South Eastern Railway – Track and Train reunited at last: Interview with Steve White

The government believe that by uniting track and train, that performance on the railway will improve and costs will come down, and that will lead to better outcomes for passengers and for taxpayers. But after 30 years of separation, reuniting track and train is gonna take a bit more than just a few sound bites. On the 18th of June, 2025, South Eastern Railway was created, uniting the former train operator, South Eastern, and the network rail region that covered the same area, all under the leadership of managing director Steve White. On the day of the announcement, Rail Minister Lord Handy said, uniting track and train leadership in the southeast is the first step in our journey to create a railway we can all be proud of, delivering the government's plan for change with better connectivity, leading to more growth, jobs and homes, and ultimately to the creation of great British railways. It's a pretty high level stuff, really. And so, with two months' experience of this new world under his belt, I met up with Steve White at Canon Street Station to hear how things were coming along where it really matters on the ground. Steve, thanks so much for joining us on Green Signals. Just give us a bit of a kind of context to you 'cause you've been involved in the railway for quite a while. I certainly have Richard. It's a pleasure to join you today. So my background is I left school at the age of 18 and I joined British Rail with their sponsored management scheme, which meant I did my initial training in Derby before going to university to train as an engineer and then coming back. And over the last 40 years, I've worked in the public sector with organisations like TFL and British Rail and I've worked in the private sector, companies like National Express and Go-Ahead and in the supply chain with Siemens. So my career has been all about railways, metro, mainline and high speed. But that's great, isn't it, 'cause you've seen it from so many different perspectives. You've seen people who spent time in the public and the private sector on an operational side but you've seen the supply chain as well. Does that give you a fairly unique insight, I imagine? I think we learn something from every job that we do. But working for Siemens was a very rewarding episode. Allow me to understand how the supply chain can engage with train operators and rolling stock companies and really deliver the best for our customers. Let's talk then about South Eastern, 'cause that's your patch now. And it's a big business. It's had sort of an interesting few years, though, hasn't it? This was such a strong commuter-based railway. Just explain a little bit about what the world was like, pre-the pandemic and what it's been like since. This railway, as you say, was really reliant on commuters, probably more so than any other train operator in the southeast. So it was buoyant, pre-pandemic. It had a really, really strong and entrenched commuter base and it was seeking to develop as a railway. But the quid quo is, we were on short contracts since 2014, looking to re-let the franchise, looking to make much needed investment, particularly in new rolling stock. And of course, that never happened. So we've gradually sought to rebuild this railway after the pandemic, but with a commuter-sized hole that needs to be filled with leisure and actually with increasing commuters. How big a hole is that, though, Steve? I mean, are you seeing now that the work from home, certainly on Mondays and Fridays, if you think it tends to be the model, has now become pretty much entrenched in the passenger figures you get for South Easton. Actually, no. It's a shifting position. So we are seeing more people trading from daily tickets to flexi seasons, which gives them two days of travel, typically, on average, every four weeks, up to weeklies and then to monthly. So actually, the number of season ticket holders is growing on our railway. But of course, it's nothing like pre-pandemic levels, particularly on a Monday morning and on a Friday morning, but it is growing. And we've also seen some really buoyant leisure activity. You know, we've had a wonderful summer and we can fill our trains that go to the Kent Coast, you know, on a regular basis. But presumably, volume is growing, but that yield. that yields the issue, isn't it, in terms of. because even if you fill the physical number of communities you've lost with leisure passengers, the yield particulates down. So the revenue gap's going to be harder to fill, isn't it? Well, at this moment in time, year on year, our revenue growth is about 10%. So we're up about 5% on journeys and the rest of that is made up through fares increases and also through yield. So what's proving to be really popular is the much enlarge range of advanced fares that we now offer. And the yield is going up across our business as people choose to make individual journeys as opposed to purchase season tickets, which have a much smaller yield per on a per-journey basis. So the good news is we're growing, growing in revenue. And our journeys in the last 12 months represent 140 million passenger journeys. And we are seeing a number of companies now asking their employees to come back to the office more frequently. And of course, that is supporting the revenue recovery of commuter train operators such as ourselves. And what about the high speed services? It's quite unusual train businesses. You've got, you know, sort of what I would call high density in as a bourbon commuting service. And then you've got this, you know, Britain's