Interview: from defence to rail
We spoke with the Department for Transport’s Fiona White OBE, learning about her surprising journey into rail and her industry experiences to date.
Fiona White OBEDirector Markets North Rail Passenger Services Department for Transport
How did your career start?
I would say, probably like many civil servants, that I became a civil servant a bit by accident. Originally, I literally wanted to buy clothes and shoes for a living, so I applied for Marks & Spencer’s graduate programme, but they turned me down at the final hurdle. So, I applied for the Civil Service graduate programme because I wanted to join the Foreign Office instead.
Working as a civil servant has been very interesting, but it also has a public sector ethos, which really chimes with me. It’s a bit of a simplification, but in a private sector company, there’s profit and loss and. ultimately, your shareholders decide to do something because it will make the company money. That’s not the calculation for government. In the civil service, we deal with an awful lot of quite tricky things, and the issues that can be hard to solve.
What was your experience in the civil service before rail?
I have to say I was incredibly lucky. When I first joined the civil service, I joined the Ministry of Defence. My very first job was working alongside the Royal Navy. There’s no getting around it, I got to do some really cool things. I took MPs around naval establishments, and I spent a week with two MPs on a ship in the Caribbean doing anti-drug trade activities.
One day, the captain stopped the ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and called ‘hands to bathe’, so all non-essential personnel could bathe in the sea. I asked somebody why there were two blokes on rigid inflatable boats with guns. That was for shark patrol.
Another time I drove a tank. Since joining DfT I have driven a train on a test track, which is nearly as cool as driving a tank.
I spent a very long time around the defence and security sector, and then international development and foreign affairs. I got very involved in working in conflict zones, working on crisis management. These were the types of things I loved, but I reached a point in my career where I was ready for something different.
Why rail?
I was looking at other opportunities around government, and people spoke very highly of transport. The idea of working in the Cabinet Office was not for me. I have to be working on issues that are connected to a part of reality, and transport is very connected to reality, to things that people do every day. So, I applied for a relatively senior position, knowing I had lots and lots of government background but no rail background. That was about six years ago, and I’ve stayed ever since.
I’ve found that in rail there are lots of very, very passionate people who really know their stuff and really care about what they do. That’s when you see a lot of the very best of people. In rail, people massively, massively know their subjects, and they were very kind with their time, helping to explain issues when I didn’t understand them at first.
What was your experience in rail in the early days?
My early weeks were working in passenger services. I was working with quite a technical team who looked after rolling stock, train service, and specification type issues. It was less a learning curve, more like a climbing wall. The issues are difficult, and difficult to solve, but they matter. And quite quickly, I became really enthused.
What has been the impact of Covid on rail?
The post-Covid environment is obviously a very challenging time for rail. In my role in passenger services, I look after our commercial relationship with seven of the 14 train operators. The sector is trying to work out how to recover in a post-Covid world, and DfT’s relationship with the operators has had to change too. During Covid-19, the government was supporting train operators. The purpose of all that money is providing infrastructure and trains to move people around.
I know the trains run more on time with fewer trains and passengers, but without the passengers, it can’t be right to spend quite so much money on rail.
Post-Covid, the reality is that, for good reasons, the cost and revenue risks still sit with the government. It’s been a massive adjustment for everybody involved. The change around community behaviours is an acceleration of things that are already happening but a real shock to the system. Everything the industry thought it knew about elasticity of demand probably doesn’t quite hold true in the same way anymore.
Although there are lots of very clever people trying to model current and future demand, we're going to have to live through some of the changes before we can figure out what the new market looks like and how to respond. Some of the challenges are interesting because they are quite fundamental to the survival of the industry, but it’s also quite fundamental to provide the right product to passengers because otherwise we’re spending money providing the wrong products to the passenger.
What are you working on now?
I was promoted from the first job to my second job where I am now, in passenger services. I can only describe this as one of the most terrifying jobs I’ve ever done. Bear in mind that I used to work in war zones!
What have been some of the highlights of your career while working in rail?
