DAVID FAWCETT | INTERVIEW


said he’d had a fantastic career in the UK and learned to think in ways he would never have done in France – and of course that worked both ways, for us as well. I found that the Royal Engineers at Chatham wanted their civil engineers to spend some time in industry and would give us one free for a year – and that was good because they, too, thought differently. “We were a design office, and the design


contract for sections of the Jubilee Line Extension, in London, came up. All the big companies tendered for it. They had their standard metro-tunnel designs and submitted variants of those. We had never built a tube line in our lives, and knew nothing about them, so we didn’t have a standard design to start with. So, two of us bought one-day London Underground travel cards and spent a day going round and round the system, looking at the stations and how they had been designed and built; and we based our design and submission on that. We got the contract; and our knowledge at the time to get it – specifically of metros, for I had built tunnels – had been bought at the cost of two travel-cards. “I told the team: ‘We have to work long


hours and you will not get any overtime. It’s up to all you guys.’ And they did work long hours, and it became a team that worked brilliantly together and cared about what they were doing. And, I am sure that that diverse recruiting had a lot to do with that.” In 1990 he moved further into higher


management. “I was made a partner in Babtie in 1992. After that I ended up doing all the acquisitions for Babtie.” In that period, he also was Chairman


of the BTS, over 1995-97. Then he moved overseas again. “I spent three years in Hong Kong


overseeing the integration of companies we had acquired there, and came back to the UK in 2000 to negotiate and oversee the acquisition and integration of Allott & Lomax into Babtie. We grew from five hundred staff in 1992 to three thousand by 2004. Some of that was organic, some by acquisitions.” During that time Babtie transitioned


from being a medium-sized consulting engineering practice to being one of the UK’s top five civil engineering design companies. Fawcett was instrumental in that change. In 2004, an offer came from Jacobs to acquire Babtie, and was accepted. His career with its many moves, and taking opportunities at home and abroad,


has been made possible only with his “hugely supportive” family, he readily admits. “There were some high-risk things that


we did. I was a gambler in business; the other guys in the company were all solid chaps. Babtie had its roots in Glasgow and they were conservative Presbyterians by nature. There was one partner, Norman Berry, who recognised my usefulness and pushed my career. He was my mentor.” Does management require different skills


from tunnelling? “Yes, or at least a different mindset; but


only to a certain extent. Tunnelling, when I started in the 1970s, was still gambling; you never knew what the ground was like. There were always things that could go wrong. Today, geology is far better mapped and is all on the internet. If you want to know about a tunnel project in Bolivia you can Google it and have the ground conditions up on your screen in three minutes.” As well as expanding the company, he


remained throughout as the firm’s head of practice in tunnelling. In those years also he gained a reputation as an ‘Expert Advisor’, to governments on new projects, to inquiries into accidents, to industry and companies


DAVID’S CAREER WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY HIS HUGELY SUPPORTIVE FAMILY.


on disputes. His views were forthright and not always popular, or mainstream. So, in 1985, he managed a research project


for NIREX investigating the practicality of a site for a deep geological repository to hold nuclear waste. “It is beyond me why that repository never happened,” he says. “You have got mud rocks down under Barrow- in-Furness. Mudstone absorbs radionuclides because it’s a mud rock. It compresses around anything you put in it. It closes up, all by itself, because it is a soft rock. What better way can you have to be sure of containing radionuclides? It is firm enough to excavate and build on, but its soft enough to close itself up again afterwards. To me it is a no-brainer. “The problem with nuclear waste is that


everybody wants the 100% safe solution, not the 99.99% safe one. But the 100% one does not exist. I still believe that the 99.99% solution is there, and is not expensive. “But instead of that they keep the stuff


above ground at Sellafield, spending billions to keep it looked after.” One might question whether above


ground at Sellafield is safer, in the short or the medium- or the long-term, than below ground in mudrock at Barrow. “Elsewhere they have built nuclear waste


repositories underground. Sweden has done it in granite. Belgium has done it in clay – which is more difficult to build in but, again, it is a perfect material because once you put your nuclear waste in its canisters down


Above: Trekking is a family passion, all over UK, Europe and South Africa. Here, David and his wife, Jocelyn, stop at the stone cairn atop Pen-y-ghent in the Yorkshire Dales


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