Rail’s sustainability strategies: a real class act?
Promoting railway careers among school kids should be part of rail’s sustainability strategies because they’re the future, says Charlotte Bryett, Alstom UK&I’s Sustainability Manager.
Charlotte BryettUK&I’s Sustainability Manager, Alstom
Like many rail professionals, Charlotte Bryett, Sustainability Manager at Alstom UK&I, was inspired as a child by a family member’s railway career. Therefore, she speaks from both personal and professional experience when she says that the industry needs to promote pathways into rail careers among young people if it’s to achieve its sustainability vision.
What attracted you to the rail industry?
My interest in trains dates back to my childhood. My parents were expecting a baby boy. In anticipation for their new arrival, they decked out my room in ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’. Then, by the time I was two, my mum had got a job on the railway. She worked her way up to management-level roles. I spent lots of time on the network due to her career, up and down the West Coast Main Line, and in and out of London. I was even at Virgin Cross Country’s launch of Operation Princess in 2002. Mum inspired me.
Now, years later, you’re Sustainability Manager UK&I at Alstom. What does your role entail?
I’m responsible for Alstom’s sustainability strategy, which is based on the UK’s Social Value Model. It has four key areas that we deliver against across the country:
social inequality
equal opportunity
climate change
health and wellbeing.
Within those four areas, we run different programmes, such as educational or employability programmes, sustainable procurement, and volunteering.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on community impact, perhaps an under-recognised aspect of sustainability. It’s easy to just think biodiversity, isn’t it? I help ensure that the processes, procedures, and projects are in place to accelerate local development and support community initiatives. One of Alstom’s primary aims is to work with our neighbours to understand the unique need rather than giving them a standard sustainability solution.
It’s your third role in the sustainability division of a transport company, your first being with West Midlands Trains. What sparked your interest in sustainability?
Climate change is one of the biggest problems that our generation is going to face. Boosting rail use can reduce the country’s carbon impact. Getting people out of their cars and onto trains is tough, though, because our rail network doesn’t serve everybody. I want to be part of the industry’s collaborative effort to make rail the preferred and feasible mode of transportation.
You mentioned your involvement in Alstom’s community impact work. What does that look like in practice?
Alstom wants to be the change it wants to see in the world. We aim to accomplish this by empowering our teams to deliver within their communities, be that through fundraising, volunteering or offering services.
For instance, staff pool their volunteer days to focus on a community project. A current example is the partnership between our Central Rivers Depot and the Canal and River Trust. The depot has ‘adopted’ a section of a canal, and the team is using their volunteer days to maintain it.
Then there’s the work we do with our clients as part of our contracts. The contracts may include social, economic or environmental goals we must deliver against. A contract might be rolling stock refurbishment, for instance, but a specific employability programme could be agreed upon to improve the social and economic prospects of an area.
What examples from Alstom’s contracts with rail can our readers take inspiration from?
Yes: our train maintenance contract with Avanti West Coast, which covers the West Coast Main Line. It includes everything from emptying the train tanks at night to refurbishing its Pendolino fleet, a massive job that we’ve now almost completed. Colleagues who work on those aspects of the contract will ensure the work is aligned with both companies’ sustainability strategies. But there’s the other side to this contract that I want to draw attention to: community impact.
Alstom and Avanti are among the companies that support Primary Engineer, a fully funded programme that raises awareness of science, technology, engineering, and maths among school-age children. We send our engineers into schools, support competitions, and provide resource to support young people’s education and introduce them to careers in engineering. And that’s just a flavour of the kind of joined-up community impact work we can be involved in.
Why is it in rail companies’ interest to do community-oriented work?
The railway often isn’t seen as a viable career route. Programmes like Primary Engineer raise awareness of the opportunities available. Making GB rail more sustainable is a marathon, and promoting pathways into rail is a pivotal part of that journey. We’re going to have to pass on the baton. We need to focus on the next generation of young people to deliver our vision.
To do that, we must ask ourselves, how are we setting up our industry for future generations? How are we making sure that we won’t have an aging workforce? How do we ensure the wealth of rail knowledge isn’t lost, and we pass it on correctly? Working collaboratively with schools and feeding into educational, school leaver, and career changer routes are crucial.
Why did you become chair of the Rail Environment Forum?
Sustainability professionals in rail need a forum where they can strategise, collaborate, and share best practice and good examples from the industry and beyond. So often sustainability professionals can be a lone worker within an organisation, simply because sustainability implementation is still quite new. So, when the chair vacancy arose, I jumped at it.
I also wanted to inject a bit of fun into the Rail Environment Forum (REF), especially after lockdown. We went on our first ever field trip last year to London Victoria. We sought to learn from the station’s waste management initiatives that are reducing its environmental impact. Our second field trip is coming up.
What is the forum doing to support train and freight operators with sustainability?
The REF will be relaunched so that its strategy is more in line with the Sustainable Rail Blueprint (SRB), which RSSB worked with industry to develop. We’ll tell your readers more about the relaunch soon (watch this space).
But, as a teaser, one aspect of the SRB we want to lean into is ‘careers, economy, and sustainable growth’. It’s that sustainable growth piece I’ve been talking about—promoting and supporting railway careers including ‘green jobs’.
As Chair of the REF, you’re likely familiar with the tools RSSB has developed to support industry. Which should readers check out?
the Rail Social Value Tool, which industry can use to measure the social value of projects and day-to-day operations. It's also based on the UK's Social Value Model.
the Rail Carbon Tool, which helps industry to understand its carbon footprint.
