Lord Hendy tells ‘Lunch with Leon’ podcast why he was keen to accept mission to reform the railway

 
Lord Hendy (left) with Leon Daniels

 
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill was sitting at his desk on a sunny afternoon when the phone rang. It was the Number 10 switchboard informing him that the new prime minister would like a chat.

Hendy has been the go-to transport boss for senior politicians. First, Ken Livingstone recruited him to lead a revival of London’s bus network before serving his successor, Boris Johnson. After nine and a half years at Transport for London, he was appointed chair of Network Rail. During the pandemic, it was Hendy who was chosen to stand next to then-prime minister Boris Johnson at Covid briefings related to transport. And now Sir Keir Starmer was on the phone asking him to be the rail minister in his new government.

“I just said, I’d love to do that,” says Hendy. “Of course I will … I can’t imagine any circumstances where you wouldn’t either immediately accept it or have an excellent reason not to.”

This is among the thoughts and recollections from Hendy that appear in an interview by his old friend and former TfL colleague, Leon Daniels, for the ‘Lunch with Leon’ podcast, which is produced in association with Passenger Transport. It’s not just any episode either – it’s the 100th.

Fixing the railway
Hendy understood the next step was to reform the railway and reduce fragmention, and he wanted to be part of making that happen.

He chaired Network Rail for almost nine years, but following the timetable crisis of May 2018, it became apparent to him that reforms were needed for the last six of those. 

“It didn’t work properly, and when it went really badly wrong, nobody was really in charge of it,” he explains. “That’s what Chris Grayling, when he was the secretary of state for transport, found. The buck stopped with him.

“Now you’ll know Leon and as I did that at TfL, when things went wrong, it was, in the end, our fault as the management. There was nobody else to blame. Nowhere you could go and say, ‘Oh, well, we did our job, but they didn’t do theirs’. And I thought that was a good thing. I don’t think it made our life particularly easy, but I think that it … operated the system for the people of London and for the mayor of London pretty well.”

That clear line of accountability has been absent in rail, where nothing is anybody’s responsibility without calling in others. 

“The consequence of that is that the culture of blame in the railway,” says Hendy. “The first thing you do when you get up and you run a public transport system is to look at your phone and find out what’s what’s gone wrong, what’s going on, and in TfL days, as you well know, you would pick it up in the morning, look at it and think, ‘I better sort all this lot out, because there’s nobody else to blame’.”

At Network Rail, he would also check his phone and feel relieved if the problem was not the direct responsibility of the infrastructure controller.

What we need with railway reform is to find people who are in charge of bits of the railway who say, ‘This is mine and we need to fix it’

He recalls:  “Occasionally, I did look at it, and I thought, ‘Oh, thank goodness this isn’t us. Thank goodness this is a train company problem with staff or rolling stock’ – and that’s an entirely the wrong way to think about it. And what we need with railway reform is to find people who are in charge of bits of the railway who say, ‘This is mine, and we need to fix it’. That, to me, is what railway reform is all about.” 

Having been frustrated by the slow progress on rail reform from the last government, Hendy himself tasked him with seeing it through.

“So here I am as the minister for state for rail in the new government; I’ve taken a pretty large pay cut to do this. It’s not quite what Sue, my wife, thought I would be doing now. I didn’t think that I would ever get the chance to do it, but given, finally, the chance to fix the railway. I think it would have been unthinkable not take the opportunity and so that’s what I’m doing.”

It’s all about the details
Those who have worked with Hendy say that he has a detailed understanding of how organisations work from the bottom up. He believes this is especially important in transport.

He recalls asking Justin King of Sainsbury’s whether he ever had shareholders at his AGM come up and ask him why the coffee isn’t next to the cornflakes. The answer was no – the focus was on business strategy and margins. Hendy told him that TfL was different:

“Even if you’re talking about 20 years transport strategy for London, question three was always ‘Why doesn’t the Piccadilly line stop at Turnham Green, except in the evenings and on Sundays?’ And if you didn’t have an answer to that question, which was not only a good answer but an accurate one, people thought you were no use. 

“And I don’t blame them, actually, because people want to feel that the people who run transport systems use them, know what they’re like, and understand the views of the passengers who have to travel every day.” 

Hendy’s mission is to understand public transport networks. He says that those who fail to do so risk being “just some faraway person with some grand title”.

Embracing enthusiasts
Part of the challenge is that many transport users also have detailed knowledge – because they are enthusiasts. This, Hendy says, isn’t an issue for a business like Sainbury’s.

I like employing people who are enthusiasts, because I like their quest for knowledge and their detailed knowledge and experience

“There are people around the world who know where all the planes are, what fleets they are, what seating configuration they’ve got, where they are, where they should be, ditto for rail, ditto for bus,” says Hendy. “So we’ve always got uniquely, that side group of people who probably know more about the business than anybody in it, and they do it voluntarily, because there’s just something about transport that makes them interested well, and I think it’s a good thing.” 

Hendy and Leon Daniels are both unashamed transport enthusiasts. They enjoy the nitty gritty elements of public transport and celebrate its heritage, but sometimes, this has been looked down on by others.

Hendy explains: “When we entered the bus industry in the 1970s one of the things that was pretty clear in London Transport was that you shouldn’t really be an enthusiast. It was looked down on, and I could never understand that. And I like employing people who are enthusiasts, because I like their quest for knowledge and their detailed knowledge and experience. And I think that, frankly, that adds something, you know.”

A great industry to work in
Hendy believes public transport is a great industry that young people should consider, although he concedes that it may not be an obvious choice.

