I have three roles. I head up the Transcend programme partner joint venture, which provides the programme management support to Crossrail as part of the project’s integrated team. There are more than 100 people from CH2M Hill, Aecom and Nichols Group working together. I also head the innovation programme on Crossrail: it is the first time that a major programme of this type has been set up with a systematic approach to innovation. For the third part, the clue is in the title: I pick up strategic projects, where complex interfaces occur, or there isn’t a standard solution. For the past three years the focus has been on the tunnels, and now it’s the depots, which are not conventional. Inevitably they are on confined sites, with difficult ground conditions. I suppose ‘troubleshooter’ is a good way of describing my role. At Plumstead in south-east London, which is the temporary works site for rail installation, they realised that it was the ideal place to be a depot for the maintenance trains. So we had to do all the work to prepare it for that role. We had to realign sewers, and came up against property boundaries, and there has been some relocation of points. So it’s a complex site.
The project has gone relatively smoothly. On all big projects there are problems but a vast amount of the activity going on is going according to plan. We are on time and on budget, which was the big challenge a year ago. That has been achieved by a lot of hard work, a lot of discipline, and a lot of good engineering and programme management. One of the challenges now is to effect the transition from a tunnelling to a rail systems and station fit-out project. That involves a different set of skills and techniques. Signalling is a challenge: and then it’s getting all the stuff to work as a system on the day that we press the button.
Are the civil engineering challenges presented by the project unprecedented?
You should never assume tunnelling is going to be straightforward. We have taken tunnelling to new levels on Crossrail. Every big project takes the tunnelling profession another step forward. The Jubilee line London Underground extension was much smaller. The sheer scale of this brings a certain differentiation. And it is arguably the first digital railway, which sets it apart too. It marks a step change in building information modelling. Bombardier’s trains will have remote condition monitoring and the capacity to monitor assets as they pass. The stations will have their own building management systems.
What would have been the implications for London had the Crossrail bill not received royal assent, giving the go-ahead for construction?
If Crossrail hadn’t achieved royal assent, the experience you have now at rush hour would be replicated at 11am in four or five years’ time. I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to shoehorn people on to those lines if Crossrail were not coming along. It will bring a 10% increase in rail capacity in London. When you look at Transport for London’s predictions for the number of people that will be travelling, that’s not enough alone to meet the demand. If this and other big projects don’t go through, London will just choke. It would be so difficult to travel around London that people would start going elsewhere. That would be the worst outcome of all. Crossrail really is a new heart and lungs for London in terms of the combination of capacity and speed at which it will move people through the city. It will be a quantum step forward – and a better passenger experience.
You’ve also worked on the High-Speed 2 Efficiency Challenge Programme. Do you think arguments about how the project may benefit cities in the North are valid? How big are the engineering challenges?
From all the analysis that has been done, I can only conclude that HS2 is essential for the long-term economic prosperity of this country. We have a real opportunity for UK plc here. We have some very complex tunnelling conditions, which are made all the more complicated because they will take place in some very densely populated areas. The tunnelling length on HS2 will be longer than on Crossrail. There are some really interesting tunnelling tasks.
You’ve been involved in disaster relief. How do think this might evolve in the future?
The first time I was involved in disaster relief was 30 years ago; then the default setting was to send experts out to help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Now we’re in a very different approach due to global warming, and regional resilience is increasing – it is not just the West supplying aid. There are also more disasters taking place in the developed world, such as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. There is a changing demographic as prosperity improves and economies develop. It is interesting to watch the way that charities like Red R work: they are more focused on training people to cope, and the expertise they can provide is about assistance and training as much as it is about sending engineers out to do wizardry in the face of a disaster.
Fast response: The military can put lots of boots on the ground but there are some development roles that are best left to charities
Does the new era of asymmetric warfare dictate that the military’s humanitarian efforts are more important than ever?
The military will continue to have a response capacity that is almost unrivalled because of the logistic, strategic and tactical muscles it possesses. Nobody else has the airlift and the sealift to get people into place. But they can be a bit clumsy, and if there are political sensitivities, there are places they can’t go. There will always be a need for charities and state aid to complement the military. There are places the military can’t go where charitable organisations can go – albeit at risk.
What should the military’s role be in terms of development work in a war zone?
The ‘hearts and minds’ effect of building assets and providing support that helps a local populace makes good military sense, as well as being good for the country. Road construction in Afghanistan was a social and military tool that brought economic benefits. Towns that are cut off are at the mercy of insurgents. Build a road and you start connecting those towns to markets and to the rest of civilisation. You can provide a game-changing capacity. The danger is that you spend a lot of money on glory projects, where you build great new structures that the local population don’t want. And you don’t want to end up with a dependency culture where people don’t recover psychologically and have no sense of ownership of the assets that they have been given. In Basra, we started off making repairs to the water system but very quickly discovered who the local engineers were. They needed us to provide equipment and materials, so we did that. Eventually the only real obstacle became that they couldn’t get out of Iraq to buy equipment so we became their procurement arm. That’s a healthier approach than bringing in a big construction company and doing it for them.
Why did you decide to move into commercial engineering work after so much time in the army?
I found the move relatively straightforward. Being a practising engineer in the military I had been working on engineering projects, I had been contracting, and I had run procurement teams. In terms of understanding the language and the behaviours, that was pretty straightforward. Getting used to very big projects like I’m working on now has been part of the fun, and a challenge. But it wasn’t an earth-shattering shock moving from one to the other. There is quite a lot of interplay between the civilian and military worlds, so it hasn’t fazed me that much. When leaving the army, you have to accept that you are changing from one culture to another. You can’t turn up and expect it to be just like the army – otherwise you will come unstuck. There are things that work really well in the army and you think they would be good in the civilian world too. But we can bring some of those behaviours with us – and there are some that are already there. Equally, the military could benefit from some of the practices in the commercial arena. There’s an exchange going on.