only domestic high speed service. What's the story there? How's that doing? Yeah, Southeast and really is a three-piece jigsaw. We've got our pay-as-you-go in a suburban metro operation where every train stops at every station. And, you know, that is really important to us serving the southeast of London. We've got our mainline services to and from the coast using our classic infrastructure into the likes of Victoria and to Charing Cross. And then we've got our high speed proposition where trains can go through our network at 140 miles an hour. So they have quite different propositions with different price points, different journey times and a different customer base. But they're all turn up and go railways. They're all run as an integrated railway with the, you know, the economic benefits and the synergies that come with that. But they are a different proposition. High speed is incredibly popular. And now bursting at the edges for capacity. We need to find a way of injecting capacity into that railway. Oh, excellent. Well, we'll come on to capacity and due course. It's interesting, something you said there about the turn up and go, you know, it's a turn up and go railway. Suppose one of the challenges of advanced fares, as you sort of move towards advanced fares, is actually, is slightly less turn up and go. It's more, you know, booking in advance. Do you see on South Eastern? Yeah, advance will may grow, but you will still fundamentally at heart remain a turn up and go railway. I think turn up and go really does have its place. They're offering greatest value for money, for customers who are particularly price conscious and have more flexibility on choosing the time they travel. So I genuinely think there is the opportunity to, to grow advanced fares more. We also intend to remain a turn up and go railway for the foreseeable future. But the pinch point for us that we will see first is on our high speed. You know, those trains were originally designed with a reservation system that's actually never been used. And we might reach the point where reservations on high speed would actually be a net beneficial to protect our customers. That's some way off, but we need to find either ways of injecting more capacity or controlling the level of crowding we see on particular services. Let's just explore that a little bit more in the way since we're on that. There's a lot of debate at the moment about the use of HS1 as a piece of infrastructure. I think a general view that more could be done to use the capacity better. There's lots of people vying for potentially getting on the network, issues around temple mills, I know. And that's an ongoing process. But are you not concerned? You might find that the get link of sort of sold all the capacity for channel tunnel services, cross channel service, leaving a limited amount of capacity to be able to grow your domestic services? So on high speed one, we are confident working with London St. Pancras High Speed that there is enough capacity for both international and domestic travel. What we want to do though is ensure that the domestic proportion of travel on high speed one really does support the economy in the south east. In order to do that we're going to need to look at expanding our high speed fleet. And we're also going to need to look at the incremental charges for running additional services on the network. Because frankly we want to run a bigger timetable with more trains to support the domestic growth market as well as the international. I mean we may be coming back to rolling stock a little bit later, but I wanted just to pick up on something that's very obvious from the badge you're wearing. So it says managing direct. to South Eastern Railway, but of course there's a South Eastern logo and a network rail logo which tells us something very important. But actually before we get to that, you've actually been running South Eastern with network rail in a kind of form of alliance anyway, haven't you for some time? We have, it's been a journey of development, you know. We talked about integration, being a bit like couch to 5k, first you walk, then you jog and then you run. So after the railways act of 1993, substantially the relationship between Toxon Roots was a contractual one. Under the era of John Howsall we moved increasingly into partnership working where we'd worked to try and put passengers first and leave the contract in the drawer wherever we could. Under the stewardship of Elie Boros as regional managing director for the Southern, we took things forward and we created an alliance in October 23, which was a virtually integrated team with dotted reporting lines that focused on better managing the interfaces between the route and the top. But what happened on the 9th of June this year was something of a game changer. We created a single integrated leadership team, managing the whole business not just the interfaces and we put together logical groupings of colleagues so drivers and signers in the same team, time-tabling and access planning in the same department, fleet and infrastructure sitting side by side in the same function. So we are joining our railway together now, top down through an integrated leadership team and also bottom up through things like the local railway initiative that we've applied to our haze line. I mean it sounds terrific and I don't sound at all skeptical, I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. But you started in British Rail. I'm of a similar area although I started in London transport. But actually we're in a minority. Most managers can't remember anything other than