Tim O’Toole was by no means an obvious choice for the job of running London Underground but he proved to be an inspired one. His experience as an American freight railman, at one point running the huge Conrail which ran most of the freight operations in the lucrative north east of the United States, seemed to suggest he would know about trains but not the people who used them.
That proved to be wrong. The widespread regrets about his imminent departure from London Underground contain not the barest hint of hypocrisy. He has been an undoubted success in his six years at the helm, not only in dealing with such crises as the 7/7 attacks and the collapse of Metronet, but also in winning over the staff to ensure that industrial relations have been at their best for years as well as the public who have been impressed with the American’s quiet but firm demeanour. He may have previously solely dealt with freight boxes – cows were the only living things he carried on his previous railways and he did not take kindly to the frequent reference to cattle trucks by Evening Standard’s veteran transport correspondent Dick Murray – but O’Toole has the common touch as can be witnessed by taking a Tube journey with him and seeing the large number of staff who greet him warmly.
He was lucky in that he was given the opportunity to learn much about he system and the people running it before he moved into his office at 55 Broadway. Having been offered the post of managing director of London Underground, he arrived in February 2003 to find that the protracted negotiations around the Public Private Partnership (about which much more later), delayed the transfer of the Underground, which had been in the hands of central government since Mrs Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council in 1986, to Transport for London until July.
As a result, O’Toole had time on his hands and used it to good effect, by spending his days touring around the network of 11 lines and 274 stations. It was a brilliant use of his spare time. Not only did he get a thorough grounding in how the system worked, but he experienced what it felt like being regular passenger. For example, he noticed how little information was given to customers and how badly it was presented: ‘Whenever they gave out information, they would start with “customer information, customer information”. I thought this is not some soulless airport in LA, this is London, they should work the brand and say “ladies and gentlemen”. You should talk to people in the way that one would expect when they come to the city.’ He noticed, too, the ghastly ‘bright blue’ uniforms which were a mistaken move away from traditional railway smartness and he reintroduced a dark blue livery in 2005.
But not all the lessons were learnt immediately. He says: ‘I did not appreciate what good work so much of the staff do. When you see them in a moment of rest, chatting to a mate, and you think what the heck is going on here but what you don’t appreciate until you work with these people around the clock is that every one of them goes through several high adrenaline moments every day. If you work in a station like Kings Cross and you get 82,000 people through there in a day it’s a big job – in your eight hours out there on a gate line, you are going to have moments like that and until I got control of the Underground and really understood it, I had that same facile appreciation that other people have.’
He says that the quality of the staff was really demonstrated on the day of the attacks by suicide bombers on July 7 2005. He says that while everyone appreciated the work at the three scenes of the bombs and the efforts to get the system back working quickly, the evacuation of the system was carried out without fuss or injury: ‘The thing that deserves a lot of praise was the fact that we moved about a quarter of a million people off the network in the next hour [after the attacks] which means staff all over the place demonstrated that they knew what they were doing because, think about it, you are stopping trains, taking passengers off where they don’t want to be, and you can imagine the fuss. Our people handled that so well, they did a spectacular job.
The events of 7/7 and the aftermath brought O’Toole to the attention of the public and earned him a CBE, a rare honour for a foreigner. He deserved it not just for his calm approach when addressing the press and public on the day but in managing to bring the system back in use with amazing speed. He resisted pressure from some line managers to restart any lines that day but instead restored the whole system, with shuttles around the bomb sites, the next day. Even more remarkably, the damage was repaired and a full service restored within four weeks, an achievement that can be put down to good management: ‘Within an hour and a half of the incident, we divided the management into thirds – we had one group to continue to deal with the immediate response, there was a second group who to prepare an operating plan to restoring services immediately and there was a third group whose job was to bring these three sites back. We knew they were crime scenes and we would not have them for a while and they would be a lot of engineering to bring them back, and by subdividing these tasks we were able to move right away.’ It contrasted remarkably with the 68 day shutdown following the relatively minor Chancery Lane derailment just before O’Toole’s arrival in London. Moreover, he is convinced that showing the terrorists that London would not be paralysed for months by an attack made ‘made us a less likely target’.
