Making sustainability a key theme of Network Rail’s business strategy brings current and future benefits. I believe that sustainability should be an essential part of delivering our objectives and priorities, not an additional ‘nice-to-have’ element.
This requires us to show clear leadership within the company. There is already much good practice across Network Rail in developing objectives for sustainability and in delivering innovative solutions to meet them, and I would like to encourage us all to continue this and take it to a new level.
Sustainability must become a key theme for the railways now and in the years to come. Already, the UK rail network has a powerful story to tell on sustainability, as it plays a significant role in developing strong, economically viable communities in a way that no other form of transportation has shown the potential to do. All the trends point to more people living in urban areas, so this is likely to become an increasingly important contribution.
Just because we are the most sustainable form of transport right now, doesn’t mean we will retain our sustainability advantage unless the rail industry continues to push itself. The automotive industry, for example, is making great progress in this area. We still have a lot of room to improve and to find fresh thinking if we are to keep rail at the heart of sustainable, integrated transport network.
Sustainability means we need to take account of whole-life impacts and that means we need to find a way to deal with the mismatch between the long asset lifecycles (not to mention the significant proportion of the network using assets built in Victorian times) and the parts of the industry working over relatively short franchise and control period cycles.
This is particularly noticeable when we are considering climate change adaptation, where a wrong decision we make now will have significant additional financial and operational costs in the future which are avoidable.
Network Rail has a responsibility to address issues of common concern on the rail network and others will look to us as infrastructure providers for this leadership. We have to step up to this challenge.
Safety and reliability are recognised as core tenets of our business, but we need to regard sustainability in a similar way – I don’t see there being a contradiction but a virtuous circle, through which, if we get one right, it will almost invariably lead to benefits elsewhere, helping us to meet our CP4 and CP5 efficiency targets. It is really a question of good and visionary management, which takes a longer term view of how to obtain the best value for taxpayers’ money because it looks at whole-life cost.
I see four particular areas in which we need to improve our drive towards sustainability within Network Rail in the coming years:
- We need to understand our business and industry impacts better – primarily, that means our sustainability data collection, management and reporting should be significantly enhanced to enable us to do this
- We need to maintain a broad perspective – we should focus clearly on the whole-life, whole system costs and benefits of what we use and build
- We need to adapt to change – this requires changes in behaviours and techniques to deliver sustainability
- We need to promote effective partnerships – we should work together with our suppliers, contractors and customers to deliver a sustainable railway.
We are already starting to shape our plan as part of the Initial Industry Plan for how we will deliver sustainability with the rest of the industry and within Network Rail we are starting with six focus areas – carbon, climate change adaptation, waste, biodiversity (encompassing ecology and land use), diversity and inclusion, and accessibility.
Developing the plan is only a start. We will only begin to make a difference by implementing it. Sustainability is not a costly added extra, but “how we do business”
Our corporate strategy needs to permeate through the company, with greater transparency, clear responsibility and accountability. We also need to build on existing work on communicating and cooperating on the key issues to make it more effective and push change faster to a functional level. That’s how we will integrate it into day-to-day business.
I mentioned the need for leaders to influence this change towards making whole-life, sustainable decisions, but I also believe that this is an area where good ideas can come from anybody – often, from the people most exposed to a problem, challenge or issue. They’re the experts in their areas of responsibility and are best placed to find the best answers.
We can challenge each other in this area – sharing ideas with colleagues, looking for support from managers and the sustainability team, everyone can get involved and make it second nature – even if starts by just turning the lights off and recycling our waste paper.
David Higgins
Chief executive
July 2011