. David Higgins, late of the Olympic Delivery Authority and originally from north Queensland is no exception. Higgins speaks quietly but is quite open and genial about what he wants to do and how he wants to do it.

Open and transparent

Railways may have traditionally been secretive. That’s all set to change under Higgins who believes in open and transparent communication. ‘When I first started at the Olympics, people said there are leaks happening all over the place. People that have information are talking to the press.

‘They said we can try and stop this, track ‘em down and stand them up against a wall. I said, forget it. Why worry? They said some of this could be scandalous.’

David Higgins made the point, ‘It’s probably better that I read about them in the papers today than that they emerge as problems in two years time because we hadn’t been aware of them. Frankly, why fight information? What we have to be is very competent about how we put out information. Clear simple communications, we shouldn’t fight disclosure.’

Graduated in 1976

David Higgins grew up on a farm some miles outside Brisbane, born of German and Irish heritage, his family have farmed the area for four generations. ‘We used to watch the steam trains going through our property,’ he says. He walked and rode a horse to school. Whilst many of the children he grew up with carried on farming David followed his brother to university in Sydney.

‘My brother trained as an engineer. I was good at Maths so I studied that (civil engineering) at university.’ He graduated in 1976 and went to Africa to work on mining projects and airports. Then he went gem prospecting in Kenya. ‘I’d survey gem sites and camp out, live on the game parks and prospect.’

From 1985 he worked for the Lend Lease Corporation in Australia and supervised the Sydney Olympics. He is now domiciled in Britain and has worked here before. After working in Brazil he originally came to Britain and got a job with McAlpine.

Later he worked in Guernsey and built a power station extension at St Sampson. More recent achievements include heading up the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent and a five year spell at the ODA.

British citizen

‘I‘ve moved a lot, travelled round, but I always wanted to come back to England. I really like it. There are very strong links (with Australia) both cultural and values. I love London and its history. It’s a fascinating city. I love the countryside, it is absolutely stunningly beautiful. I like hiking in it.’

Higgins certainly feels very at home here. He enjoyed working for English Partnerships. ‘My wife’s family are Welsh and I’m a British citizen. I wanted to commit to living here. People don’t understand what a gift it is. It’s amazing, the countryside.’

He lives outside London near Reading and is a keen gardener. ‘The thing about English gardens is that you stick a broken twig in the ground and it flowers about six weeks later. In Australia you stick a perfectly good plant in the ground and well…’ Higgins is taking a similar gamble with his railway reforms.

A pro-rail government

David Higgins joined Network Rail’s board in April 2010 as a non-executive director. Appointed chief executive in February this year the man in charge of Network Rail is slim, slight of figure and bespectacled. Even after a long career that spans Brazil, Africa and the Channel Islands he still speaks with an Australian accent.

However, the urbane laid back approach should fool no one. Within days of taking up his appointment he announced sweeping changes as to how Network Rail was structured and delivered. He had worked with Sir Roy McNulty at the ODA and has a good relationship with Iain Coucher.

In the background is a pro-rail government forking out 120 million quid a day in interest charges on debts piled up by the last administration. Higgins, like all industry leaders dependent on public finance, is charged with getting costs down at the same time as delivering an expanding industry undergoing a recession defying boom.

He says of the government, ‘We have had very good support and we shouldn’t waste it. The easiest thing in the world would have been to slash capital expenditure on major infrastructure and they didn’t and now we’ve been given responsibility to spend that money efficiently and wisely. That’s what we’re going to do.’

Network Rail is now devolving power to ten route businesses – the tenth will be the newly created Wales unit. The changes will devolve power, responsibility and accountability onto the new business units run by route managing directors. Wessex and Scotland have already gone live.

‘Our biggest way of taking out costs now is decision making.’ Higgins leans forward, ‘It’s all about decision making. Local people, local businesses in the routes working with train operating companies aligning them. This is where we will make big savings.

‘It is also about track access. The current arrangements are set up for conflict. I know why they were there. They were set up to encourage certain efficiencies but they’ve been distorted. The result….it’s created behaviours which are counter productive to getting the most effective use out of the railways. So yes our costs are higher than Europe but our studies have said – the single biggest factor of why we are more expensive than Europe is access time.’