O’Toole is convinced that the way the staff acted following 7/7 ‘turned many Londoners’ heads, and the heads of many of our employees who told me that they had passengers thank them over the next few days, and that was the silver lining of this awful day, the rediscovery of the dignity of these positions.’
O’Toole is a great believer in giving it straight to people and that has been the secret to the absence of strikes on the system since he took over in 2003. He has focussed much effort on ‘employee engagement’, talking to staff and being very clear about what he is trying to do. He says he has not bypassed the trade unions, which he must by law deal with, but has spent a lot of time talking directly to staff: ‘the trick is to be consistent, and fair and straightforward in your messages. The fact that the engagement [with trade unions] is compelled by law, you should not allow that to take the place of your relationship with your employees, for no other reason than to get some clarity in your messages. And it does have the advantage that if your employees know where you are going, the trade unions can’t very well demonize you.’ He is not in favour of a macho style confrontations with the unions but, rather, being ‘firm in our position. You deal with this is by creating a relationship with your own employees.’
At the outset, O’Toole realised he was never going to make the London Underground the best in the world, or the fastest or the most modern. The small tunnels, the intensive use, the age of much of the system and the backlog of investment meant that this was impossible. Instead, we sought to build on the brand which is an integral part of the image of the capital, and indeed, of the whole country. That, he says, was the way to realise the aim of creating a world class metro.
The focus on customer information was not, he says, ‘just the flavour of the week – it is the heart of the brand and we decided that the only way to ever create a world class tube was to go back to that brand. It is the only way to deliver world class on this property because we are not going to have the whizziest trains in the world.’ One easy and cheap measure was the introduction of line standard boards at every station which advise people of the current state of the system, on every line, not just those served by that particular station: ‘They are an efficient way of conveying information, which tells you either you are going to get what you expect, or that there may be some delays but you are still better off going this way or you ought to think about something else.’ O’Toole says that those are the only three messages that passengers need and they are at the heart of customer service.
On trains, too, information is key to improving what the marketing people call the ‘customer experience: Drivers are expected to speak to passengers to explain the cause of any delay after just 30 seconds providing the type of reassurance which O’Toole, in his media appearances, excels.
O’Toole is particularly proud of one aspect of the system that few people notice: ‘One of the things I like to point to, is that we have completely painted out the graffiti on the network. If you see any graffiti on the network, it probably means you are looking over the Network Rail permanent way on the District or the Met.’ When he told his managers that he aimed to eliminate graffiti, they told him it was impossible: ‘Yet now, you go out on the District and the Piccadilly and there are just brown walls. We just said we were going to do it, people painted graffiti, we painted it out, they did it again and we painted it out, and finally they went somewhere else. It is about being unrelenting. I felt that if we kept pushing this, we could keep this scourge away from London.’ Interestingly, that was not something included in the massive PPP, but something that London Underground had to pay extra for but O’Toole is convinced it was worth it in making the system appear safer for his passengers.
One of the reasons that O’Toole beat off other potential candidates for the job was his experience in dealing with complex contracts in the US. TfL realised that understanding the PPP and being able to get the best out of the infrastructure companies would be essential. The £30bn PPP was dreamed up by a combination of the Treasury and consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers and imposed on the Underground by a Labour government to take responsibility for the management of the refurbishment of the system away from the Tube management. The infrastructure was handed over to two consortiums, Tube Lines and Metronet, who were given 30 year contracts and considerable sums of guaranteed cash – around £1bn per year in the early stages – to maintain and refurbish the system.
