Former Abellio chief: Here’s how to get British rail back on track
Half a year on from leading a management buyout of the major rail and bus operator Abellio from its Dutch owner, Dominic Booth is surprisingly modest about what some would consider a career-defining moment.
“It was a key sort of milestone for me to achieve, something I’d always wanted to do. But, you know, it came and went really with a glass of wine and celebration,” the 59-year-old says, chatting in the London offices of Transport UK, the company borne out of the deal.
Chief executive Booth, a veteran railwayman with nearly 40 years’ experience, completed the buyout in late February, taking Abellio off the hands of the Dutch state-owned provider Nederlandse Spoorwegen, ending its involvement in UK rail.
His motivations? “Heart and head,” he explains. “After 16 to 17 years building a company, under the stewardship and ownership of Dutch railway, of course you know, I had a huge attachment to it.”
Playing into the decision was a desire to bring critical public transport services back into UK ownership, at a time when fellow transport groups Go-Ahead and Stagecoach had been courted by foreign cash.
The move will also free up the firm to “be even more agile [and] move more quickly,” he says, critical as it finds its footing in a sector still reeling from the impact of Covid-19.
But after a career in British rail, which saw him rise from station manager in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Booth ultimately “felt responsible for” charting the business through its post-pandemic recovery.
Not an easy task. Passenger numbers collapsed during lockdown and while leisure demand is creeping back, commuting habits have been forever changed by the surge in home working.
A bullish Booth relishes the challenge. “It’s early days,” he says, but insists: “We’re on a good track.”
Recent industry figures showed the only three rail companies to improve punctuality performance year-on-year — Greater Anglia, West Midlands and Mersey Rail — were all run by Transport UK.
That still leaves East Midlands though, which declined slightly to deliver 55 per cent of trains on time in the last quarter, and the rail chief admits: “There’s still a bit of work to do there.”
Strikes and performance aside, the question of how to manage the railway’s troubled finances is hotly debated, with revenues declining and double-digit government budget cuts in effect amid a challenging macroeconomic backdrop.
Time for a shake-up
Operators have been pushing for a shake-up of the current Covid-era contracting system, after the Department for Transport (DfT) introduced low-margin, restrictive contracts to stabilise the industry during the pandemic.
Under those arrangements, the government takes on Network Rail and operators’ cost and revenue risk but many in the sector would like to see that transferred, in exchange for greater rewards.
For Booth, that should be the first “cab off the rank”. He wants more “dynamic” contracts, which include “revenue incentivisation,” something he has “lobbied very hard for” and which he hinted could be introduced in the coming weeks.
“We want to bring that dynamism back into the industry and the skills the private sector has, we can deploy them properly to the benefit of the customer and the taxpayer,” he told City PM
“We want to bring that dynamism back into the industry and the skills the private sector has, we can deploy them properly to the benefit of the customer and the taxpayer.”
Dominic Booth, Transport UK Chief Executive
Which brings the conversation to Great British Railways (GBR). A plan originally devised by Grant Shapps and Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams, to bring in a unifying ‘guiding mind’ for Britain’s fragmented rail system.
The state-owned body would reduce ministerial micromanagement and give customers a more obvious source of accountability for poor service.
“The sooner [it] can happen, the better,” Booth says, with profit and loss and investment decisions “best taken on a whole industry basis and taken by a team of experts”.
“Rail is a long-term planning industry and you know, having a team with the sort of knowledge and the wherewithal to make those decisions over the medium and long term and take a whole industry view crucially, is very, very important,” he explained.
Whether he is right about franchising, GBR and the role of private innovation – most in the sector are behind reform of some kind after such a rough few years.
Look to Japan
Could looking overseas hold some more answers? Having worked with Japanese stakeholders, Booth thinks there are lessons to be learned from how they do it.
The privatisation of Japanese railways in 1987 has proved a booming success in its sprawling metropolises — Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.
“I think [the Japanese] levels of punctuality are world famous, the scale they operate at as well is enormous, you know, so they’re not just punctual on small railways, they’re the biggest railways in the world,” Booth said.
“Their innovation, the level of innovation is tremendous. They are tremendously profitable so they don’t have any burden whatsoever on the taxpayer in Japan, which is quite something for rail, that’s very unusual for rail.”
“The level of innovation is tremendous. They are tremendously profitable so they don’t have any burden whatsoever on the taxpayer in Japan, which is quite something for rail.”
Dominic Booth, Transport UK Chief Executive
Whether Britain will ever be able to emulate Japanese punctuality looks unlikely as of today.
But Booth insists the future is bright and as countries increasingly prioritise sustainability, that places British rail “on the cusp of a very, very exciting period of time to come”.
“We need to make sure that we don’t lose faith and we navigate through the post-Covid recovery as quickly as we can. And we go on to… really what I think is going to be a real renaissance for public transport.”
“We don’t want people sitting in cars over long distances, we want to put them on a series of vehicles where we can have 1,000 people… It was invented 200 years ago, it’s called the train.”