a network rail world and a top world. How are you going to deal with that all important question of almost culture and mindset and and and it explains people the world's changed? Yeah well we talk about joining our railway together organizationally, culturally and digitally. So if I take each of those in turn, organizationally as I say, putting the major stations with the rest of the stations in the same department, you know, it's just a really sensible and logical thing to do. And our team are reacting really positively to this organizational change and we will find more examples of that as we look to the future. But we also want to join together culturally and that means we have to respect the ways of working that network rail and south east and have and then seek to develop the best of those in our integrated teams. So Andrew Haines led the programme of putting passengers first within network rail. But it's the train companies that have the insight to truly allow us to put passengers first to understand their needs, to understand where they're travelling, to understand what they are happiest with and what they want to see done differently. So as we bring our organizations together, we are very respectful of our heritage, very respectful of our individual cultures, but seeking to build a better railway together as a joined up integrated team. And we want to come together digitally. Data is completely agnostic as to how it's used. We're going to put together all of the data from our rolling stock, all of the data from our fixed assets and then analyse that to help us understand trends in asset reliability and solutions that we can find. We're going large on train-borne data to help passenger trains spot infrastructure problems before they affect customers. So all together, if we change ourselves organisationally, culturally and digitally, we're on the road to becoming an integrated railway. Just on that cultural point though, I absolutely understand about respecting where people are coming from, because unless you understand that, you don't really understand what makes people think and act the way they do. But presumably also, the comes-of-point way, you have to go, "I very much respect where you come from, but unfortunately we're not going to do it that way anymore, we're going to do it this way instead." So it's a little bit of both maybe? Yeah, honestly the appetite for change is absolutely enormous. So one of our colleagues, Daisy, is responsible for our revenue forecasting. And she told me recently that she'd told a meeting with network rail managers to explain the revenue that South Eastern was generating on a line of root basis by day of the week by ticket types. And she said she'd never presented to a more curious, a more engaged or more interested audience. And I see that on a daily basis. The curiosity that colleagues have to understand one and others business to learn and improve it together. A genuine dissatisfaction with the status quo, we all know we could do better. I am very optimistic, this is a fuel for change. When I was at London Underground, I ran a vertically integrated railway. I looked after the subsurface railway. I am even more optimistic that the integrated team I have at South Eastern will be able to go further and faster because for them the curiosity of something new, the curiosity of for the first time in 30 years truly having a whole system's perspective is tangible. And I think that will give us even greater momentum. Our people are the greatest strength of this business. There are now 6,740 people in the south-eastern integrated railway. And we have 500 people taking apprenticeships. We have massive agenda for social mobility. We have people that show their humanity every day of the week through the care that they give to our customers and to the community. And they are embracing the opportunity to be part of something that's joined up. I think there's a genuine belief that an integrated railway is a safer railway. An integrated railway is just a better way to work. An integrated railway is just going to overcome some of the challenges and frustrations they've had in recent years. One of the challenges though and an awful lot of people are concerned about this. This isn't just me saying it. Is the relationship with the Department of Transport. And the fact that for understandable reasons, certainly since COVID, there's been very close control if you like oversight because it concerns around the money. And a real fear that in this brave new world that you've just described, it only works if you and your team are genuinely empowered to deliver. How confident are you that that's going to be the case? I'm very confident and I'm very confident because I can see the pendulum shifted. So for example, from April 20th to 25 onwards, we're now being measured against subsidy, not cost. That's a game changer. We've been asking for that for a number of years. It's now in place and it's now changing the way we think about and manage our business. I'm confident because we've been given a simplified service agreement with less prescriptive deliverables and more headroom. I'm confident because it's been announced that around 300 people in the DFT are going to transfer to DFTO by the end of March this year. I'm confident because I'm being offered the opportunity to build a business plan over the next three years, not an annual business plan, but a three year business plan that gives us the chance to take longer term view about what is the right thing to do for our railway. So the pendulum is shifting. You are quite right. The most precious commodity