‘Appalling’: Engineer fired on UK rail minister’s orders speaks out about ‘farcical’ dismissal

Award-winning railway engineer Gareth Dennis was recently fired for talking to the media about safety issues at London’s Euston Station. That’s after Lord Peter Hendy, the former chair of Network Rail and now the UK’s rail minister, threatened to withhold contracts from his employer, one of the UK’s biggest rail consultancy firms, unless the engineer was dismissed. Here, in an exclusive interview with RailTech, Dennis explains exactly what happened to him, why he decided to take the matter public, and why it’s so important to the industry that Hendy now loses his job. 

Can you explain what led up to your dismissal from one of the UK’s biggest rail consultancy firms, Systra, and how the current UK rail minister—then the chair of Network Rail—Lord Peter Hendy got involved?

So back in April, I provided some expert commentary [to The Independent] around Euston Station and the challenges that the station faces. I talked about the fact that in conditions of overcrowding, particularly where you’ve got one or more delayed or cancelled trains, you can end up with thousands of people in the concourse. And as a result of that situation, the station becomes unsafe. It was a very tame interview. I didn’t say: “It’s not safe because of this person’s actions or Network Rail needs to get their act together.” I said this is a condition of the history of the station; it will always be a challenge and that has to be managed, but I’d signposted [the UK’s safety and economic regulator] the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) improvement notice [which had warned Network Rail about safety concerns at Euston].

So then a month passes, no problems, none at all. My employer [Systra] was quite happy with the article. They’d been encouraging me to continue to do my advocacy and outreach work as one of the UK’s more well-known rail experts. But a month later, suddenly I’m called in, there’s a brief meeting, I provide the evidence behind my claim. Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight and some data requests, I now know this was forwarded by my former CEO to [ex-Network Rail chair] Peter Hendy. Hendy just doesn’t appear to have paid any attention to the evidence and just ignored it and said, this isn’t good enough, there needs to be consequences for this individual.

And then the day after that contact and the threats from Hendy, I was suspended with pay pending an investigation. That was in May. Since then, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of a series of disciplinary grievances, then an appeal and then the involvement of my union as best as they could. It’s been a very grim three months. To be chewed up and spit out by an industry that I have committed thousands of hours of my time advocating for, an industry that I care very, very deeply about, to be a victim of what is really a pretty appalling and illegal act from the UK rail minister, as he was then, the chair of Network Rail, it’s a real problem.

How did your employers at Systra treat you during the investigation, particularly after you refused to sign a confidentiality clause about your dismissal?

So, the Subject Access Request shows that behind the scenes, not only did they expect me to sign that agreement, but that they had predetermined that I was leaving the company at that point. So the subsequent investigation was essentially a way for them to feel like they’d gone through due process. Towards the end of that process, when I was appealing the decision, I was treated with contempt. The whole process was deeply condescending because I was losing my mind, thinking, do you not realise what is happening here? This is an absolutely farcical situation.

They had been fine with my interview before. Now they were suggesting it was a case of gross misconduct. Just constant, very strange defensive claims. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the Hendy letter until after the final decision had been made. It was only on seeing the final, unredacted version of that letter that I knew he had threatened Systra with refusing them contracts. If I’d seen that, I would have been even more robust in the defence of my actions.

Towards the end of the final appeal process, I contacted Systra’s managing director and told them, look, you have a choice here: given the circumstances, what happens next is that this goes public, and Systra will see severe reputational damage. Systra’s relationship with the Department for Transport through Hendy will be severely damaged. This isn’t something that I had a choice over. I’ve had three months to realise this is no longer a choice for me. This was a choice for them. And the managing director did not agree with that. He wanted to call my bluff, but I suspect he did not appreciate the gravity of what was at stake here, which is the entire safety culture of the industry.

Because for the person who is right at the top of the rail industry, in his role as Network Rail chair, as rail minister, he’ll continue to interfere as he did at Network Rail. He’s going to be steering the shape of the UK’s future rail industry, and what his actions have done is shatter the covenant of trust between passengers and the rail industry that has taken a decade to foster in the aftermath of the series of fatal crashes that we had in the 90s and early 2000s. It has taken a huge amount of effort to regain the trust of the public. And what he’s done is say, actually, you know what? We don’t have a safety-first culture; we have a reputation first culture. This is not a personal vendetta. The rail industry just needs to very robustly show that this is not the case, and it does that by Hendy no longer being involved in the rail industry. It’s as clean as that.

How did your dismissal personally affect you? How has it affected your chances of future employment?

It’s been three months of extreme stress and anxiety. You know, I have a one-year-old so it put extreme pressure on us as a family. For me, a very important thing was how to respond should this go the way it’s ended up going. I knew that I would need to ensure that what happened was public for the sake of the industry, but also, for the sake of my career. I needed to be exonerated and to be quite clear about what had happened and why it had happened.