I am particularly proud of helping solve the major network disruptions caused by the introduction of a new timetable in May 2018. It caused major disruption for passengers in the North of England and the South East. Because of my crisis management background, I was asked to lead the passenger services as part of the coordinated response.
This situation was clearly pretty awful for those who were involved, and pretty awful for the passengers on the receiving end of it. But I also saw people who were sometimes at loggerheads putting all of that aside, focusing on working together to try to fix the issues in front of them. It didn’t feel like people were pointing at the DfT or each other, but we were all working on the same side and for the same outcome.
I’d been in the rail sector for less than a year at that point, so it also cemented a lot of relationships for me. Positive work relationships were built under extreme pressure. I still deal with many of those people now, and I think the bond I have with them is different because of that experience.
I saw a lot the same things during rail’s response to Covid too.
Do you have any other career highlights?
I am also really proud of the work my team did to recast the train services around Manchester. Network Rail, DfT, Transport for the North, Transport for Greater Manchester, and the operators were all involved, but the work was independently led.
All parts of the sector, including DfT, took a step back away from their narrow organisational interests and asked, ‘What is the right system outcome for the right passenger outcome?’ A lot of hard work went into that thinking. Everybody had to come together and decide which trains were going to run and which trains weren’t. We were almost building the service pattern from scratch. It meant lots of compromises from all of rail’s stakeholders. No passenger likes losing their service, but we were really trying to focus on the evidence for the right passenger outcome.
We now believe there to have been a significant performance improvement and a very solid base from which to build in future. It's very satisfying to see that the team won a Railway Innovations Award in the Operations and Performance category as a result.
My other highlight has been doing ticket checks on a train for a day on a cross-country service. They let me, or they made me, I don’t know which. I like getting an insight into what rail involves, and doing ticket checks was really intimidating. I am full of respect for anyone who does that for a living.
In your work at DfT, are regional bodies important?
We certainly try to work with regional bodies because that’s the place where you can join things up across different means of transport. A central department is not necessarily the best place to do it. We have to rely on regional bodies to help us and help them join the pieces together.
There are some interfaces and overlaps [between DfT and regional bodies], but the reality is that it was Transport for West Midlands who did the transport planning for the Commonwealth Games. We talked to the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, and we helped support Transport for West Midlands, but there isn’t a great deal of point in me trying to come up with a transport plan for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Making sure you interfere in the right things is possibly the watch word of any civil service role.
What's next in your career?
I’ve never really done career planning. I’ve done things that I find interesting for as long as I find them interesting. I never want to be in a job past the point where I think I am no longer the right person for it, but I don’t know what I will do next. I may move to another transport-related role in government, move somewhere else in the rail sector, or do something completely different. It depends on what comes up when and what takes my fancy.
What are your skills?
I have battlefield casualty skills, but I hope I’ll never have to use them. I’ve also been trained to prod my way out of a minefield, although if I really was the only one left to poke us out of a minefield, we would probably have bigger problems to deal with.
Very early in my career, I was presented with lots of tricky things, so I had to work out how I found my way into the issues and how I could fix them. The key skills I use now are working with stakeholders and understanding and resolving difficult issues. How can I bring people together? How can I look at complex problems and break them down into something simpler? To achieve this, I need to motivate teams to want to come to work every day and do difficult things. That’s a very transferrable skill, whatever part of the civil service I work in.
I also definitely know how not to panic in a crisis, and sometimes that’s useful too.
What’s rail’s underappreciated strength?
I wonder whether the community-based work and outreach doesn’t get a national profile in the way that it should. ‘Railway works with X to deliver a localised programme’ is very much recognised on a local basis but doesn’t seem to make national headlines. I suspect most people would be surprised at what these localised programmes are and the benefits they deliver.
Would you encourage people to get involved with rail?
Yes, I would. But I think rail captivates the British public anyway. They love rail in a way they do not love buses, road or other forms of transport.
Rail has a vast array of skills, roles, and programmes you can get involved with. I’ve never worked on the front lines in delivery roles, so I don’t know what that feels like, but I’ve found it to be a really welcoming sector. I think that goes back to the fact that the sector is filled with lots of people who love the railway. There is always something compelling about working with people who love what they do quite so much.
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