we have at the moment is management bandwidth to deal with all the issues we want to address. We want to talk to the department about the bigger topics. I will go to as many committees or meetings as necessary if it results in us buying new rolling stock for our Metro. So we want to reserve our governance for fewer bigger issues, allowing the railway to make the other decisions using their own judgement and being held accountable for the delivery of the results that the department are looking for. I'm going to push you a little bit further if I can see because you're the standard bearer. South Eastern and South Western as well, but you're in the lead on this. You say that your confident things are changing. Give us some examples of things that maybe a year ago you'd have asked permission to be able to do, but actually now, as managing director of South Eastern Railway, you feel confident that you're empowered and accountable to just get on and do it. Well, let's use the timetable as a great example. Previously we would have needed permission to turn an empty stock train into a passenger train for the benefit of our customers at no net additional cost. I mean that's not a good use of any ballies time to have that dialogue. What I'm looking at now, I'm looking at a summer plan that's running a lot of additional services to the coast. A contingency plan in case the extreme summer records. as to make temporary adjustments, but an autumn plan which is unrecognizable from last year. Last year we tried to run the full-time table where every station stop and we saw a 14% drop in punctuality. We had a discussion with the department this year on the big principle that said a 14% drop in punctuality in the autumn is not allowing customers to plan journeys with confidence, make the connections or the appointments that they need to. So we've been given permission to do a very different timetable this autumn for a nine-week period which we are confident will improve punctuality for our customers. 12 months ago that wasn't possible. And you're confident with that that those things always require some tweaking to get them right, the nature of it, those are decisions you can take internally inside South East. That's exactly right. So we want 2025 to be better than 2024. We want August to be better than July. We want CP7 to be better than CP6. In order to do that we need to generate the momentum of continuous improvement with the occasional injection of a step change such as the procurement of new rolling stock. And we have that momentum now. We are able to do more within our own control than we've ever been able to do during my tenure as the managing director at South East. That's really positive. Just talk about some of the big challenges facing you though. Big issue at the moment. It hasn't rained for what feels like years. Soil moisture deficit is a real thing. We've got issues with all sorts of other infrastructure issues. You've got some rolling structures as well. What's the top of your get up in the morning and worry about list in this new role where you're responsible for operations and infrastructure? The railway we have today is the product of two competing railway companies in the 19th century. They did their utmost to put one another out of business. They often built railways on the cheap without sufficient clearance in some of our tunnels. They understood very little about climate change and accessibility. So they built up the railway we have today but we have so many challenges to address. So for example, in what the hottest summers on record, we know that parts of our railway are starting to change the foundations. And I'm likely to need to impose speed restrictions within the next two weeks unless we get some rain that saves that from being necessary. We know in the garden of England we've got six million trees adjacent to our railway, some of which are dying and need to be removed. It's a huge challenge not only in the autumn but actually all year round. We know our asset base is tremendously diverse. We've got 1100 miles of track. We've got 1500 point ends. We've got 5,000 signal-in assets and we've got 1,600 different vehicles. And we don't have a homogenous high performing asset base which supports a homogenous, simplified high performing railway. So our challenges are to address the asset base that we have to make it increasingly standardised and reliable to access the foundations for a high performing railway. Do you think that by integrating operations and infrastructure in the way that's now going to happen? Just take one example. Things like vegetation control, right? Which if you just look at it from a network rail perspective, you'll see one series of issues. If you look it from an operator's perspective is a whole separate thing. And I think most railway people would agree actually inside the boundary fence. The property shouldn't be anything there at all. Is that something that you can do differently now because you're integrated? It is. So we are teaching ourselves how to do whole systems thinking. Look at the railway as a whole, understand the risk as a whole, understand what we can do to keep trains safely moving. So for example if a tree does come down on the railway, we now give our drivers a six point check where if we've got power and brakes and nothing hanging down, once that tree is removed we can proceed without waiting for a fitter to arrive from a depot to check the train out. So we're learning to both mitigate the incidents in the first place and reduce their impact when they happen. And all of that comes through looking at the railway