Terry Morgan is a man of many hats. And that’s no accident. Currently his principal focus is as chairman of Crossrail, the new rail line under London with a tunnel between Liverpool Street and Paddington stations at its core. It is Europe’s biggest engineering project, with a budget of £15bn, and it has had a rough ride, having been on the drawing board pretty much since the war – World War II, that is – but is now safely underway.

The scale of the project is staggering. There are 20 major worksites, 40 in all, scattered across London, nearly all of which are in very constrained areas that require detailed logistics simply to bring material in and out. It is quite a unique project and Morgan cannot disguise his enthusiasm for it.
However, he is adamant about how such a scheme must be managed. “There is no way that anyone can keep abreast of all that,” he says. “You have to delegate and hand over responsibility. Each of the non-execs, however, does have oversight of a particular major site for the purpose of board meetings.”

For many people, being chairman of such a huge project would be enough, even if the job is supposedly only for two or three days a week. But Morgan, with the experience of having headed numerous organisations, recognised that being the part-time, non-executive chairman posed a risk. When asked if he is really a part-time non-exec, he accepts “that it is a bit more than that”, but, crucially, though, he found a way of ensuring that the Crossrail chairmanship did not become a full-time job. “I asked John Armitt [chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), and formerly chief executive at Network Rail] how to avoid working at Crossrail full time and he gave me good advice,” reveals Morgan. “He said, ‘take on other roles and that will stop you going in every day’. And that’s what I have done.”

As well as being president of CMI for the past two years, Morgan has assumed a variety of roles, including being on the board of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, having a couple of directorships, becoming chairman of the Manufacturing Technology Centre, and being on the board of the National Skills Academy for Railway
Engineering.

A good track record

Therein lies his passion: raising the skills of the workforce. The root of this interest undoubtedly lies in his background. “I was an apprentice,” says Morgan. “I did not go to university to learn engineering, I learnt it on the job.” Morgan was rather shocked when, taking over the chairmanship of Crossrail three years ago, he realised it needed 1,300 people with underground construction skills – more than lived in the UK. “How many were there in the whole country? About half that number – and their average age was 55.”

That is why Crossrail has set up its own training centre in east London – the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (it is open to the wider industry and therefore does not carry the Crossrail name). It has so far seen more than 1,000 people through its doors. It is both a training centre and accreditation centre, and also runs courses for “pre-employment”, trying to get local people into the workforce.

Morgan has no doubts about the ability of the British workforce and feels people must be given a chance. “I am always amazed at how young people will respond to opportunities that you offer them,” he says. “If you don’t create an expectation, why should they?”

Run like clockwork

Improving skills is not, though, according to Morgan, just about people on the bottom or middle rungs of the ladder. Morgan believes that managers, too, do not always have the required skills. “My other passion is leadership,” he says. “I feel great companies have great leaders and that the question of leadership skills is underestimated at your peril. CMI is trying to do precisely that, accrediting the right skills.”

A skilled workforce, however, also needs access to the right tools, and that’s where technology comes in. Morgan is proud that his background is in technology and that he learnt its importance at a time when Harold Wilson’s slogan of the ‘White Heat of Technology’ resonated with the workforce of the day. He is concerned that the focus on technology has somewhat been lost: “At the time, technology was seen as the way to create competitive advantage and the government underpinned that with a lot of money,” the Welshman recalls. “That’s not so much the case any longer.” His focus on the importance of technology led him to one of his other roles – joining the board of the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), part of the government’s Catapult programme. Based in Coventry, the idea is to create a partnership between industry, universities and research organisations to bridge the gap between innovation and production. As everyone knows, the British are great at inventing but not always at seeing the concepts through – and that is the key idea behind the MTC.

Morgan brings to these organisations experience developed from a wide variety of jobs. He has moved about a lot in his career, typically every three to four years. “I was lucky,” he says. “I kept on being offered interesting jobs as they thought I was someone who could get things one.” Lucas, Land Rover, British Aerospace – Morgan’s CV reads like a list of the UK’s top engineering companies, past (mainly, sadly) and present. While he dislikes his wife’s ribbing him as an arms dealer, he even enjoyed four years heading up British Ordnance.

By 2002, however, Morgan was able to choose where to go, rather than wait for the offers, and he made the big decision to take over Tube Lines, one of the two successful bidders for the huge 30-year infrastructure contracts under the controversial public-private partnership (PPP) for the London Underground. He did not, interestingly, take part in the bidding process while the Tube Lines team was led by Iain Coucher. However, he filled the vacancy about a year before the contract went live when Coucher went off to run Network Rail, the company that emerged from the ashes of Railtrack.

Uphill struggle

Morgan makes no bones about the fact that managing Tube Lines was a difficult, almost impossible, task. “No one liked us,” he recalls. “The PPP was controversial and Transport for London had not wanted it. The media were constantly looking for negative stories. We were working in a hostile environment where people were willing us to fail, though the Treasury was really enthusiastic.”

While the Treasury’s enthusiasm was hardly surprising, since the scheme had been Gordon Brown’s idea in the first place, Morgan is proud of what Tube Lines, undoubtedly the more successful of the two infrastructure companies, achieved, and he got out in time. There was a 7.5 year breakpoint in the contract, and Morgan, who wanted to leave the way clear for his successor, left a year before, in the expectation that a further 7.5-year plan would be agreed. In the event, that never happened. Tube Lines and Transport for London (TfL) could not come to an agreement, and consequently TfL bought out the company. Despite all the controversy and the subsequent collapse of the PPP contracts, Morgan is convinced that “Tube Lines was a success. We did things that London Underground was not in a position to do.”

Winning line

Inevitably, our conversation returns to Crossrail. Our conversation is taking place on the 28th floor of one of the Canary Wharf towers, with a view of the O2, the Olympic site and the various building sites of Docklands. Given the vista, it is impossible not to reflect on the way that London has changed during Morgan’s working life. Crossrail is in a way the apogee of his career, even if his role is not quite as central as in some of his previous jobs. “I deal with a lot of the stakeholders, sharing out the work with Andrew [Wolstenholme] in keeping on making the case for the line,” he says. “For example, I have been going to the boroughs which are not crossed by the line to persuade them of its value since their larger business-rate payers are contributing extra towards the cost [under the special arrangements sanctioned by the government to levy an additional rate to pay part of the scheme].”

He is in no doubt that Crossrail will be something special. It is not, he recognises, a railway built on the cheap – but he sees that as important. “This will be a fantastic reference point for what British engineers can still do,” he says. “Passengers in the 21st century expect a different experience and travelling on Crossrail will be just that sort of experience.” He hints that there should be no problem over cost overruns and delays. “The ODA is the benchmark,” he says. “There has to be sufficient money available for contingency and a knowledge of the risks that we are taking on. This is not like the Jubilee Line Extension, where the estimates were simply wrong and then it was beset by the need to finish by the new Millennium. That won’t happen with Crossrail. We know the scope of what we are doing.” It almost seems as though Morgan’s emphasis on three elements – technology, training and leadership – is coming together on London’s new railway. Crossrail and Londoners will undoubtedly be the winners.

About the author

Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster specialising in transport. His latest book is The Great Railway Revolution, a history of American railways, published by Atlantic.

www.christianwolmar.co.uk / @christianwolmar