In profile: Kate Jennings, Policy Director, Logistics UK

“It was perfectly timed and it was just great to have that opportunity to meet everybody and see the enthusiasm and the capability in the team,” she said, “It was lovely just meeting people from all the different bits of the business,” she said.

ORIENTAL ODYSSEY

Before she worked for trade associations, Jennings enjoyed a long career in the Civil Service, which left her with a firm belief in the value of collaborative working and communication. She is also possibly the first person in the policy director role who can speak both Chinese and Japanese, as well as a host of other languages.

Given her multilingual ability, it was a natural choice to begin her Civil Service career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the 1990s. Following Chinese language training, she accepted her first international posting to Beijing, where she first worked on transport policy. Responsible for working on the handover of Hong Kong, the last significant British dependent territory, to the Chinese in 1997, she led on aviation security and air service negotiations and what it meant for the handover.

Her return to the UK gave her the opportunity to take stock of her next move in the Civil Service.

“For family and personal reasons it didn’t make sense to stay in the Foreign Office because the role increasingly involved travelling overseas,” she explained, “So that’s when I thought: ‘Where shall I go, what department?’”

TURNING POINT

Thinking about what she enjoyed most about her job, she decided she liked the transport aspect of her brief best.

“I liked doing aviation policy, it was fun and so therefore when I looked to move, I did look at DfID and I did look at BEIS,” she said, “but the department that was most interesting to me was transport.”

She was offered a post in what was then called the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR), focusing on the Better Regulation agenda which later moved her to the Cabinet Office.

Readily admitting that Better Regulation was “a very geeky agenda”, she said in essence it was how to make regulations work better for business and ensure that the regulations were cost effective. It also introduced her to a lot of different people who worked on roads, aviation, rail and shipping policy.

“It was always about how can we make this work better, what can we do to reduce the cost of regulation for business,” Jennings said, “So again, it’s quite relevant to what I do now.”

In the Cabinet Office, she led the secretariat for a committee chaired by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, which challenged government to ensure regulation minimised costs on business.

“We had business representatives on the committee and a network of Better Regulation ministers across Whitehall departments. My team would agree what the agendas were, propose outcomes for discussion and follow up on actions to reduce the regulatory burden on business,” she explained.

COORDINATING EUROPEAN NEGOTIATIONS

Following her time in the Cabinet Office, she returned to DfT where she was offered the job of EU international coordinator.

Stressing it was long before the days of the Brexit referendum, she said: “It was a really fun job, it was not preparing for Brexit at all. It was all about going to Brussels to support ministers with transport negotiations.”

Jennings and her team would plan for ministers to attend both formal and informal transport councils, where they would sign off the big decisions. She often travelled with ministers further afield too, to brief and plan meetings in countries like Japan or America.

“For example we went to Japan to look at rail investment in Japan, to look at the relationship with Hitachi – the inward investment,” she said.

At this point in her career, the transport policy she worked on was truly multimodal. She worked on successfully resisting some of the changes in EU regulation which would not have been in the interests of UK freight hauliers, as well as the EU/US open skies agreement and innovation funding.

Working on national airport policy, she enjoyed relationships with all the UK airports, and fed into airspace policy and the Heathrow expansion, where freight plays an important part of the business case for growth.

SHAPING RAIL STRATEGY

In 2016, Jennings was appointed Head of Rail Strategy at DfT, supporting rail strategy development, including the Transport Secretary’s Strategic Vision for Rail and the launch of the Williams Rail Review.

“My team didn’t do the Williams Review but we were the team that led to the government agreement to launch the review,” she said.

Her responsibilities included rail policy, including devolution, investment, workforce and engagement with industry stakeholders like Network Rail and the Rail Delivery Group. She was also responsible for freight: “I actually led on rail freight, so my team and I used to lead on the relationship with the freight hauliers and customers.”

In her final few months as a civil servant, Jennings worked on the development of road transport policy for EU Exit.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADE ASSOCIATIONS

During her career as a civil servant, Jennings has often engaged with trade bodies and business groups, working with the British Chambers of Commerce on the Better Regulation agenda, speaking at meetings of the Airport Operators’ Association on aviation matters and engaging with Maggie Simpson, Director-General of the Rail Freight Group.

“I think if anything the voice of trade associations is stronger now than it’s ever been,” Jennings said. “Trade associations can be really useful because they summarise the views of the sector and that makes your job easier as a civil servant. Instead of having hundreds of people all telling you different things you get one voice, one view.”

She underlines the importance of trade bodies providing government with evidence-based information, such as economic research, to back up their view.

“That is really helpful,” she said, “because as a civil servant what you do is advise ministers on decisions. Those decisions can be policy decisions, like setting up the Williams Review, or they can be funding decisions, like should we fund this freight, rail, or road project? The more evidence you’ve got to say why that is the right project or the right policy decision the better.”