He remarks: “It’s an industry which has a pretty good chance of survival for the working life, even of an 18-year-old or 16-year-old who leaves school now, and that you can’t say of many industries. You know, Sue, my wife’s parents worked for Barclays Bank. You thought working for a bank was as safe as houses. You know, her father was the Barclays Bank manager in Exmouth. I don’t suppose there’s a bank manager in Devon now, but the transport industry is going to endure it, isn’t it?

He continues: “There’s no chance that there won’t be significant numbers of people running public transport and and certainly the railway … So it’s a solid career and much of the transport industries still got extraordinarily good pensions, actually, by national, international standards.”

But good long term prospects aren’t the only reason he cites for joining the sector. He sees it as an opportunity to be part of something that plays a central part of communities.

Addressing Leon, has says: “What you and I know is that once you admit that you work in a transport industry, you’ll never, you’re not. You’re never on your own at a party are you? You know, you’re surrounded by people who say, ‘Why does the Northern line run the way it does? Why doesn’t the Piccadilly line stop at Turnham Green, except in the evenings and on Sundays?… What’s wrong with the route 19?’, and people are interested in that. And if you can say a bit about it, they’re even more interested because, you know, these are, these are big, complex systems.”

Hendy claims that this is the same for people at all levels of the industry, and he sees it as a positive thing: “We don’t make as much of that as we should. The people who work in transport are absolutely fascinating.

It’s not actually a job, it’s a vocation, I think

“Many of them get in there by accident. They look for a job, they don’t really know what to do. There’s jobs as customer assistants on the tube or on stations, and suddenly they discover … this lovely world of really interesting people of diverse cultures and backgrounds who are really keen on the job they do. It’s not actually a job, it’s a vocation, I think. And people are committed to it.”

He adds: “There are not many other industries where you might get chance to work inside the Olympic Games. You might get the work on the planning or the delivery of the funeral for Her Majesty the Queen. I mean, these are all high- profile jobs where most of the world is watching on the television, and people who worked with us were actually doing it. They’ve got that one… Frankly, if you worked in a ball bearing factory, or even in the management of a ball bearing factory, you probably wouldn’t have that to talk about.

Another selling point for the sector is that it’s at the eye of technological change. “It’s not an optional extra, you know,” says Hendy, “if you look at the railway, it’s got everything from Victorian signal boxes with levers that you pull with your entire force of both hands right up to and including the ECTS signalling system … which is absolutely world class modern technology. And anybody getting involved in that end of signalling will have a job for the rest of their life, because that’s going to be the way railways are signalled throughout the world.

“And if you look at the bus industry, [it] has been absolutely in the vanguard of both hybrid vehicles, and now fully electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, in a way that the car industry and the truck industry is, frankly, only now catching up.

Hendy also believes the railway can provide fulfilling professional challenges for a neurologically diverse workforce. He points out the Network Rail examined why is assessed people who were being recruited to compile railway timetables in the same way as those who work in a office and it now looks for people who have minds that can cope with numbers and can see timetables in a way that many others cannot.

A greener future
Hendy is excited by the public transport sector green credentials and it’s potential in helping the country to meet its Net Zero targets.

He explains: “Both of my kids, who are now in their 30s … are far more conscious about the environment, and want to make sure that the world they’re living in is sustainable … There’s some really, really exciting things going on and the transport industry is in the vanguard of it, you know, I mean, in yours and my time at TfL, we’ve moved from an entirely diesel engine bus fleet to one where nobody would ever have believed that you could have 100% electric double deck bus or a hydrogen double deck bus. We’ve done both. It’s now common place.

There’s some really, really exciting things going on and the transport industry is in the vanguard of it

He adds: “I’m taking the Buses Bill through parliament currently, and one of the provisions in it is to enable there to be a cut-off date when new vehicles can’t be used on local bus services, except if there’s zero-emission. I mean, we couldn’t have envisaged that 10 years ago, but it, but it’s very possible. In fact, it’s certain at some stage in the not too distant future, isn’t it?”

Celebrating heritage
Being excited about the future does not mean there is not space to celebrate the past. Hendy and Daniels wholeheartedly agree on the importance of this. In their view, transport heritage is not just about nostalgia, and it’s not frivolous and trivial.

“It relates people to their lives and to the lives of their predecessors,” says Hendy. “You know, their families, in a very tangible way. [I look at] a Facebook group for old Ealing because I grew up in Ealing, and more often than not, the pictures that appear on it are of the 65 bus and the 607 trolleybus down the Uxbridge Road. It relates people to their surroundings. So it’s a good thing.”

“You’re the chair of the London Bus Museum. That’s a brilliant thing. We’ve both been trustees of the London Transport Museum in our time, and they’re telling stories which relate to people’s own experiences and about the growth. The [London Transport] Museum is not just a collection of old buses and trains. It’s the story of London.”

He continues: “You know, one of the things with these industries that is really interesting is that the level of interest in the history of the industry, what it now does, its wider social, political and economic contribution, is very profoundly marked with many, many people. It isn’t just a job, is it? That’s the truth of it.

“You know, there are people we both know, for whom it’s just a job, and it’s just a way of making money. But for many, many people, they realise how interesting it is and what a contribution it makes. And I think that’s brilliant, actually. I think you know, the fact is that that connectivity drives growth jobs and houses, but actually connectivity interesting and transport is interesting, and I it’s so great that that’s true, isn’t it? We couldn’t be having this discussion if we were both foreign exchange traders, could we?”

 
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW: leondaniels.co.uk/podcast

 
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.

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