News

Interview: Highways England chief executive Jim O’Sullivan

If you simply divide the £15bn allocated in the roads investment strategy by the six years it covers, Highways England chief executive Jim O’Sullivan is in charge of spending close to £7M a day. Interview by Jackie Whitelaw.

Jim O’Sullivan, ceo Highways England

Highways England’s new chief executive Jim O’Sullivan has had a career that has equipped him with a range skills that will prove very useful as he oversees the people in his own organisation and the supply chain who are about to deliver the biggest roads investment since the 1970s.

O’Sullivan is 56 and grew up in Ilford, Essex in a family of contractors. “So no one has to tell me that contractors need to be able to make a reasonable profit,” he says. “I know if they don’t it’s bad for your business and theirs. And I am very aware that you have to be very, very careful of selecting a job on price alone.”

“When you are spending at that rate people become very good at managing your rather than you managing them. You have to keep your ear close to the ground and nose around to find out what’s really going on.”

When he left Campion School in Hornchurch he went to train as an undergraduate apprentice in air transport engineering with BA emerging with a degree and qualified as an articled aeroplane fitter. “I can, if required, change the brakes, wheels and the engine of a plane,” he says. “And I understand what it means to be working the night shift, freezing at 2am. I know how much you can ask of people, and how much is too much.”

He had a successful career with BA, culminating in the role of chief engineer for Concorde for three years in the early 90s.  “It was wonderful, though you think you are working with high tech but by then it was quite old tech – given Concorde was designed in the 60s,” he says.

With Highways England’s focus on the customer, high profile, high celebrity count Concorde was a good place to learn that good service is critical.

“As chief engineer I was expected to fly on it once a month. It was an important part of understanding the customer service story. For instance, you’d get complaints that the food was not hot and one way to think about that customer is ‘we are flying you at twice the speed of sound, what’s your problem’. But if you turn it round the customer is thinking ‘you can fly me at twice the speed of sound but you can’t heat pasta’. It’s about seeing things from the customer’s perspective.”

Post Concorde O’Sullivan went to the US as chief project engineer for BA on its Boeing 777 programme. BA was spending $5M a day on aeroplanes at the time and he learned some useful management skills. “When you are spending at that rate people become very good at managing your rather than you managing them. You have to keep your ear close to the ground and nose around to find out what’s really going on.”

Operation Stack: As an emergency option for something that might happen three of four times a year, it is fit for purpose. But it is not suitable for three times a week.” Eighteen hour queues and chaos on local roads are not acceptable long term."

Those skills are going to come in useful with Highways England he says. “If you simply divide the £15bn Road Investment Strategy allocation by the six years it is over, that is £6.8M a day or £285,000 an hour.” O’Sullivan is going to want to form his own views on the progress of delivering that investment, he suggests.

He has already driven through probably the most nationally significant issue Highways England is dealing with at the moment – Operation Stack on the M20 where lorries exporting goods park up on the carriageway if there are closures at the Channel Tunnel.

“I went down to see what was going on, drove the entire length of it, went to the control room and met the Police. As an emergency option for something that might happen three of four times a year, it is fit for purpose. But it is not suitable for three times a week.” Eighteen hour queues and chaos on local roads are not acceptable long term.

“But there is no magic bullet solution. We have looked a contraflows but they would have required 5000 cones and would mean cars crossing in front of trucks, not an attractive option.”

The latest plan is to divert some lorries to the disused Manston airport where they can park up. Convoy trials through rural Kent from Manston to the tunnel have been successful but O’Sullivan is going to do the drive himself so he can understand the potential issues.

Long term a different solution for the M20 has to be found, he says.

“If  we can establish a capable Highways England with a successful capital delivery programme and a level of recognition from our peers and our customers – that would be how I’d judge our success. If people regret having set us up, we’d have failed.”

It is the sort of organisational challenge that is right up his street. When O’Sullivan left BA in 2001 with the aviation downturn following 9/11 he went to be  safety and engineering director of Transco (now National Grid) gas division. “I had the engineering knowledge and was interested in the organisational challenge; they were not as good as they wanted to be.

“Safety is going to be a big issue for me at Highways England too. We are definitely not as good as we want to be. I’d say we are average. We need to be world class.”

After Transco O’Sullivan went to work in another regulated industry as chief operating officer of Welsh Water. But working away from his home near Birmingham was not conducive to balancing work and family life so he switched again to become capital delivery and field force director for Eon, responsible for developing the capital programme for the Midlands.

Next it was back to aviation, running Heathrow Airport Holdings – the regional airports held by BAA with the job of selling them off. He started as managing director Edinburgh Airport and when that was sold moved on to Stansted, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton.

When that was all offloaded, he was looking for a new job at Christmas with Highways England a target organisation.

“I wanted to be a CEO, in some form of transport or infrastructure – HE is both, and I wanted a challenge, something that needed doing. Clearly transforming Highways England into a company and gearing up to deliver the roads programme is indeed a challenge,” he says.

The interview process was tough. “Depending on how you count fireside chats there were probably four interviews and a full panel that included the Department for Transport permanent secretary Philip Rutnam and Highways England chairman Colin Matthews.”

He started the job on 22 June.

How will he know if he’s been a success?

“If  we can establish a capable Highways England with a successful capital delivery programme and a level of recognition from our peers and our customers – that would be how I’d judge our success. If people regret having set us up, we’d have failed.”

Read - Industry has two years to deliver - Jim O'Sullivan

If you would like to contact Jackie Whitelaw about this, or any other story, please email jackie.whitelaw@infrastructure-intelligence.com.

Comments

Highways has proved to me it can disrupt people's life without much concern. Without consultation their contractors have cut the trees bordering our property and left us not only looking at the motorway from our gardens but suffering the noise. Its 2 weeks now and I and several neighbours have barely slept, a fantastic service!
Disturbing people asleep in their house by cutting trees and bushes from 8pm until 12:40 am and agin out tonight on the A38 at Ivybridge Devon. This sort of work can be done during Sunday morning when there is less traffic on the road.
Trees on the A38 at Ivybridge Devon causing interference with television reception.Screen picture breaking up and Sky telling us there is no signal September 2016