Mark Phillips
Chief Executive, RSSB
Rail reform is an act of ambition. After decades of growth—1.7 billion journeys last year, up from 800 million in 1996—the industry is restructuring to build a railway that works better for passengers, freight, and the public who fund it. Great British Railways represents a generational opportunity to align accountability, integrate track and train, and create the single guiding mind the network has long needed. At RSSB, we are committed to making that opportunity count.
Earlier reviews were candid about fragmentation: no single organisation held a view of the whole. That diagnosis is in many ways RSSB’s origin story. The case for an independent, whole-system body—one that neither GBR nor ORR nor DfT can replicate without a conflict of interest—becomes more compelling as integration advances, not less.
But independence is only meaningful if it is earned. And earning it means being honest about where we have fallen short.
Meaningful independence
Our standards process has been too slow and too burdensome. Research has been produced without being adopted. Safety reporting has sometimes looked backward when it needed to look forward. Engagement has reached governance layers when it needed to reach operational and engineering teams. Some of this is on us—and we are fixing it. The Industry Leadership Group, the Value Management Office, and a sharper focus on outcomes rather than outputs are not just structural changes. They are signals that we have listened.
Reform raises the stakes. It does not reduce them. An integrated railway needs common standards—and those standards need to pass a simple test: do they keep people safe, reduce net cost to the taxpayer, speed the delivery of improvements, and enable innovation? Where a standard acts as a barrier rather than an enabler, we have a duty to say so.
RSSB purpose
RSSB’s purpose is to help our members keep Britain moving with safer, smarter rail. Our goal by 2030 is that every railway employee in Britain uses an RSSB tool, standard, or service as part of their daily working life. We will be measured against three things: the value we deliver, the pace at which we deliver it, and the adoption of our work across the industry.
GBR will lead the railway. RSSB’s role is to give it—and the wider industry—the honest, independent picture it needs to lead well.
The journeys are the point. The structures are the means. That is the railway we are building for.