I was working with a very good team at Systra. My team colleagues were excellent. It was the dream job and I was very, very happy in that role, excited about what the future held. And so was Systra. They were very excited at the prospect of me, with my advocacy and my loud voice in favour of the rail industry, pressuring the government on expanding its support for the sector. That was then wiped away in a flash.

It’s been very difficult and what actually happens next for me is still not a foregone conclusion at this point. I’m very lucky that a lot of senior leaders in the industry have reached out to say that they’re absolutely appalled by this. Some of them are actually following that up with action and contacting the chief executive of Network Rail to understand exactly what the implications are of Hendy’s interference in their business processes, and in their ability to win work fairly. So there’s hopefully going to be continued pressure on the leadership of the industry to make this right.

But the result for me is pretty shocking. Engineers have a professional code of ethics. It’s explicitly stated that above all else, our responsibility is to safety. What Systra has done is suggest that their reputation overrides an engineer’s professional code of ethics. That’s a very difficult precedent to set. What does that mean for engineers? The majority work for either a contractor or a consultant. Does it mean our code stands for nothing, that we will receive no protection?

No matter how softball the interview I did originally was, I was raising a matter of safety. The correct response to that would have been to do so constructively, to say, “Well, actually no. We publicly disagree with this and here’s why.” Now, perhaps the reason that hasn’t happened is because, as evidenced by the rejection of several freedom of information requests to Network Rail in the aftermath of the ORR improvement notice, Network Rail is on shaky ground in justifying that they are operating a safe railway station at Euston right now. And so perhaps it’s difficult for them to prove that what I’ve said is incorrect, which is why perhaps this touched a nerve.

Now, the way for Network Rail to respond robustly to that, of course, would have been to be very transparent and clear about what it has done to resolve the challenges that were put forward by the ORR. Now, nine days after my interview went out, the ORR wrote to the Transport Select Committee highlighting that they still have concerns about safety at Euston station. Network Rail responded saying that the improvement notice was closed out months before the article. Well, I’m afraid that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, given the fact that the ORR have explicitly stated that they continue to have concerns about safety at Euston station.

The thing for me is we need to see a robust response from the industry’s leadership, or it calls into question everything. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to continue to be a rail engineer. I will continue to advocate for this industry very loudly. This isn’t going to be the “Gareth’s Angry at Hendy Show” for the rest of my life. I will get back to doing what I’ve been doing for ten years, which is advocating for the railway industry to be one of, if not the most critical tool in our society’s toolbox to tackle the problems of the future. This is an interruption in that for me, but my resolve is only stronger.

Did you ever have a personal relationship with Peter Hendy?

“Yes, he knows me. In the chain of emails, you can see that he’s aware of me. There’s another email where he’s just mouthing off, you know, “What does this guy even bring? What’s this guy’s deal?”, referring to me tweeting things. I’ve met him, I’ve spoken to him. He probably wasn’t too happy with me when I spoke out against his very unpleasant interview in The Times regarding workers during the strikes. I suspect I wasn’t in his good books from that point onwards. For Hendy, he is all for advocates for the railways so long as they’re just clapping for the railways. The moment they start asking for the railway to be fixed, he loses interest in that person. Or perhaps worse.”

You said that there’s been a huge outpouring of support from inside the industry. Does Hendy then have a reputation for dealing with such issues in this way?

Let’s put it this way. For him to make the illegal assertions that he did in that letter – that doesn’t happen if that’s the first letter he’s written. For him to have lost touch with what you ought and ought not to be putting into a letter that can be easily requested through a Freedom of Information Act request, he must have done this lots of times before.

So what journalists across the industry need to be asking is, who else and how many times? What other interventions has Hendy personally made that impacted on people’s career or covered up safety problems? That for me is a really key question. Because I suspect that either you’re going to get Freedom of Information Act requests rejected, you’re going to get stonewalled, or you’re going to uncover a trail of carnage that he has involved himself in. I would hope that it’s the latter because then we’d be able to hold this unelected Lord to account.

Hendy is now the UK rail minister and in charge of the country’s ambitious railway expansion. What do his actions mean in that context? Is this for you, an issue of one personality at the top of the rail industry, or a systemic problem?

Hendy and the people that Hendy surrounds himself with, these people who feel that they have impunity, they like to fill their boardrooms and workspaces with other people who share these views. Unfortunately, that’s been shown over and over again. Whatever the scandals are, these men like to surround themselves with other men who behave in the same way. We’re at a point where we are reshaping the structure of our industry, including the lines of accountability, and the relationship between the public and private sector. Given Hendy’s interactions, is it right that he’s in that position when he’s a threat to transparency and safety reporting? My answer is absolutely not. He should be nowhere near the head of the rail industry, and I will be clear about that until I receive a statement confirming his resignation. But I think it’s also quite straightforward for others to come to that conclusion.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister Keir Starmer had told the press that the UK leader has full confidence in Hendy following last week’s revelations. What does that mean considering the seriousness of the evidence?