as a system and through the lens of our customers. So one of the challenges you do have is you're almost universally third rail. And over the years it's become something, it's become bit of a story really, you know, that people don't like it for lots of reasons. And yet operation is very little you can do about it, you've got it. Are there any different, are there any things you can do now again with this new sort of new approach to deal with the fact you have got such an extensive third rail network? There definitely are things that we can do. So we have got over a thousand miles of third rail cabling. Some oil fill cables dating back to the 1960s. We regularly lose power in an individual section. For example, if a lug burns off leaving the railway without supply. So there are a number of things we're doing. We're fitting thermal imaging cameras to both metro and mainline trains, to spot overheating assets typically on the power supply, like contactors or hooks, which is all all power lugs. And that's allowing us to spot problems and address them before they affect customers. We're also of the opinion that a new fleet of metro trains should be fitted with batteries. Batchers will allow us to proceed at portions if there is a trespasser on the tracks. Key locations we may remove third rail from a particular station to ensure that anybody that does go trackside is not at risk of electrocution. If we took out third rail from our yards and sidings, it would make those locations safer and cheaper to maintain. So we believe that in time, the rolling stock replacement agenda on the south-eastern railway will help mitigate the inherent risks of third rail power supply that we live with today. So we're going to make sure the train that we buy for this railway is the right way for the system, not just the right way for the operator. It's a fascinating thing that Steve, because elsewhere on the rail network, a lot of people try and I think sometimes use batteries as a reason for not electrifying at all. You're actually talking about it as a way of ensuring the system keeps operating, notwithstanding the fact you've got third rail. Exactly. And some parts of our network are inherently more difficult to maintain. If you've got a tunnel that's 175 years old and that tunnel lets in water on a regular basis, then maintaining the track and the power supply within a wet tunnel is expensive and time consuming and inherently unreliable. So it may make perfect sense to use batteries to take trains through tunnels and to remove power supplies from particularly hostile environments such as a wet tunnel. And then there's a benefit for the taxpayer for doing that. No downside for the customer is just a better way to run a railway in the 21st century. So that leads us beautifully onto new rolling stock. You've got a lot of rolling stock on this operation. Some of it is actually getting, you know, it's well advanced in years. Let's put it that way. It's done really well, but it's getting well-events. You've done some refurbishment, but the big thing isn't it? Is new trains? How's that process going? Yeah, we're out of procurement now for new or modern cascade at rolling stock. And we think that's again change for our metro area. I say we want to boldly go where other operators have already gone. To be candid, we want to do what greater anglia have done. Their rolling stock replacement strategy has been a textbook example of how to transform the fortunes of a railway, you know, through rolling stock investment. And that's exactly what we want to do. New Metro Fleet offers more capacity, better accessibility, better year-round performance, air conditioning, and will reduce the subsidy for the taxpayer. So that's the most important business case we will write. And the procurement process is live. We expect to be in a position to build the final business case and seek permission from the Treasury and the Department next year. And that's what I do accept. Government's got a really strong and legitimate role in there. But funding is a real challenge at the moment. We had actually, I think, quite a tough spending review settlement for the railway. The number of capital projects at a fund that is quite limited, the department's down there and, you know, departmental expenditure limit is coming down in real terms. Are you confident that there's going to be sufficient funds to be able to get you the new trains you'd like to see? Yeah, working on a subsidy basis, the challenge that we have is to build a business case which is the lowest subsidy requirement in the three-year spending review and also the lowest subsidy requirement over a 35-year period and that's the challenge that we've embraced and that's what we want to present to the department and the Treasury. Of which and your preferred rolling stock solution will be a fully integrated part of that so it's netted off in that bottom. Absolutely, you did say though new stock or cascaded stock that'll have a few people going oh heck does that mean we're going to get somebody else's castoffs? Yeah modern cascaded stock with air conditioning and driver controlled operation you know would be a step change from where we are today so we're looking at all of the options to ensure that we've given the treasury the suite of permutations that are available to them and selected the best option. Okay so I mean I completely understand the caution in the care I mean obviously in the end of the day you've got to get something because what you've currently got is going to run out of its life at some point isn't it? It is the challenge with rolling stock like