Avid supporters

An affordable railway means freeing up more money for investment in extra capacity, rolling stock and high speed rail. This is surely of direct benefit to contractors, railway staff and passengers.

Higgins is right behind high speed rail. ‘90% of all long term journeys in France are by high speed rail.’ France already has 2,000 kilometres of high speed railways. ‘And before we open High Speed Two they’ll have built another 1,000 kilometres of high speed rail.’

Higgins likens our rail system to the old A roads connecting market towns. There is no comparable high speed network bypassing urban bottlenecks. ‘Unless everyone’s vigilant it won’t go (ahead) so we have to be avid supporters of it,’ he says

Localised decision making

Britain might have the most expensive railways in Europe but that’s largely because of structure not incompetence. ‘In France and Holland if you cost the penalties they would have to pay to take time out from the network to do major enhancements they become much more expensive.’

European railways are vertically integrated so avoid squabbling over possessions and charges for them. Higgins puts it like this: ‘At the moment we’re not aligned and localised decision making will make that much better (enabling us) to do the local trade offs. So many of the decisions are locally based decisions which we don’t need to make centrally and it takes time to make those decisions.’

He uses the word alignment many times. Happily the train operators are right behind this.

Combine operations and maintenance

‘The interesting thing is that when we went to the train operating companies and proposed this idea I said, what is the single biggest thing that we could do to make your life better. They said combine operations and maintenance. It used to be like that. It’s now centralised. I understand why you did it but if you could singly do that…

I looked down the table and said does every one agree? They did. Unanimous! This is a screaming thing to do. You need to have much greater co-ordination because day to day running the railways, the operating of the trains, the operating of the system and the signalling and the maintenance of the network are inextricably linked.

At the moment in your organisation, (they said) they go up through two different silos. So we bring that together and combine it into one organisation: Network Operations. A new organisation under Robin Gisby, it’s not just moving everything into Ops and Customer Services. No, we have created a new organisation.

It starts up and we fold different parts of the business into it. The heads of our routes will have to run a business not just a cost centre. They’ll have to be responsible for the operation of all the business and much more aligned to our customers, the train and freight operating companies.

We realise in doing that we can’t lose the benefit of centralised timetable planning with open access and freight so we’ll strengthen that.’ Higgins acknowledges the great benefits of centralisation and standardisation that have been made over the last eight years.

Red tape and bureaucracy

Does the contractual nature of the industry mitigate against efficiency? ‘We are more fragmented since BR was broken up into 100 different contractors, which is incredible really. The public do get the big brands but I think they are looking for someone to solve many of their problems. They see pricing as expensive, trains as crowded and they look to see those things changed.’

A major part of the problem is the amount of red tape and bureaucracy. Higgins has a two part answer to this. ‘We do have a lot of process and we have to have process because we’re a business that runs all the time and is safety critical. So we do have to have process but I think looking at it with a 20 or 30 year perspective we have probably gone too far down the track on process now.

We rely on process and that’s allowed us in some ways to deskill the industry. In breaking it up we have lost some of that corporate memory and the intuitive knowledge of people who know how the railways operate. We need to rely a little more on the skills and expertise of our organisations and our people and our partners rather than prescripting everything… so we’re going to change that. I mean we have 1200 standards in Network Rail alone of which 800 are engineering.’

Part of the plan is to re-examine these. Higgins goes on. ‘We’re clarifying those standards as a first stage and then what we’re going to do is go back and fundamentally re-look at all those standards and rewrite them in plainer English.

‘Some of them will be eliminated and some of them will be simplified. Because what we’ve done is add to them all the time. The whole thing is added to. We’ve put everything through a filter.’

Champion the heroes and the innovators

However, the real thrust of his argument, like the route business model, is to put the railway back in the hands of the people who know how to run it. ‘We are empowering a lot more people where they face the customer. Now currently people have power because they control money and control decisions on asset improvement.

