The big interview - Tony Meggs

There’s an inescapable irony to the location of Tony Meggs’ office on the sixth floor of Transport for London’s (TfL’s) shiny glass-and-steel HQ in Stratford, east London. A stone’s throw from the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the chairman of Crossrail works to wrestle his delayed and over-budget megaproject back onto the rails, all while surrounded by the legacy of another that was famously on time, on target and a worldwide hit to boot: the 2012 London Olympics.

The presence of these landmark facilities – West Ham United’s London Stadium, the London Aquatics Centre and the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, among others – is a very public reminder of the lasting impact that major projects can have. Perhaps it’s a spur for Meggs’ efforts to turn failure into success at Crossrail.

It’s no small task. What was once the jewel in the crown of European construction abruptly lost both its chairman and chief executive last year, having dropped the bombshell as late as August 2018 that the much-vaunted east-to-west rail route across London would not be opening as advertised on 9 December 2018, or even shortly afterwards. It’s currently two years behind schedule and £2.2bn over its original £15.9bn budget.

It’s a high-profile – and high-risk – mission, as Meggs, the former oil industry executive and erstwhile head of the government’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), admits. “I was preparing my departure from the IPA when I was asked to take on this role. I realised it would be a risky job – frankly, it’s part of the chairman’s role in a project like this to be disposable if something goes badly wrong. So it is a risk, but I quite like big risks.”

It’s also a job that Meggs – who took over as chairman in January this year – thinks is eminently worthwhile. “This is a world-class project that went off track, and the challenge of getting it back on track is very exciting. It’s going to be really transformational for London and the South-East.”

So how did the 73-mile rail route across London, touted as one of the biggest, boldest and best-run projects in Europe right up until early 2018, end up going so badly and unexpectedly wrong?

At its heart lies a classic project management paradox, says Meggs: the balance between the huge self-belief necessary to make progress on the one hand, and pragmatism about what can actually be done in the time available on the other. “A big project is an act of will, and you need people with a very strong will who can run it, manage it and move it forward,” he says. “Crossrail was very successful in the past in that it had very strong leadership and determination, but those same characteristics caused problems at the end.

“You have a project team who really do need to be optimistic, hard-charging and focused, but you also need a bunch of more sceptical people doing the independent assurance who say, ‘Oh but this is so very difficult, are you sure?’ The job of the board – certainly the chairman – is to balance those different points of view.”

Meggs is at pains to point out that there’s “an amazing team of people working on this project”, and that “the previous management team did a fantastic job getting the project to this stage”. Yet the old Crossrail management team under former chairman Sir Terry Morgan lost that balance towards the end, he says. Systems of internal checks and balances failed, replaced by an increasingly blind determination to meet that 9 December 2018 deadline for the first trains to start running – a position recently described as a ‘fantasy’ by current chief executive Mark Wild.

“That date loomed larger and larger as a total commitment. When you’re so committed, almost come hell or high water, there’s always a risk that you start to filter out information that doesn’t agree with your desire. And then the information that comes to you starts to get filtered before you even see it,” Meggs says.

A smart if unflashy dresser with a measured, no-nonsense manner, Meggs has spent much of his time since January working on urgent project priorities while also addressing the underlying governance issues that caused them in the first place. “The project was very much geared around construction, so the final pieces got squished more and more. A lot of the things we’re doing now – new trains, new signalling systems – they all have to be tested, homologated and made safe. It would have been better if all that had been done two or three years ago.”

Meanwhile, the board has had a shake-up, putting a fresh focus on scrutiny and oversight. “The old board did a great job over a long period of time, but it was no longer very challenging,” Meggs explains. “We’ve got a new board now with new skills [including three female non-executive directors in Baroness Jo Valentine, Sarah Atkins and Anne McMeel]. And we have rebuilt or built from scratch the appropriate board committees and a new system of assurance. Previously, there was no second or third line of assurance at Crossrail, but now we’re in much better shape.”

It’s a belt-and-braces approach that Meggs learned during his years in the oil industry, an inherently risky business where looking hard before you leap is a way of life. After graduating with a degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, he answered a small ad in the back of The Times and ended up prospecting for coal deposits in Indonesia. A shift to Exxon – and a more exciting life in the US – beckoned after a year or two.

“It was the 80s and the oil price was going through the roof. I quickly realised that there was a bunch of people in the oil industry having a lot more fun than I was.”