the network is as you look in it 1980s electronics and technology you know that you're trying to keep a live 40 years later. Actually the previous generation of rolling stock which was fundamentally simpler was easier to keep going for longer but 80s and 90s software and control technology is ferociously difficult to maintain and to replace through obsolescence so there will be a point in time where the networkers do need to sadly end the contribution they've made to our our way and they won't owe anybody anything will they have actually been a very successful trade. Yeah they have they they've done a great job for us but our customers now want level board in they want a conditioning we need more capacity and we want higher performance you know the difference between for example the 707 city beams that now operate on our railway versus the network you know really is night and day so doing what great your anglia have done investing in new rolling stock should be transformational for the south-eastern Metro and is level boarding an achievable vision because with multiple different platform heights presumably you can do a lot more but you probably can't do it all or is that is that too much? We've always been ambitious to do as much as we possibly can. So last period we delivered a record of 20,000 assists in a four-week period the vast majority of those were turn up and go so the demand for accessible travel is rising rapidly and it's something we need to meet. We're confident that if we buy a new train with the floor at the right height we can make a step change if you're part of the expression to unassisted boarded. We are surveying every single platform on every single metro station across the entire length to understand what that sweet spot will be but it will probably not be achievable to get level boarding everywhere without infrastructure changes as well as rolling stock changes but in our integrated railway we will have the data to address this issue we will buy the train which is most able to address this issue and we will examine the residual challenges that remain but we expect this rolling stock investment to be the best train to make the most impact on the railway that we've inherited. So you're going to do a three-year business plan so let's now project ourselves three years out. What for you as MD of this huge integrated rail operation? What will success look like? What will you go? You look back and go yeah we did those things what would they be? So we've always said that integration really is being done for three groups of stakeholders for our customers, for our colleagues and for the taxpayer. So what I'd like to see three years from now is a railway where our customers would see a more punctual railway with fewer cancellations and higher customer satisfaction. Our ambition which is not a funded plan but it's our ambition is 90% customer satisfaction, 90% time to three and fewer than 2% cancellations. For our colleagues I'd like them to feel that working in an integrated railway just makes sense and they're able to have spontaneous conversations you know with people in network rail or people from South Eastern just to make the railway better. We ask our colleagues to go and find their new best friend somebody they don't currently know. Somebody that's going to help them solve the problems that they're facing today or build the better railway of tomorrow. And I'd like to see the railway consuming less taxpayer subsidy. This year we will take 50 million pounds less subsidy than last year but we need to find other ways of growing our revenue and controlling our costs so that our subsidy continues to fall. Our ambition is to halve the subsidy we take from the taxpayer over the next three years. So that's our plan and that's what we'll aim to build our business case around. So 90, 90 sub two just to sort of those three things. In your view is that I knew you said it wasn't funded per se but do you think that is genuinely achievable? I don't know how close we're going to get there Richard but what I do know is if we don't try we won't get there. So it's an ambition. I like setting high ambitions it allows us to explore the art that possible. We're going to get as close to that as we possibly can within the funding envelope that's been provided to us. And I am excited about the range of opportunities that we are finding. They actually don't cost a lot of money to implement. They just need a different approach or a different mindset or a different prioritisation of the funds we already have. So 90, 92 is the target we're going for. From a positivity point of view that's absolutely terrific Steve. We wish you all the best with everything that you're about to. You are in the lead on this very much so. So hopefully you know where you go others will follow the one thing where you do you do set the pace and we wish you all the very best. Thank you. We're really hoping that GBR will be a devolved organisation made up of local business units that are customer centric and really able to deliver for passengers in a way that we haven't always been able to do recently. Success for me in the short term looks at three integrated railways, South Western with Lawrence and Anglia with Jamie and we'll see what they are of the possibilities and then we'll hopefully create a playbook that others can use but the success will be those local business units, those integrated business units working hard every day for passengers and freight. Well Steve I couldn't agree more with that as a summary. Thank you for your time and all the best. Steve White, thank you. Thank you. [Music]