Mark Phillips
Chief Executive, RSSB
As Britain’s railways prepare for transformation under Great British Railways, standards will either unlock cost savings and competition—or become the bureaucratic anchor that develop a drag on reform. The evidence is clear: get standards right, and you open opportunity to new suppliers, faster procurement, and lower-cost solutions. Get them wrong, and you risk pricing innovation out of reach.
The real culprit isn’t gold-plating standards requirements—it’s gold-plating by application. When standards are poorly interpreted, they morph from essential frameworks into specification straitjackets.
Small and medium enterprises and technology startups find themselves drowning in contract requirements referencing standards, prescriptive engineering rules, documentation demands, and long approval timescales that bear little relation to actual risk.
Helping the market grow
Consider the market opportunity. Every barrier to entry we remove—every unnecessary approval loop we cut, every duplicated requirement we eliminate—widens the supply base. More suppliers mean genuine competition. Competition drives down prices, accelerates innovation, and brings cutting-edge digital and data-driven technologies into a sector that desperately needs them. The potential savings run into millions across procurement cycles.
This matters more than ever as rail reform gathers pace. New commercial models can only deliver if they are built on a foundation that allows cost-effective procurement and rapid technology adoption. Standards should be gateways, not gatekeepers.
At RSSB, we’re not interested in defending the status quo. Our approach is disciplined: mandate standards only where the public interest demands it—principally in safety-critical and system-critical domains. Everywhere else, use flexible, industry-led standards that encourage innovation rather than stifle it. This isn’t about lowering the bar; it’s about raising the right bar in the right places. Also we mustn’t allow the allocation of costs and benefits to inhibit modernising standards.
Broad economic benefits
There’s a broader economic dimension too. Post-Brexit, Britain’s railways remain embedded in global supply chains. Thoughtful alignment with European and international standards keeps capital costs down and maintains the UK’s competitiveness as both a customer and exporter of rail innovation.
Market fragmentation is the enemy of affordability. When we diverge from established international benchmarks without compelling reason, we shrink the supplier pool, increase bespoke development costs, and make Britain a less attractive market. Harmonisation saves money. A fragmented market is an expensive market, and ultimately, it’s passengers and taxpayers who pay the price.
Used intelligently, standards can slash procurement times, reduce capital costs, and create a genuinely competitive marketplace. Misapplied, they’ll perpetuate the high-cost, slow-moving sector we’re trying to fix.
Standards provide customer benefit, performance, and safety improvement and better overall value for money. And in an industry under intense financial pressure, that’s not gold-plating. That’s good business.