In May 2024, now-prime minister Keir Starmer called for a ‘duty of candour’ law to compel public servants to tell the truth and prevent cover ups like the Post Office Horizon scandal, Grenfell and the wider cladding scandal, or the Hillsborough disaster.
Following his party’s victory in the general election in July, Starmer appointed Lord Peter Hendy as the rail minister. The following month, a story hit the headlines about an engineer talking about systemic challenges at London’s Euston station that had the potential to impact on public safety in an interview in the press.
The interview, published in April, resulted in Hendy, in his previous role as chair of Network Rail, threatening the engineer’s employer and ultimately resulted in him being sacked. In a letter he sent to the employer in May, he closed his complaint by saying, ‘Of course, finding a potential supplier criticising a possible client reflects adversely on your likelihood of doing business with us or our supply chain.’ This was followed by a further email a few days later in which Hendy threatened to ‘take it up with your head office and shareholders’, at which point the engineer was suspended and eventually dismissed.
That engineer was me. And the wide-ranging implications of this story and others like it go to the root of some of the biggest problems with public service today.
Silence, denial, attack
The response from government and its agencies in the aftermath of me taking my concerns public at the end of August was one of silence, then denial, then attack – all trademarks of a cover-up, even if there isn’t actually one happening in this instance.
I’ve gone to great pains to explain that what I did was not actually whistleblowing, but the whole sorry affair raises an interesting question and challenge to the way that whistleblowing is considered and managed in the UK.
To be protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998), i.e. as a whistleblower, you need to have reported the unsafe condition through one of several prescribed or ‘official’ channels. In the case of railways, the two main routes are through the Office of Rail and Road (ORR, the post-privatisation railway regulator) and via CIRAS, the supposedly independent confidential reporting service.
However, the provisions of the act are extremely narrow. Lots of safety issues do not fall neatly into a safety ‘event’ or ‘condition’ that can be reported through such channels. And indeed, the sorts of events or conditions that do are usually because of earlier, more systemic issues for which no such formal reporting channels exist.
There is no protection if you are talking about broader, systemic challenges around safety, welfare or other conditions, such as long term funding cuts or government decisions about investment. Indeed, I would argue the appropriate channels for such discussions are the media, given that they are the ones that can most effectively hold politicians and senior government officials accountable and bring about positive change.
A culture of opaqueness
From here, we see two issues. First, formal channels are, by design, intended to break up wider problems into smaller chunks that can be grouped as statistics but can also be selectively dismissed. We see how this works on the railways in relation to platform-train interface risk, which is the most significant on the network for passengers, has not improved unlike almost every other source of harm, and yet sees no dedicated team or funding pot at any meaningful scale to resolve it.
Second, formal channels provide a useful way for authorities to say they are doing something while giving cover for them doing nothing at all. It is inherent in these processes that they keep complaints hidden, separate and away from those who can hold industry leaders or politicians accountable – such as the media or unions.
This leads into another issue: regulatory capture. This is where bodies that are supposed to hold industry accountable are in fact protecting that industry from being held accountable, either intentionally or otherwise.
Hendy must go, and the organisations involved must issue firm and robust apologies, re-stating their commitment to a safety-first culture
At Euston, the railway regulator closed out an improvement notice (a formal request to make change happen to avoid a dangerous situation) following input from Network Rail, the public body that owns Britain’s railway infrastructure. Consequently, the ORR finds itself in a situation in which it will appear to have been ‘captured’ by industry should it transpire that little or nothing was done to meaningfully improve conditions at the regularly overcrowded station.
This has been compounded by Network Rail and the regulator refusing to publish any information about what changed to allow the improvement notice to be closed. The question has gained added significance in light of the passenger representative body London Travelwatch repeating the claims I originally made – describing the station as ‘dangerous’ in conditions of severe overcrowding – and the secretary of state publicly stepping in to force Network Rail to come up with a new plan to improve conditions.
Hence, we see a situation in which a regulator finds itself on the defensive, giving it a potential vested interest in playing down safety issues as it protects its reputation and its perceived independence. It doesn’t require malice or malpractice – it is simply a consequence of a culture of opaqueness. Had the process been fully transparent to start with, officials would not be so keen to jump to arrangements with the industry and industry would be held more rigorously to account.
A right to speak out
This gets to the last point, which is the most wide-ranging and damaging. Hendy’s knee-jerk and vindictive actions as chair of Network Rail displayed a reputation- first instinct at the top of the body responsible in large part for the safety of railway passengers and workers. This is in direct conflict with the claims of having a ‘safety first’ culture and very clearly is a threat to the safe operation of the railways.
Back in May, Starmer pointed out that the inability of public servants to speak out had resulted in ‘injustice after injustice – from Grenfell to Horizon, to Hillsborough and infected blood. The story is familiar: concerns raised but ignored, reports written but not acted on, victims and their families campaigning for years just to be heard.’
In the aftermath of the privatisation of Britain’s railways, there were a series of fatal derailments that called into question the safety culture of rail as a whole. It has taken two decades to rebuild trust with the public. Hendy’s intervention to push me out of my job for speaking candidly about the conditions at Euston has had a chilling effect on the safety culture of the railway industry. Why risk submitting a ‘close call’ if your job is at stake?
Yet Starmer is now protecting Hendy. For the damage to be reversed, Hendy must go, and the organisations involved must issue firm and robust apologies, re-stating their commitment to a safety-first culture.
There is an opportunity to be seized here: widen the remit of the public interest disclosure legislation to include protections for all public servants speaking about subjects on which they hold expertise, whether through prescribed channels or publicly. Only with the guarantee that they can speak openly will our public servants – engineers, doctors, planners, firefighters and more – be empowered to tell us how to build a better society.