Freed from the shackles of having to continue working for the Underground, O’Toole finally gives his real assessment of the PPP arrangement and it is, to say the least, pretty uncomplimentary. When I say to him, ‘let’s talk about the PPP since some of it has collapsed’ he is quick to correct me and says ‘most of it’ which is true as the failed infraco Metronet, was responsible for two thirds of the system. Metronet has now been incorporated within Transport for London, quietly renationalised without a murmur from the system’s midwife, Gordon Brown, or the arrogant mandarins of the Treasury who insisted on a system that O’Toole is now prepared to say was unworkable and he is surprisingly critical of Tube Lines, the surviving infraco: ‘So many things were wrong. Separating the track from the infrastructure was wrong even more so than under Network Rail because of the intensity of this operation. Separation is a mistake. The theory of this was that we are willing to pay a premium which a lot of people like you made fun of, because we will get 100 per cent of the railway for 80 per cent of the cost, on the basis that these private companies will come in and they will have all this innovation, and we know that supposedly LU was full of these hoary old engineers who made everything too expensive. But in the structure of the PPP, these infracos were rational people. It was a much lower risk strategy for them – yeah, they did innovate with some little things on the edges, like the machine that Tube Lines will show you that deals with wet spots, but fundamentally [their strategy was] not to challenge the standards and to build to those standards, therefore not risking doing something different for which they can be accountable and simply billing for the cost.’ While he accepts that Tube Lines has done well on escalators, reducing the time to replace them, he says some of the credit is down to LUL being more flexible about storing materials and, in general, he says that the PPP structure does not encourage innovation, which is the fault of the system rather than the individual infracos.
O’Toole says that as a result of the way the PPP was structured he has had to work with one hand tied behind his back in a system that was deliberately created to reduce London Underground management’s ability to affect the contracts: ‘The PPP was designed in such a way that it deliberately removed some of our weapons. For example it does not allow LUL to have a proper oversight of the work. We can’t withhold money as you could do with normal contracts when there are disputes. This was deliberately designed into the system to prevent LU having the power. We had a dispute with Metronet over a Corrective Action Notice to get them to do some work and they took us to court and got it blocked. The PPP structure was designed so that LUL would not be able to control it.’
Another damaging result of the PPP was that it encouraged weekend closures, which have become the bane of Londoners’ lives: The PPP system encourages the use of weekend closures. But better ways should be explored. In Madrid, where they do not close lines at weekends, they do a lot of planning and use an overlay system for new signalling that is installed over the existing one, and it can be turned on and off for testing . Here it is difficult to get people to do things differently as that was the way that the PPP was designed.’ He hopes that in the future, especially when the Piccadilly line is resignalled, it will be done differently because the Piccadilly is so essential to London at weekends with Harrods, football grounds, the West End and Heathrow on its route.
However, he stressed that it was vital not to continue battling against the PPP once it was signed. He took the decision right from the beginning that he had to work with the PPP rather than constantly challenging, and that his staff had to do the same, resisting the temptation to blame everything on its faults: ‘I was very worried that the enthusiasm for fighting the PPP was actually going to make the job impossible. It would have been easy to have degenerated into a mass of law suits. – it was a balance between helping them and challenging them.
So one of the things I decided to do from the beginning was to make sure that people did not use the excuse of the PPP for not getting better. I told everyone, “forget about PPP, that is not your job, we have people to worry about that, I will worry about that, but all we need and want out of you is a safe, clean, reliable railway”. No fancy explanations beyond that, we are just going for metrics that are about stabilising the operation.”
He feels he has succeeded: ‘Despite the PPP we will have delivered a new Underground. If you look at the metrics of the London Underground, they improved quite a lot during the nineties and when they hit the late 90s and early 00s, straight through to when I arrived, the metrics flatline or went down. You can see what happened; the management got completely sidetracked by the PPP fight and changing jobs, creating shadow companies, and progress stalled. So it was all about getting people to focus on their local world and getting better. That largely happened, but we knew we could not just go there, but we had to take people and elevate their understanding of what was going to happen next. That’s what kicked off this big employee engagement which is one of the things I am proudest of where we took the vision that people had, which was a world class metro, and answer the sceptics and cynics who asked how it was possible to ever get there.’
The PPP was designed in such a way that it deliberately removed some of our weapons. For example it does not allow LUL to have a proper oversight of the work. We can’t withhold money as you could do with normal contracts when there are disputes. This was deliberately designed into the system to prevent LU having the power. We had a dispute with Metronet over a Corrective Action Notice to get them to do some work and they took us to court and got it blocked. The PPP structure was designed so that LUL would not be able to control it. In a way, a lot of credit must go to Metronet and TL for getting as much done, and prioritising the railways.’
