Roland Perry wrote:
In message
-sept
ember.org, at 14:46:47 on Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Recliner
remarked:

If everyone to do with running a franchise is TUPEd over, then almost
nothing will ever change. The whole point of swapping parent
companies on renewal is to bring in some new blood.

You have it right, though there have been exceptions. The Northern MD, Alex
Hynes, did transfer to the new franchise holder there at first though he's
now gone to Scotrail.

And DOR started with Elaine Holt transferring from our very own FCC. She
then brought in her former FCC colleague Karen Boswell to run East Coast.

But below them, where did the other senior DOR managers come from when it
was running EC? I suspect most were from NXEC. After all, DOR had no
permanent operational staff, while NXEC had people who were no longer
needed by NX, but had exactly the right experience that DOR needed to run
EC.

But they are implementers, not policy-makers.

Yes, particularly where DOR was concerned: Adonis was the policy maker.

I don't know to what extent he micro-managed the policymaking, rather
than delegating it to Holt and her teleported-in senior team.

For example, did he decide specifically to scrap the restaurant cars, or
was that just collateral damage of a policy to "balance the books,
however unpopular"?

Another thought strikes me: I wonder if Adonis's enthusiasm for kicking out
NX rather than renegotiating was partly driven by his desire to pull the
strings on a TOC himself? No doubt he thought a DOR answerable to him
would be more controllable than a private TOC, and he wanted to show that
he could do a better job when in direct control.