I look forward to reading the brief in full, but in my opinion, the Westminster lobby line that the PM has full confidence in Hendy is a holding pattern while further information is being accessed. So it will be interesting to see what happens next. This story is not finished yet. This has become a Westminster politics question as much as it’s a technical or transport sector question. So it’s widening out into a political scandal already. It’s adding to the challenges against this Labour government of claims of cronyism. So this isn’t going away and at some point someone’s going to have to be hung out to dry. At the moment, it’s me. Let’s see if Lord Hendy comes out and joins me.

The UK’s shadow transport secretary has written to the government asking about Hendy’s vetting process in light of your dismissal. Has anybody from British politics reached out to you? And if so, are you worried you could be used as a political football in the future?

No one. No MPs, no ministers, no shadow ministers, no one in Network Rail, no one from my former employer, no one on record at the DfT has reached out. My story is already becoming a political football. It’s good that the opposition has picked this up. Strange bedfellows, I would say, myself and the Conservative Party, given how vigorously I’ve criticised them in their leadership position.

But no, at the moment, what I’ve got to lean on is that I’ve made an active decision to go extremely public with this. I’m very lucky to have a large number of people who advocate for me through knowing the work that I do, particularly in my public advocacy for railways and sustainable transport, as well as lots of connections in politics and journalism. I’ve made the point of being very public, so that it becomes much more difficult for my story to disappear. For anything to happen to me, it continues the story so they have to think very carefully about what their next move is.

I know that a lot of letters have been written to MPs about the issue, and I don’t know of any responses yet. But this is being raised within the industry as well. It’s going to be very interesting to see the responses, whether it’s Network Rail or inside consultancies, where their junior staff are wondering, so if I happen to make a close call that finds its way up the chain and it isn’t very popular, does that mean my job is now at risk? This gets to the heart of the challenge. This has the potential to cripple the safety culture of our industry.

Did you ever think it might have just been easier to have accepted the confidentiality clause and bite the bullet? What do you really want to see come out of this situation?

I want a real industry that’s fit for the future. I want it to be transparent. I want it to meaningfully prioritise safety and accessibility. Because for me, the Euston question was not about safety as in a brick might fall on someone’s head. I was talking about the experience of passengers, the perception of their journey as one of the critical components in driving modal shift towards public transport.

It’s different for staff and workers. But for passengers, the perception of safety is absolutely a critical component to be considered alongside their actual material safety. And anyone who’s involved in any public service understands that the perception of the public is a critical thing to be managed, and not to be taken as trivial or unimportant. This is a moment for the industry to set itself on the right track, and so far it has failed to step up. And I’m worried that this will just feed into the wrong culture.

Instead, we will see an industry that, in fact, is opaque, filled with cronyism, that is about backroom dealings between these old boys, and everything against what most young people in the industry and people older than me feel it ought to represent. It should instead be an industry that represents the people it’s a public service for, and that the public and private sector work together to deliver the model shift we need to actually face the challenges of the future.

But isn’t there a wider problem here? The UK’s ageing rail infrastructure is exceedingly difficult to modernise, especially at a time when demand is ballooning. Won’t safety concerns – and the way in which they are publicly handled – always be an issue under such circumstances?

Actually, no. I think as an industry we can step up. Yes, the government also needs to step up and provide the funding to deal with the future. We’re talking about an industry that requires about 12 billion pounds a year extra for it to face the future properly, but that’s not money that disappears down the toilet – it goes back into the economy. And it’s spent by all the skilled people that you are paying, all the contractors, everyone. The benefit is that not only is that money going round and round in circles getting spent, but you’ve also got a transport system fit for the future.

I’m actually optimistic. I think we can tackle these challenges, but it requires vision. It requires leaders with vision who understand what the challenges of the future are and how we have to face them. And people who should have retired six or seven years ago aren’t those leaders. My fellow engineers are a fantastic bunch of very skilled and energised people who absolutely can tackle these challenges. Even with a blank cheque, we would not be able to solve these problems overnight. And even if we did have an infinite money cheat, we would still need the skill and tenacity of engineers to solve these problems.

Time is a major pressure on us to get these things done. The number of skilled people available is a major pressure. Getting access onto the railway whilst driving modal shift without just stopping the trains is also a major pressure. But engineers can absolutely do it. On a note of optimism, we can absolutely step up, but we need the right leaders to allow us to do that.

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