Industry Commercial

Rail’s private sector partners make a huge contribution to the railway. Our dialogue with rail’s client side and supply chain tells us that rail can be too slow, too siloed, and too prescriptive. This is why we are working together to find new, efficient, and customer-focused solutions to the challenges our railway faces.

Creating Great British Railways (GBR) will mark the end of decades of fragmentation. This new guiding mind will provide strategic direction, clear leadership and whole system thinking, opening up exciting new opportunities for collaboration and innovation. With the big gap in rail’s finances following the pandemic, we need to unlock the full breadth and depth of expertise in the private sector, alongside making it easier to bring about effective change.

What are we doing?

We’re designing a GBR that supports enabling the private sector’s innovation and commercial acumen for the best interests of rail’s customers and the communities it serves. Alongside this, we’re looking at the way the industry currently works and finding innovative solutions that we can start today which will make it easier to effect positive change.

At GBRTT, we are working with partners such as Network Rail, the Department for Transport, and the Department for Business and Trade to create a dialogue that can influence the future, as well as inspire change today.

Commercial Partnerships

Our work in this area aims to boost innovation, create efficiencies, and make it easier for the public and private sector to drive customer focused improvements. With partners from the supply chain, Network Rail, government departments, and industry representation groups we’re working to create a better system for both the client side and supply chain.

We’re doing so by creating dialogue through forums such as the Commercial Partnerships Sounding Board. Our work so far has influenced how GBR will work in the future, as well as encourage those working today to be simpler and better.

As part of our commitment to transparent conversations, we have shared the outputs from the Sounding Board in summary reports for each cohort:

• A summary of meetings with the first cohort
• A summary of meetings with the second cohort

Simpler, better industry processes

Right now, complex regulatory processes are getting in the way of colleagues from across Network Rail, operators, the Office of Rail and Road, and other partners. Current complexity makes it harder to improve the rail experience for customers, takes up valuable time from industry experts, and drives extra cost.

With our partners, we’re identifying opportunities ahead of legislation to cut through the complexity and create change today – with a view to trial these changes soon.

Learn more about our work in this area.

How our stations work

 Improving how partners across stations work together will support greater customer-focused interventions, help manage our assets even better, and enable stations to be better connected to the communities they serve. We’re working with Network Rail, Northern, c2c, and others to test how stations will work in the future.

We’re currently working with our partners to run a number of pilots – testing our improvements ahead of GBR.