Interim Project Teams delivering Value through Transformation

The labour government’s rail reform plans are transforming the industry and GB Rail are now the new body bringing together infrastructure and operations in the biggest shake-up of the sector since privatisation in the railways Act of 1993 under John Major’s government.

Lord partner with public sector and regulated companies. In this post, we explore the strategies for effective Interim project delivery, providing actionable insights.

Supporting the Private to Public transfer of Rail ownership

The government were elected with a manifesto commitment to bring the railways back into public ownership as franchise agreements with existing private sector operators expired. The newly created Great British Railways is now the publicly owned body designed to unify track infrastructure and many passenger rail services across England, Wales and Scotland.

Franchised Train Operator (TOC’s) transition to Public ownership

Prior to the 2024 act, the DfT operating division (DfTO) was already running a quarter of train journeys on the franchises it controlled, including Northern Rail, LNER, TransPennine and Southeastern, and since the act South Western Rail, C2C, Greater Anglia, West Midlands Trains, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and Chiltern Railways have transitioned into public ownership on a phased basis.

The government now expects all DfT contracted train operators to be in the public sector by October 2027, with Great Western Railway (GWR) and East Midlands Railway expected to transfer in December 2026, Avanti West Coast in March 2027 and CrossCountry in the autumn of 2027.

Heidi Alexander (Secretary of State for Transport) has sought to ensure that the DfTO is key to ensure that Great British Railway “doesn’t end up as an umbrella of 16 separate organisations, each with their own incentives, back-office systems and structures, but instead become one integrated team, relentlessly focused on the passenger”.

Case Study: Project Interim teams support the transition to Public Ownership

As part of this transition to public ownership, several train operating companies (TOC’s) were separated from their original franchise owners, and the various functional team’s capacity was significantly reduced, as previously partially reliant on their parent groups central support teams.

Losing access to greater bandwidth and experienced colleagues at a time of significant change and transformation of the operating model was challenging, however manageable with the rapid introduction of experienced public sector Interim specialists and project management teams to support the transition.

To manage the mobilisation an experienced Interim team were recruited to support the transfer of ownership. The assembled team had a range of different skillsets from analytics to public sector transformation & project management leadership, all designed to support the leadership teams through the process with fixed and demanding delivery dates.

The successful project team delivered a blueprint for future TOC’s mobilisation based on shared learning and knowledge transfer. As the Interim team left the project, the teams were also supported in recruiting new staff for permanent roles in the newly designed organisation structure.

We will be looking at the way government manages the final stages of the program and providing Insight on best practice in future articles following the appointment of Andy Burnham.

Lord Interim works with clients, delivering project teams, subject matter and fractional Interim expertise.

To find out more about Lord’s range of Interim management support, call Tony Goldsby; London Office on 020 7692 8968 or Birmingham Office on 0121 445 7900 – or email tgoldsby@lord.co.uk