After stints in Alaska and the North Sea, he ended up as global head of technology for BP, where he worked closely with John (now Lord) Browne. After leaving BP, Meggs switched first to academia at the MIT Energy Initiative and then into private equity before joining the UK government’s Major Projects Authority as chief executive in 2015. That became the IPA in 2016, not only providing oversight of major projects – including Crossrail – but also promoting best practice in their management.

So is there an element of mea culpa in his latest move back to the sharp end of project management? “Obviously we didn’t keep enough of a weather eye on Crossrail. Frankly, we didn’t regard it as a high-risk project, which of course was completely wrong.” Its stakeholders – including an increasingly cash-strapped TfL, the Department for Transport and London Mayor Sadiq Khan – now keep a very close eye on Crossrail. This level of scrutiny is only right, says Meggs. “We have completely opened our books. We’re totally transparent with our sponsors and give them feedback every single day. That openness is quite different from the past and from the way that most major projects are run.”

The nature of the project’s risks were also misunderstood, Meggs says, from the way in which contracts were designed and fulfilled to the technological challenges involved in integrating multiple untried technologies into a single functioning whole. In other words, there’s a lot more to a functioning modern railway than digging Crossrail’s 26 miles of tunnels and laying the track.

“One of the things I really believe is that all projects now are essentially digital, and infrastructure projects should be treated as systems integration projects from the get-go,” he explains. “These are complex digital entities that are far outside the areas of expertise of civil engineers or even mechanical and electrical engineers. They require a really different set of skills.”

The project’s current status is that the central section of the Elizabeth Line (as it will be known), running from Paddington to Abbey Wood, will now open at some point between October 2020 and March 2021, with the other two phases to follow at roughly six-month intervals.

What about the budget? Meggs concedes that cost pressures exist, but he still expects the project to be completed within the current funding envelope. According to a report by KPMG in January, there is an 80 per cent chance of completion within the current £17.6bn provision.

It’s important not only to get the line operational for passengers, but also to restore confidence in the UK’s ability to do big infrastructure, he says. “Governments need confidence to invest in very large projects, because, if you look around the world, they very often go quite badly. Crossrail was supposed to be part of that confidence-building, which is why it was so crushing when the delay was announced right at the last minute.”

So what does Meggs make of Boris Johnson’s bullish pronouncements on infrastructure – especially the idea of a high-speed link between Leeds and Manchester? Meggs is too experienced a Whitehall hand to be drawn into political speculation, saying only: “Infrastructure needs champions. These things don’t happen by accident, so it’s good to have optimistic people in charge.”

He does concede that it’s a tricky time in terms of political and economic uncertainty for making the big-ticket calls that infrastructure requires. “You have to look at as many different scenarios as you can, and then you look for the projects that are relatively robust in those scenarios.”

But you also have to be prepared to take risks, he adds, because the future is unpredictable. “You cannot know. When I left London in 1979, it was a city in decline and the population was falling. When I returned from the US 15 years later, it was on the up and the population was rising again.

“So, you do all the work you can, and then you leap off the cliff.”

When he is not grappling with Crossrail, Meggs’ beloved country house in Suffolk requires continual maintenance – a kind of busman’s holiday project that is perpetually late and over budget, he admits with a smile. He has also recently returned to playing the piano. “I am re-learning. I learned to play the old-fashioned way, but I decided I wanted to be able to play by ear. I found these guys who are teaching me a whole new way of thinking about the piano – it’s fantastic.”

He’d like to see project management skills more widely recognised for their strategic importance, especially in government, where there is still, he says, “a valley of death” between the policymaking mandarins on the upper floors and the “implementation guys” in the basement.

But his number-one priority remains working to fix Crossrail’s many and varied troubles, to deliver not only a great new transport asset, but also to prove that the UK hasn’t lost its major projects mojo and can still deliver Olympic-style successes.

“The people who are making those huge investment decisions are looking at us and saying, ‘Well, can we really do it?’ What I always say to the suppliers and the team is that we’re not just doing this for ourselves. We’re not just doing it for Crossrail or London. We’re doing it for this whole industry for the long term.”

Tony Meggs

1973: University of Cambridge, BA in natural sciences

1979: Imperial College London, MSc in petroleum engineering

1979–2004: Exxon Corp, various reservoir engineering supervisory roles in exploration and production

1984: Sohio Petroleum, exploration and production

1990: Stanford Business School, MS in management

1990–2008: BP, including roles as global vice-president of exploration and production, and head of technology

2008: MIT Energy Initiative, co-director

2015: Major Projects Authority, chief executive

2016: Infrastructure and Projects Authority, chief executive

2019: Crossrail, chairman