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Railtrack Chief Gerald Corbett did the decent thing and found everybody loved him – for a short while, anyway
On the evening of the Hatfield derailment Railtrack Chief Executive Gerald Corbett decided that if the accident was due to an infrastructure fault he would tender his resignation. When the next day a broken rail emerged as the likely cause the resignation was offered and Gerald mania broke out.
Support for Corbett to stay came from every quarter. At a political level Transport Minister Lord MacDonald said ‘I think the important thing as far as the implications are concerned is that the company maintains its leadership and its coherence at the executive level'. Informed Sources hinted that the Prime Minister's office also spoke to Railtrack during the day.
Formal statements came from the Association of Train Operating Companies, the Railway Forum and the Railway Industry Association. Stewart Frances, Chairman of the Rail Passengers Council said that Corbett's resignation would not help'. Several newspaper editorials called on Corbett to continue.
Only dogs didn't bark: Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who has an old Labour thing about bloated plutocrats in top hats and striped trousers, and Sir Alastair Morton of the Shadow Strategic Rail Authority who had spoken privately to Corbett the night before. Publicly, Morton said only that the resignation offer was the act of an ‘honourable man', but suggested on Newsnight that Corbett's fate could depend on the cause of the accident.
Were I a cynical old curmudgeon I might surmise that while everyone else got carried away at such a rare achnowledgement of responsibility, two wily old political birds like Prescott and Morton realised that if Railtrack was subsequently prosecuted by the Health & Safety Executive over Hatfield, it might not be too clever to have been seen supporting the man in the tumbrill.
But apart from support for a good man still struggling with the steepest of learning curves, realpolitik also decreed that Gerald had to stay. Railtrack has an invisible Chairman and an incredibly weak Board. So there was no heir apparent and even if an external manager of stature could be persuaded to take the job, he or she would have to go through the same learning process that Corbett started three years ago.
And, at a late night meeting on October 18 the Board decided ‘unanimously' not to except the resignation offer. It argued that Corbett is ‘the person best qualified to lead the company in the search for all root causes of the disaster and the responses. Rail quality improvement has been led vigorously by Mr Corbett and that effort must be followed through by the company'.
Corbett's resignation offer
I am personally distraught that another tragedy has occurred on our railways . The families of the bereaved are foremost in my mind. As a matter of principle as Chief Executive if Railtrack I have of course tendered my resignation to the board.
Gerald Corbett 18 October 2000 |
A harsher judgment came on 19 October when David Davies, Chairman of the influential House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said that if poor maintenance proved to be the cause of the accident the whole Railtrack board should resign. When asked how this squared with the wide support for Corbett, Davies said that it ‘would set an example' for Company directors responsible for safety by showing that if someone were killed they would at least lose their job.
By which time Corbett, running on adrenaline, had turned into a NORF, declaring that the structure of the privatised railway was a shambles needing radical change. This went down badly with Government and the SSRA. Then came what train operators saw as a gross mishandling of (not to say over reaction to) the Head Checking crisis, followed by a series of gaffes and Gerald was back to being a villain again. Of which, no doubt, more next month.