What to expect from our Strategic Business Plan

Welcome back to a new season of the RSSB Podcast. In this episode, we’re joined by RSSB Chief Executive Mark Phillips. Mark takes us through our five-year Strategic Business Plan covering 2024–2029, pulling out some of the key priorities along the way. He’s particularly excited to see how rail can leverage some of the technological and digital advancements taking place. Listen now to learn more about what we’re hoping to deliver to industry in the next few years.

Related information

Strategic Business Plan 2024-2029: https://www.rssb.co.uk/about-rssb/who-we-are/strategic-business-plan-2024-29

Transcript

Host: [00:18] 
Welcome to a new season of the RSSB podcast. We are delighted to be back. And joining us today is RSSB Chief Executive Mark Phillips to go over the launch of our strategic business plan for the next five years. Mark, thank you so much for being with us today.

So, as is tradition, let’s start with a bit of background. Can you please tell us about your experience in rail over the years and your journey to your present position?

Mark Phillips: [00:42]
I joined British Rail in 1986, so a long time ago now. But I’ve been very fortunate in having the opportunity to work across infrastructure with Railtrack and Network Rail. I ran the industry’s train and engineering planning organisation for a few years. Then I ran one of the Network Rail regions, Anglia, and had the opportunity to transfer into one of the train operating companies. And as deputy managing director, I was responsible for all of the train operations across East Anglia. I’ve had the opportunity to lead a bid team to run one of the contracts for rail operations. And since 2015, I’ve been at RSSB, and I was appointed Chief Executive in 2016. 

And alongside that, I’ve also had the opportunity to do non-executive work. I was deputy chair of the British Transport Police authority, and for the last five years, I’ve been on the board at Transport for London. And there, I also chair the Audit and Risk Committee. And that’s been eye-opening, particularly during the period of Covid, when we had a lot of issues to manage during that very difficult period.

Host: [01:55] 
RSSB is now looking to launch its five-year strategic business plan for 2024 to 2029. So, can you give us a bit of an overview of our key goals and main priorities?

Mark Phillips: [02:07]
The goal that I’ve set the organisation is to ensure that by 2030, every rail employee across our wide membership is using an RSSB tool or service every day. And that’s a really ambitious goal. But the reason for that is to ensure that the stuff that we produce for our members is relevant to the tasks that the industry has. And I think that’s absolutely achievable. So, it’s making sure that things are relevant and applicable to running not just today’s railway, but the railway of the future. And we are particularly focused, in terms of longer-term thinking on behalf of the industry, on how we can actually help prepare the industry for things that are coming towards us. And to that end, we’ve established a Futures Lab that is particularly focused on that. 

In terms of the general things, I think there are some big shifts that we are helping industry with. One is around data transformation, digital transformation, because that’s going to be so critical to using the data that we collect across the industry and improving performance — operational performance and safety performance — and helping us reduce costs by doing things better and more efficiently. And also, sustainable development, because we have to make the industry more sustainable for passengers and for freight businesses because that is very much what our customer base is looking for to improve the quality of the service across a whole range of aspects, from air quality through to decarbonisation, noise, waste, and pollution. So, there’s an enormous agenda that we’ve got to help the industry with on those topics.

Host: [03:47]
This is the first time we’re introducing what we call ‘strategic multipliers’ to the plan. So, can you tell us what these are and how you think they’ll help us maximise our progress over the next five years?

Mark Phillips: [03:58]
The idea behind that is to bring the specialist skills that we’ve got in our engineering departments and our safety departments together to address these particular issues. For example, one is climate change and how that’s starting to affect the operation of the railway. We’re beginning to see the impact of serious heavy rainfall in terms of how it impacts the earthworks and other important assets. Also, very high temperatures in the summer and how that’s impacting overhead power cables and the operation of traction. And so, bringing our skills together across the organisation, we can do some really complex work in terms of understanding some of the techniques that we can use to help the industry manage some of those particular problems and identify ways in which the industry can start to mitigate the impact of those and be more resilient to the impacts of a changing climate. 

So, I think that’s essentially what we’re seeking to do: bring together a range of different skillsets to tackle things from a different perspective and help the industry improve. 

Another one will be on health and wellbeing. There’s a significant problem with the health of rail employees. We can provide some guidance to individuals so they can look after their own diet and sleep patterns and so forth, and there’s also things we can help the industry with in terms of how it designs roles such that people are less exposed to health and wellbeing problems in the workplace. And bringing both of those things together I think will help equip the industry for a more healthy and better workforce.

Host: [05:31]
And how are these objectives applicable to or beneficial for multiple levels of the industry, such as those in frontline roles vs. those in rail management?

Mark Phillips: [05:41]
In all aspects, I think the objectives are aligned from frontline roles right through to the board room. And I think our role is to provide the right tools across that range of positions that people hold. So, there are things that we can deliver that are absolutely applicable to designing a frontline job and how you can improve the way in which tasks are carried out. We can provide guidance to frontline staff to minimise their exposure to risk in the way they carry out their duties — whether it’s train driving, signalling, maintenance activities, track walking, right through to how the board room actually addresses risk to make sure that it is considering the full range of risks that a business can be exposed to and is taking appropriate action. 