We need to change that environment. In the end it’s not about your ability to control things and information. In the end you’ll be valued because of your networks and your ability to support and help others. Now I’m not naïve enough to thinks that’s going to change over night. This’ll take years – if it happens. All I can do is champion the heroes and the innovators that push that line. Work out who they are and make sure I’m there to support them and encourage them to do more.’

Resilient, passionate and very competent

Higgins is not just talking of the modern management method of empowering people at the point of delivery – the inverted triangle theory. He takes it a little further. ‘The way our industry works together to get the railway back up and running again is amazing.

Winter. OK, it was disruptive but we took a conscious decision to focus on getting people moving at the expense of delay minutes. It would have been easier just to cancel a lot more trains being blunt about it but that wouldn’t have helped the general public. What people (staff) did to keep those lines going and to get people moving and being creative when problems occurred is amazing. That’s the great strength of the railways.’

He goes on to describe railway staff: ‘They’re resilient, passionate, they love the railways and are very competent.’ This may sound like a board room platitude but his re-organisation is actually built on exploiting such inherent capability.

You need creative people

‘The railway is really complex. It’s not a brand new system. It requires real creativity to get the most out of it. It’s always about balancing competing and conflicting demands. Where do you put money in? How do you balance capacity with punctuality and maintenance? There’s always trade-offs so you need creative people.’

A colleague had tackled him that morning about diversity. Higgins, with by now characteristic directness goes a little deeper. ‘I understand – diversity of inclusion. The sign of a diverse organisation is one where people’s opinion can be heard. People who have an opinion can raise it and are not going to be put down or bullied.

They have a right to have their ideas listened to and then acted on. It doesn’t matter about hierarchy. That’s the sign of a diverse organisation. People must feel they have the authority and the right to have different opinions.

An organisation can, then, harbour eclectic people, strange people that challenge the norm, that put their hands up and say: I think we’re going the wrong way. I like eccentric, different, people that challenge things. That’s one thing that the English do really well.’

He admits the system breeds conformity here with procedures and processes but argues that an eccentric can challenge things and occasionally improve them. ‘There are these really creative and eccentric people who think differently, who are very wise. The thing is we need to encourage them to dream. Say to them there’s a deadline.’ As Peter Parker, one time BR chairman used to say, ‘Earth the lightning.’

Higgins has been involved with the Sydney Olympics and the London Olympics as well as numerous engineering projects. The idea is to throw every bit of creativity and ingenuity you can into the project within the tight timescale available. As any engineer or journalist will tell you, hourglass inspiration always beats second best muddle.

Higgins has set himself the challenge of applying this to the creaking contract-attribution heavy rail industry. It is a dangerously subversive argument that will upset a generation of lawyers and bean counters.

Clear objectives

Almost everyone involved with railways has said there is no magic wand, no vertical integration or primary legislation that can sweep away the failings of an ill thought through privatisation. What that leaves is the inherent creativity and ingenuity of railway operators and staff themselves. The soul if you like, beneath the back-covering group standards, carriages, track and ballast.

Higgins says, ‘The biggest issue is defining what you want to do, setting yourself clear objectives, aligning everyone, trying to get over the fragmentation and get rid of the noise. There’s big stuff we’ve got to do on the railways and we just need to focus on the simple things we have to do in operating the railways.

We have to take away the barriers, the cultural barriers, the behavioural barriers and the financial penalties that cause us to operate in an inefficient way.’

Such a statement draws on the residual wisdom of almost every mess room up and down the network. Network Rail has been involved in the RailStaff Awards since day one, an affirmation that the railway’s hidden strength really is its people. Higgins is setting about making them stronger.

We were speaking a few days before the McNulty report was released. Sir Roy takes forward the idea that the rail industry itself can solve its problems if it is encouraged to look away from the body politic and refocus on its own soul. Who could disagree with such an alignment? As Cloud Control puts it. ‘Soul is what I got…’

My thanks to P J Taylor, Kevin Groves and Dan Panes for their help with this article.

Cloud Control are currently touring the UK. Their album, Bliss Release, is available from infectiousmusicuk.