In-House Team of the Year: Crossrail Ltd

Crossrail – “a textbook example of how to get things right.”

Why Crossrail?

The Crossrail public affairs team has set the benchmark of how public sector infrastructure projects engage politically. The past year has seen Crossrail become an exemplar project in Westminster, attracting significant interest from other major projects’ seeking advice as the model to emulate.

After a year of tireless political engagement, Crossrail is reaching exceptional levels of cross-party support despite being in its peak construction phase and still four years out from completion; Crossrail is seen as delivering a wide range of benefits, not just to London but the whole of the UK.

The huge public affairs effort has afforded Crossrail the essential goodwill and confidence that a major project, spending £14.8bn of taxpayer’s money, needs to deliver the job, helping to manage the complex and disruptive works across 45 sites in London and the South East and scrutiny from officials across Westminster, Whitehall, City Hall and the UK.

This year has seen a number of great successes for the project, including a favourable National Audit Office inquiry and culminating in a very positive report by the notoriously robust Public Accounts Committee, who concluded that in “Crossrail we see a textbook example of how to get things right.”

Strategy

The public affairs’ team strategy is simple: to build political capital with a broad range of stakeholders to highlight project successes and ensure an effective response to reputational risks. To achieve this we have focused on three key themes:

• Telling the story of Crossrail’s construction – so people are excited by what we are building;
• Promoting Crossrail’s wider benefits - so people are inspired by our positive social, economic and environmental impacts;
• Supporting the delivery of Crossrail on time, on budget and safely – ensuring we have anticipated and mitigated our reputational risk.

Through leveraging support across an array of policy areas beyond transport and construction we have created a diverse range of advocates. We have given equal energy and focus in our targeted engagement to our compelling skills and apprenticeship story; our huge economic growth and jobs impacts; our industry changing health and safety standards; the regeneration we are delivering; and our captivating environmental and innovation stories.

Through energetic engagement, we have encouraged all our stakeholders to share in our successes, rather than using the project for political partisan gains. As a result, all sides of the House regularly cite Crossrail as a textbook project other schemes should follow.

Crossrail Public Affairs 2013/14 highlights

• Directly engaged over 230 Ministers, MPs, AMs and Civil servants including over 90 site visits.
• Navigated a 6 month NAO inquiry which concluded “Crossrail Limited have so far done well to protect taxpayers’ interests”.
• Underwent a 3 hour PAC inquiry which concluded “With Crossrail we see a textbook example of how to get things right.”.
• Successfully appeared in front of a further four Parliamentary and City Hall Committees.
• Utilised our compelling story to attract the Prime Minister, the Mayor, the Chancellor and Secretaries of State to mark milestones on the project, ensuring widespread media coverage.
• Leveraged support for campaigns such as apprenticeships and women in engineering.
• Parliamentary apprenticeship awards, sustainability event and upper-waiting hall exhibition.
• Hosted an engineering skills summit, chaired by the Transport Secretary, for industry leaders.
• Successfully managed reputational risks, related to industrial relations, on-site incidents, scope changes, planning issues and the London vs the rest of the UK spending debate.