Stakeholder engagement

ORR has a wide range of stakeholders - rail users, funders of the railway, the railway industry and the general public. We have always seen effective relationships with these stakeholders with a two-way flow of information as an important input to our activities. We proactively seek our stakeholders' views on what we are doing and consult extensively on key policy initiatives.

Stakeholder survey

In Autumn 2006 we engaged Wardle McLean to help us carry out a survey of our industry stakeholders with a view to giving us an independent assessment of:

how well stakeholders understand our role in the industry and the scope of our duties and responsibilities;
the relative importance that our stakeholders place on our activities; and
whether there is anything that stakeholders would value us doing more, or less, of to the industry's benefit.

A number of in-depth interviews were carried out with a range of influential figures in the rail industry.

Findings from the stakeholder survey

The main messages coming from these were requests for us to:

ensure that we maintain (and are seen to maintain) a strong and effective challenge of all aspects of Network Rail's performance and efficiency;
be more visible in the actions we take to help the industry to move forward;
plan and target our consultations better as part of a more effective dialogue with stakeholders; and
play a more strategic role in the industry and provide direction where needed.

Actions in response to survey

Our corporate strategy for 2009-14 makes clear that we want to improve our engagement with stakeholders and develop a more focused and integrated approach to the necessary two-way communication. We have restructured our organisation and now have a new directorate dedicated to external affairs, including stakeholder relations. As we develop our approach we aim to deal with our many stakeholders in a more proactive, strategic and planned way.

2009 stakeholder survey

We have recently followed up the 2006 survey with a further survey of stakeholders. The results continue to show, generally speaking, that ORR is a well-regarded regulator.

We are preparing an analysis of the results and briefing the Board and senior members of ORR on the findings. We will add a summary of the results of the research to this page as soon as we have done so.

Last updated: 11 January 2010

Glossary

Network