In this article, Bianca Molloy, Managing Director at TES 2000, argues that the rail industry’s workforce ambitions will remain out of reach until commercial structures, planning horizons, and contracting approaches are redesigned to support stable, long-term employment.
In rail, we’re not short of people who want to work in rail. The industry has a real pull. The scale of what we’re building, the sense of purpose, the knowledge that the work actually matters; people respond to that. What we are short of is the conditions that allow those people to build a proper career once they’re in.
I say that not as a criticism of the industry, but as a genuine observation from someone who sits right at the intersection of training, employment, and delivery. At TES, we train people, we employ them on PAYE, we mentor them, and we deploy them. So when the system isn’t working as well as it should, we feel it acutely. And right now, there are parts of it that need attention.
The need for reliable employment
Here’s the situation we find ourselves in repeatedly: We invest in a person and put them through training, we mentor them, we get them competent and confident. And then the work programme shifts, access gets cancelled at short notice, or the call-off volumes under a nil-value framework simply don’t materialise. That person doesn’t get their shifts. They start to doubt whether rail can offer them a real living. And before long, they’re gone.
We have plenty of ambition. What we don’t always have is the planning horizon needed to act on it. And that gap plays out across the supply chain every single day.
Short-term shift visibility, late access changes, and boom-and-bust funding cycles aren’t abstract issues. They make it very difficult to offer someone reliable employment. And when reliable employment is difficult to offer, building and sustaining a workforce becomes significantly harder. It really is that direct a connection.
The mismatch we need to talk about
What strikes me most about the current conversation around rail skills is the gap between what the industry says it wants and what its structures currently enable. The sector talks about careers, competence, and safety. It talks about attracting young people, supporting career changers, building a diverse and resilient workforce. And I genuinely believe those ambitions are sincere.
But the frameworks many employers operate under were designed for flexible labour supply, not long-term workforce development. The commercial reality is that when a supplier is working off a nil-value framework with minimal forward visibility, they cannot justify the investment that genuine workforce development requires. They’re being asked to make long-term workforce investments in an environment that can be difficult to plan around.
Add to that the increasing and entirely right push towards proper PAYE employment, and the tension becomes even sharper. Stable employment is the right direction of travel. But it only works when the commercial environment is aligned to support it, and at the moment that alignment is not always there.
The wider direction of travel in employment legislation is also clear. People quite rightly want greater certainty over their hours, their income, and their future. That is understandable, and in many ways overdue. But it raises a difficult question for employers operating in rail supply: how do you offer people genuine job security when, as a business, you are so often working without genuine security yourself? If the expectation is that employers should provide greater certainty to workers, then the commercial structures those employers operate within also need to provide greater certainty in return. Otherwise, the risk is simply being pushed further down the supply chain.
Safety, not just supply
I want to be clear that this is not about lowering standards or accepting unsafe practices. If anything, many employers are working incredibly hard to go above and beyond in creating the conditions for proper mentoring, safe exposure, and competence development. But safety and competence are not built in a classroom alone. They are built over time through repetition, continuity, supervised experience, and exposure to the environments people will actually work in. If individuals do not get enough shifts, enough continuity, or enough varied experience on track, it becomes much harder to build confidence, maintain competence, and transfer knowledge in the way the industry needs.
That matters even more in the context of an ageing workforce. Rail still holds a huge amount of experience in people who have spent decades in the environment, and that knowledge is invaluable. But if newer entrants are not getting enough consistent exposure to work alongside experienced colleagues, then the opportunity for that knowledge transfer narrows, and the risk of skills fading across the industry only grows.
That is why the routes we open into rail, for young people, for career changers, for those supported by DWP, for women, for neurodivergent individuals, and for those leaving the justice system, only deliver lasting value when there is enough stability behind them to support continuity, development, and progression.
The changes I’d like to see made
I’m not asking for perfection, and I know the industry operates in a complex environment. But there are practical steps that would make a real difference, and they don’t require a complete overhaul of how rail works.
Better forward visibility on work programmes, even modest improvements in how far ahead access windows and shift patterns are confirmed, would transform our ability to offer people reliable hours. The difference between six weeks’ notice and two weeks’ notice might seem small in planning terms; to a person deciding whether to commit to a rail career, it’s enormous.
Contracting approaches that better reflect long-term workforce investment, not removing commercial flexibility but recognising that stable employment has value and that framework design should do more to support it consistently.
And a shared skills strategy that builds workforce capability into delivery planning from the outset. That capability planning should happen early, but access remains a major constraint in ensuring the right people get the right exposure at the right time and with enough consistency. When weekends and nights are the norm, but not enough reliable hours exist to sustain full-time employment, the challenge becomes even greater.
The opportunity is real
GBR, investment in digital and decarbonisation, the ambition around CP7 and beyond – there is a genuine once-in-a-generation opportunity here. But we will only capture it if we build the workforce capable of delivering it. And we will only build that workforce if the conditions allow employers to plan, recruit, and grow people properly.
We have brilliant, committed people in this industry. We have employers who genuinely want to do the right thing. We have training providers and contractors who are ready to invest. What we need is a system that works with that ambition rather than against it.
If rail wants careers, competence, and safety, it has to create the conditions that make them possible. I genuinely believe the ambition is there. The opportunity now is for all of us to work together to create the conditions that make it possible.
TES 2000 is a family-run railway engineering and safety-critical contractor based in Colchester, providing possession management, OHL construction and isolations, permanent way maintenance, technical projects, and training services across Anglia, Sussex, and the North East. For more information, visit www.tes2000.co.uk