One of the things that we’ve done in the last year or so is to set up an industry risk group with representatives across our membership. And we bring in to that discussion some of the latest thinking from the cabinet office and some international risk analysis to identify what are the top issues that companies need to be considering such that they can take the right steps to manage that. So, for example, cyber risk is a huge problem that’s affecting so many businesses. And there are examples every day of businesses being hit by attacks. And so, we can share some of that intelligence and some of the steps that businesses might take in order to reduce those sorts of risks.

Host: [07:13]
It sounds as though exploring new technologies and really making the most of data are increasingly important for rail. Why do you think that is?

Mark Phillips: [07:21]
Rail has probably not benefited from analysis and data as much as many other industry sectors. And I think there is a huge opportunity for us to really start to bring that into how we make decisions. We’ve not been terribly successful as an industry in collecting data perhaps in the way that some other industries have, so there is absolutely a huge opportunity to start to expand the way in which we fit the remote condition monitoring kit to a whole range of assets and to not just take readings from that, but actually then start to analyse and look for patterns in the data that perhaps give us different insights to how assets are behaving. And from that we can then start to plan better when we might do interventions, maintenance, corrections. But also, how we can better plan for the whole life cost impacts of an asset. And better predict likely outcomes for the future I think are now becoming much more available to us. Particularly, we’re just at the advent of applying artificial intelligence, and we really don’t yet understand fully how that may bring new opportunities that we’ve never envisaged before. 

So, I think it’s a really exciting opportunity for the industry and one which we really need to embrace. But we’re going to need some people with these specialist skills to actually do that. And we’ve got a few of those people at RSSB, and other member organisations will have some themselves. But we need to put those to best effect so that we can really start to understand how the industry is operating better, and that will then enable us to reduce cost, provide a better customer service, and overall, raise the quality of the rail product.

Host: [09:17] 
Thanks, Mark. And of course, we all know how important sustainability is for the sector as well. We’ve already published the Sustainable Rail Blueprint, and our objective now is to embed that in rail operations on a much larger scale. So, how are we going to drive that change?

Mark Phillips: [09:33] 
The next step is very much to work with members on an individual basis to help them develop and apply the Sustainable Rail Blueprint in their particular circumstance. It is the case that many member organisations have fairly limited resource in this particular area for good reason, in the sense that they have to manage the cost lines so tightly in the current situation. So, I think having the thinking done, largely in one place, which RSSB has been very successful in over the last few years on this sustainability topic. We’ve now got a small team that can spend time with individual members and talk them through how they might apply the different aspects — as I’ve said, from air quality, decarbonisation, to social value — into their particular business, such that effectively they can pick up templates, modules, tools, and start to apply those with relative ease into their own organisations and start to meet the goals that we are aiming to achieve through the Sustainable Rail Blueprint.

Host: [10:41]
I think our listeners will also be keen to understand what this really means for the sector. So, broadly, how do you think our five-year business plan can help industry continue to drive meaningful change?

Mark Phillips: [10:53]
I think our objective here particularly is about how we can enable the sector to improve its overall performance. Train performance is not where it needs to be in order to continue to be attractive to passengers. Reliability in particular is an area of concern. So, our research in terms of looking at better ways to manage timetabling, how we can improve opportunities for freight pathing, are all some of the latest ideas that will help on operations performance. As is our work on standards, particularly aimed at how we can take opportunities to diverge, if it’s appropriate, from some of the technical specifications for interoperability that were set in Europe to reduce cost. 

How we can do things in a consistent way is really important. And from a safety point of view, safety is a cost. If you can minimise the risk that you impose on staff, on the public, on passengers, and on freight businesses, then that will reduce the cost of running a business. So, looking after safety is a really important aspect of reducing overall business costs because when things go wrong, there is often a very high cost involved in that. So, good processes, good procedures, managing safety well are good ways to manage cost and overall aspects of the business I think are really important in that regard.

Host: [12:30] 
And finally, if you could choose just one thing, what is it that you are most looking forward to in the next five years?

Mark Phillips: [12:36]
I’m really excited about the digital transformation piece. I think that it offers such a lot of opportunity, untapped ways of improving how businesses operate, and I think we’re just beginning to start to see how some of these new technologies can be applied in our very own sector. I suppose for most of the recent period we’ve been looking at how tech businesses on their own have managed to develop their own businesses and grow, but I think we’re now seeing how that tech can be applied to the rail sector, which has been fairly traditional in many regards. But I now think it opens so many doors and opportunities for us to improve, great opportunities to advance the way people work in the industry. I think it offers new opportunities for people to come and work in the rail industry. A really exciting time, and I think it’s on us to really open our eyes to how we can best apply it.

Host: [13:33]
Thank you, Mark, for those insights. And thank you for listening. We hope you’ll join us for the next one. And in the meantime, as always, stay safe.