Gareth Llewellyn Biography
For seven years (2000 - 2007) Llewellyn was the global director for safety, health, environment and corporate responsibility for the National Grid. From 2008 he joined Anglo American as its global head of safety and sustainable development. He was a non-executive director at Biffa, where he chaired the board’s HSE committee, and a non-executive director of the Renewable Fuels Agency where he chaired the board audit committee. Before Network Rail, he was managing director of a consultancy business providing safety and sustainability advice to global clients. Llewellyn is an associate of the Prince of Wales’ programme for sustainability leadership at Cambridge University
have in place if it does occur. You want to focus on the stuff that’s preventative and that needs to be analysed in a lot of detail. We’ve done all of that work for Plain Line track, and at the beginning of October we started a national trial for all Plain Line track activities in Great Britain. This has resulted in role- based manuals for various people within NR – around 650 of them, and it effectively says ‘This is what you have to do’, but at the same time it gives them a lot more freedom to do things that are no longer mandatory, whereas beforehand, everything was mandatory, in theory. The fourth new development is in the Sentinel card. In the
past it was a very dumb piece of plastic with just a number on it and the competencies, and we know that people would buy those cards and turn up on track. Your number would be noted and you would go on track, and the person standing in front of you wouldn’t know really whether you’d bought that card or been trained properly. So we stopped that. The new card has a QR (quick response) code which can be scanned by an iPhone or an Android and it connects with the central database, so what comes up on the phone is my picture plus my competencies and whether I’m allowed on track. If the picture on the phone doesn’t match then you’re not allowed on. If you’re outside of a mobile phone signal it has a chip inside it which also has my competencies and my details, and that can also be scanned by the phone. That system, which will give us 100 per cent authentication (versus two per cent previously) was rolled out at the end of September to all our employees who are able to access the track, and we’ve now started rolling it out to all our contractors, which means that by Christmas it will be in the hands of 100,000 people. So for the first time ever, in early January, every day we will know who is allowed to be on track and who is not. And if somebody breaches the rules we can take permission away overnight. So those four big changes are set to have a huge impact on the market because we’re saying to a lot of the contingent labour suppliers, ‘We’re not interested in having you providing safety critical workers anymore and we’re not going to come to you for that’.
What do you enjoy about your job? I came here because the challenge was big – and as my wife said ‘You can’t make it any worse can you’. I suppose that is possible but I believe we can make some big changes here which fundamentally affect not just the way the organisation operates but also the welfare of the people that work for NR. Nobody deserves to come to work to get injured or killed and nobody actually sets out to be unsafe either. So in that context it’s about how we can make the changes that guarantee people go home safely every day. That is our vision, it’s not us being trite, it is effectively what we want to achieve.
What don’t you enjoy? I’m a huge optimist but I think with all these things it’s the pace
of change. You’re always desperate to make the changes faster because the sooner you can improve things the safer people will be. But in an organisation that’s been around for such a long time with the culture here, change is slower than you might want.
What’s your vision for the future in the safety arena for NR - what would you like to see? We are the safest railway in Europe – we don’t often celebrate that fact funnily enough but ought to, and it hasn’t come about as a result of luck, it’s taken a lot of hard work. The RSSB recently summarised all the big incidents in North America and Europe in the last 24 months – 81 serious train accidents and not one here so we have a lot to be proud of. But workforce safety is not where it should be. It’s better than
the construction industry but light years away from some of the more proactive industries such as oil, gas and power. There’s a lot more we can do in NR, but that requires quite
a lot of change, both in the processes we operate and how we introduce new technology such as remote condition monitoring, risk-based maintenance, and multi-skilling – for example when you send somebody out to look at a signal, that they also clear the vegetation around it rather than send other people out – so it’s a whole mixture of things.
What do you think David Higgins’ successor Mark Carne will contribute to NR’s safety processes? When he was 29 Mark was part of the investigation team into the Piper Alpha disaster where 167 men died, so he has an in- depth knowledge of what can go badly wrong. Coming from Royal Dutch Shell, he’s also worked in an environment where safety is significantly higher profile than it’s been here for a long time, so that’s got to be good. •
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