Interview
PRACTICE
Departure platform Network Rail is spending £40bn in the five years to 2019 on an ambitious plan to upgrade the UK’s rail infrastructure. Helen Hunter-Jones, Head of Group Risk at the organisation, explains how her team are building a risk platform to support the project BY ARTHUR PIPER
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hen Helen Hunter-Jones joined the UK’s train infrastructure business Network Rail in 2012, she thought she had said goodbye to central government. The company was a quasi-independent organisation charged with keeping the country’s trains running, and planning and implementing major upgrades to the national system. She left HMGCC, a small government agency, after 20 years’ service where she had, among other things, developed and managed its enterprise risk management (ERM) processes. But it was not to be. On 1st September 2014, the government brought Network Rail back under its wing in what many described as re-nationalisation. Hunter-Jones had been promoted to Head of Group Risk just two months earlier. She shrugs off the personal irony of the situation, but agrees that the change in the business’ status has thrown up some anomalies and opportunities. “Our key product is a fully functioning, fit-for-purpose railway infrastructure system,” she explains when I catch up with her at the company’s national office in Milton Keynes. “And our biggest pressure is our ability to get access to the network to actually repair it.” In some areas of the country, engineers have a window
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If good risk management is important now, it will be even more critical with perhaps twice as many trains running on the system
Enterprise Risk