O’Toole therefore tried to ensure staff just got on with their jobs: ‘What we pushed the staff on and we really got traction, was to say hey, this PPP thing, we know it is not value for money, that some people are getting far too much money, but it is still lots of money, more than we have ever seen before so we should get a basic reliable railway. It may not be the slickest in the world, not as slick as Singapore or Shanghai, but with two minutes between every train and we marry that to the brand which is this environment, great signage, great information, safe, clean and a staff that is available to answer questions, then suddenly you are presenting a picture that is compelling and that could be defined as world class, so that someone who travels on metros across the world could say “I like London best, the trains are reliable and whenever I had a problem, there was someone there to help me”‘.
O’Toole, who is going back to the US because his wife did not want to settle in London, has clear regrets about having to leave at this stage when many major investment will significantly improve services on the Underground. He is aware that the experience of travelling on the Tube has not improved that much for passengers despite the huge sums spent on the PPP but reckons that will change over the next few years as several resignalling projects are completed and the new trains for the sub surface lines (the Circle, Metropolitan and District) are delivered, starting at the end of this year: ‘When you get the new trains – when you see the new subsurface trains which I drove a few weeks ago, they are gorgeous. They have air conditioning and move so smoothly. When London sees them later this year, people are going to say, “now we get it”.’
He is proud of what he has achieved with both passenger numbers and satisfaction at record levels: ‘Normally when the passenger numbers go up to this level, satisfaction must go down because of crowding, and yet this year [08/09] will set an all time record of passenger numbers and satisfaction scores. While it isn’t where this place needs to get – it may be damning with faint praise – it is undeniable that the place got better’. He points to the virtual elimination of derailments, the reduction in mean distance between failures – thanks to lots of investment in the fleet – and a great improvement in track quality. The big change, though, will be when various lines are resignalled, with the replacement of 40-50 year old wires that invariably fail: Thee jubilee will come on later this year, the Victoria line is installed and being tested, the Northern is next, and the sub-surface will be procured – its when the signalling systems are put in place that the people who say nothing has been changed will finally not be able to say that any more.
There is no doubt that O’Toole will be a big loss to London just at the time when the Tube faces a lot of challenges in dealing with a possible budget deficit, which may be exacerbated by the Tube Lines contract which is up for its first financial break point next year, and continuing to incorporate Metronet, as well as ensuring the successful implementation of all these signalling systems. He can though, look back with some satisfaction at what he has achieved: ‘I am proudest of where we took the vision that people had, which was a world class metro, and answer the sceptics and cynics who asked how it was possible to ever get there. What we pushed the staff on and we really got traction, was to say hey, this PPP thing, we know it is not value for money, that some people are getting far too much money, but it is still lots of money, more than we have ever seen before so we should get a basic reliable railway, perhaps not the slickest in the world, not as slick as Singapore or Shanghai, but two minutes between every train and we marry that to the brand which is this environment, great signage, great information, safe, clean and a staff that is available to answer questions, then suddenly you are presenting a picture – you get to perform on the best stage in the world – that is compelling and that could be defined as world class, so that someone who travels on the world’s metros could say, I like London best, the trains are reliable and whenever I had a problem, there was someone there to help me.’
O’Toole, while welcoming Crossrail – he will not be drawn on whether it is the right project – says that another disappointment is the lack of planning for further growth: ‘Crossrail is very important to London and creates lots of east west capacity, which the business community says is important to the competitive position of London. You can take that as given. But We still have tremendous north south capacity issues on the tube, though. They are the most acute, and I do think that we face an historic imperative, that more people live in cities than don’t for the first time in history, so how can more people live closer together and still prosper. If you look around the world and see what’s happening, look at Beijing, Shanghai, Madrid, Barcelona, what people are doing is building more metro lines, because the challenge is not to get from London to Birmingham but the challenge is to get from London Bridge to Harrow. We have to have Crossrail. Thameslink will be a big advantage, but at some point we have to get back to the same agenda as the rest of the world which is we have to build more metro lines.‘ In fact that seems a distant prospect. London has only acquired two new tube lines since World War Two, the Victoria and the Jubilee, in contrast to 1905/6 when three were completed within a year. Even Crossrail is almost a decade away and instead, Tube passengers will have to hope that O’Toole’s replacement is as good at managing the overburdened system and coping with the various challenges as he was.
