This was being discussed at one operator last week.. their Ops Standards department was being referred to as the department of creating additional paperwork necessary to keep themselves in jobs - a department of 27 as opposed to their post BR department of 3. The widely used industry standard software, called ACMS (Assesstech ltd Competency Management System) was considered to be a breakthrough in reducing the time spent rooting through staff paperwork, in order to work out who is due to be monitored, assessed etc. At the time of ACMS arriving there were promises of fewer staff being required to manage traincrew. Despite this, the unexplored result in terms of management staff ratios was quite astounding.
Depends, surely, on what Operational Standards are required to do? If their remit is wider or at a larger operator, they'll naturally need more staff. TOCs have never been shy about putting recruitment freezes in place for departments that are featherbedded, so if there's 27 staff there, they obviously feel there's a need - given the recent state of having to find efficiencies at operators, they're not hiring managers for anything they're not needed for, that's for sure. The world 30 years ago is legislatively and legally very different to today as well - it's no real surprise that the department primarily invested with making sure the railway runs in a safe way has expanded compared to 1998.
Amongst traincrew, the ratio of managers to staff, in 1998 was around 35 guards or 30 drivers to one manager. Add in the current swathe of area and middle managers also responsible, but remove the heads of department, the current ratio is around 10 guards or drivers to one manager.
That's generally a reasonable management ratio in just about every other industry I've seen. 35 crew to one manager means that you get to see your manager twice a year, and maybe an inspector for assessment rides, which is almost to the point of negligence when you consider that the role of a manager in the modern world requires much more than it did 30 years ago. Retail, which offers very standardised but low-risk tasks normally sees 1:20 as a maximum.
You can't adequately look after your team if you don't see them apart from two Time With Your Manager sessions every year - pastoral care and awareness, as well as all the additional activities for managers, plays a much more significant role than it used to - at least one operator introduced non-technical managers while I was there to support this area, leaving managers with actual driver qualifications with more time to do the technical side of the work.
As for nationalisation, it seems to have no (immediate) effect on management numbers or policies - as TUPE brings most of the problem leadership to the new company. For example, one company has a guards must step down first before releasing doors policy. The neighbouring company does not - as long as you can see your train. Another company insists on steel toe caps, whilst it's neighbour insists on non-slip only. Neither company's policies have changed since nationalisation.
Well, it likely won't - railways even now run relatively leanly from a management perspective, much like the NHS. There's little meat to cut from the bone until you start applying rules and procedures in common across TOCs, and given that the majority of activity is expected to be planned and actioned by the routes themselves, I can't see GBR being much more than a common branding, policy, and fares management centre (particularly given the news of a raft of civil servants being transferred over). Routes will still have MDs (or "general managers", although most operators already employ those for their regions), and a board of directors/senior managers to oversee them as the current stance appears to be that they're remaining largely independent, seeking their funding/arguing against subsidy reduction measures individually.
One part of the problem seems to be rule writer the err 'not for profit' RSSB Ltd company number 04655675. I've no issues with a safe, assessed, regulated railway, but this seems to be another cog in the machine that requires an inordinate amount of exceptionally well paid people to run it.
I wouldn't say they were exactly
expensive in the grand scheme of it, and they conduct a significant amount of research additional to just producing the rules; it's something that could arguably be absorbed into GBR as a cost-saving measure, but it's funded by the operators either way. The average pay is about £65k not including directors, which given the largely technical nature of the work I wouldn't have thought is exactly obscene.