KEEPING RAIL POLICY ON TRACK

Jennings made the move from the Civil Service to trade association herself in early 2020, when she was appointed as Policy Director of the Railway Industry Association (RIA).

On top of the culture shock of moving from the public sector to a trade body, she also had to adapt quickly to working remotely.

“I was literally two weeks in the office and lockdown hit, so I was lucky I suppose that I met the team in person before we were all asked to work from home,” she said.

Adopting the mindset of ‘never waste a crisis’, she immediately led RIA on its COVID response, having weekly meetings with the Rail Minister and regular meetings with key industry stakeholders such as Andrew Haines, Chief Executive of Network Rail, and Mark Thurston, Chief Executive of HS2, alongside RIA members.

“I chaired all of those conversations, with the minister, with Andrew Haines, and with our members. Some of those meetings would be for what we call the strategic members, so all the tier one companies and the big members, and some of those meetings would be for all members,” she said, “They could ask whatever they wanted to ask and it was the best way for me to get to know the membership.”

Jennings’ role at RIA was to lead on its strategic engagement, developing relationships with ministers, government departments and big clients.

“In rail it’s all about public funding, and the public funding comes through Network Rail, Transport for London and HS2. I led on those strategic relationships for members, and I led on the big policy issues for the sector – visibility of pipeline of work, carbon net zero, procurement policy and project delivery.”

Relationship building was the key to the role, she believes. When it came to procurement for major projects, for example, rather than having a simple transactional relationship, you ideally want to have honest conversations about what is working and share risk in the right place with the private sector.

Jennings is also a strong believer in cross-departmental collaboration. She worked in partnership with RIA’s public affairs team to develop the five tests for Great British Railways (GBR) (no hiatus, transparency, partnership, productivity and ambition), which are designed to hold them to account for things like delivery and zero carbon.

“Often government has ambitious strategies but no delivery plan. Transport planning is long term – you have to fund it,” she said, “You can’t get there if you don’t fund it.”

She also worked very closely with the membership team, often briefing board-level contacts within RIA’s bigger members.

“I’d ask: ‘How do we support you, what’s your strategic agenda, how can we make sure that we’re getting the right speakers and saying the right things in our consultation responses?’”

To ensure its thought leadership pieces were relevant to the sector and showcased its members, RIA’s policy team would spot the big issues, pull them together and then ask members for evidence and case studies to support them and tell their stories. 

“Now I want to work with Logistics UK members to do the same thing here,” she said. 

WHY MULTIMODAL MATTERS

With a strong background in both aviation and rail policy, Jennings argues that adopting a multimodal approach to shaping transport policy is critical.

“Transport is really all about systems thinking, and I think for Logistics UK, all our members need the best possible transport system for freight,” she said.

While the vast majority of freight movements in the UK are by road, she believes that to make better use of the system, freight that comes into the country by sea or air needs to join up better with road and rail to get goods to the customer more effectively and efficiently.

“Whether the customer is the supermarket, an infrastructure project or programme or me living at home having parcels delivered, if we get this right, all of our key messages should work for all of our members,” she said.

While she freely accepts that members involved exclusively in air freight will not necessarily be interested in drivers’ hours, she said there should not be anything in Logistics UK’s positions on road that are not easily understood by its rail and aviation members. The trick, she argued, will be making sure that Logistics UK does not back one member to the detriment of another, but is being as ambitious as it can be for the sector on the issues that count – decarbonisation, productivity and skills.

“I think the great thing about transport is that you work on some of the most important agendas for communities and the country, and that makes it very exciting,” she said.

EARLY AMBITIONS AT LOGISTICS UK

During her first year at Logistics UK, Jennings is focused first and foremost on delivering the business group’s existing agenda.

“There’s a big programme in the autumn of Transport Manager events, Freight Councils, Annual Reports, and we need to make sure that we deliver this to the quality required,” she said.

In parallel, she will be going out to recruit to grow Logistics UK’s policy team, which also includes the compliance experts in the trade body’s popular Member Advice Centre.

“There’s a huge amount of knowledge and talent in the team and so my ambition is to play to people’s strengths and celebrate what they do as we build a new team and get new people on board,” she said.

She also wants to work closely with her colleagues that head up the different directorates within Logistics UK, to say: ‘Are we the best we can be?’

“There will be a creative tension between say comms and policy or membership and commercial and policy, but ideally we should be better together, shouldn’t we?”

Jennings recalls working incredibly closely with RIA’s public affairs and comms teams.

“Sometimes I’m too geeky and I’m too much in the detail, and sometimes they’re too simplistic, but between us when I’ve commented on my colleagues’ work and they’ve commented on mine, we should both feel it’s even better for members than we started with.

“I suppose that’s my ambition: that Logistics UK should feel like one team, and we should feel like we are better together, better for our members, and that when we influence the agenda and make positive change, we celebrate our wins together.”

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Published On: 21/07/2022 16:00:31

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