Wessex begins devolving


Richard O’Brien is the boss of Network Rail’s first devolved regional business. He heads up the new Wessex Region. One week into the job, he spoke to Paul Clifton


R PAGE 18 JUNE 2011


ichard O’Brien used to be called the route director. Now he’s the managing director. He used to control Network Rail’s Wessex Region. And he still controls


the Wessex Region. So, on the surface, it seems very little has


changed. But that’s not how O’Brien sees it. ‘Many of the things that used to be done


centrally are now being pushed out. Before, I had 1,500 staff. Now I have 3,000. The most significant change is in asset management. Before the budget was handled centrally. Now I’m doing it.’ He’s fixing up a new regional


headquarters in Basingstoke. Calling it a ‘campus’ he will oversee the moving of around 1,500 staff to a site close to the railway. Most of those people will be transferring from offices in central London. A training centre will come first. O’Brien says that ‘over a generation, everything will be centralised there’. So far he hasn’t even got as far as applying


for planning permission, though the site has been identified. When we meet he has been in the job for just a week. Publication of the McNulty report, recommending the new structure for Network Rail, is still a few days away. So what difference will the change of structure make? ‘The last 15 years has followed a classic


pattern of how you would handle a business that needs to perform better. The government


didn’t have a lot of confidence in the railway’s ability to control costs. ‘Network Rail was created with that in


mind. It centralised everything. That was right for the time. Now the government has regained that confidence in rail, it can put a pound in rail and get some value out. Big companies are slower than they should be, and more expensive. Pushing accountability to a local level will up the pace of decision making, drive out cost and save money.’ But won’t it just add another layer


of regional bureaucracy? A string of local headquarters, each with its own administrators, finance officers, personnel managers and training teams? O’Brien thinks not. He believes the


Wessex region is large enough to maintain economies of scale. He cites a re-signalling project west of Salisbury, announced two months previously as his first example. He will seek out local suppliers, and try to optimise the way those suppliers work together on one particular project. And that may include choosing companies not favoured by the rest of Network Rail. ‘Those will be local decisions. There is


both opportunity and risk in that. There is the opportunity to bring smaller suppliers into the market place, but they may have less experience. Centralised companies tend to use centralised suppliers.’ O’Brien will continue to report to Robin


Gisby, Network Rail’s director of operations and customer service. Gisby will be chairman


of the Wessex board, and of each of the other boards as they are created. Wessex and Scotland are leading the way. Three more routes will be devolved in October, with the rest following in March 2012. ‘My killer line during the interviews with


head hunters was that really I had been doing a two-and-a-half year-long interview for the job! In my time as route director, the Wessex region has become the most punctual it has ever been, and the safety record is excellent. ‘My last job was being responsible for


quite a lot of the region, and then having an influence over the rest of it. Now I am responsible for all of it. I’ve been doing it for about a week and that changes a lot more than I thought it would.’ O’Brien is not a lifelong railwayman.


A civil engineer by training, he came to Network Rail a decade ago from British Airways. Before that, he had worked in Africa. His target now is to save money, though


he puts it in corporate-speak: ‘drive better value by optimising efficiency’. And it has to be done without compromising the service his main customer, South West Trains, has come to expect. He will start by doing away with huge


nationwide framework agreements with big- name suppliers. ‘Now you just buy what you want on


the internet. Things have changed. We can cherry-pick the market. If you’ve got a broken window it is often cheaper to hire the local man and his van than it is to go through a framework agreement with your big contractor.’ It’s a system ridiculed in the media


recently over a contractor to the Ministry of Defence charging £22 to change a broken light bulb at an army camp on Salisbury Plain. The light bulb itself cost 40 pence in the local Tesco.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36