NCB: Collaborative, reliable, and expanding its services

Operating as an independent subsidiary of Network Rail, NCB Rail Assurance is the UK railway’s leading infrastructure assessment and certification body. Rail Engineer has spoken to Managing Director Sam Brunker on a number of occasions. Here, he brings us up to date with the organisation’s subtle rebranding, its expanded range of services, and what sets it apart from its competitors.

Could you give us a brief history of NCB Rail Assurance and some insight into the services you offer?

NCB Rail Assurance was set up in 2012 to provide independent certification services to the rail industry, specifically as a Common Safety Method for Risk Evaluation and Assessment (CSM-RA) Assessment Body and an interoperability Notified Body (as it was called before Brexit). There are three main reasons that we were established. One was to grow competence in CSM-RA and interoperability because, back  in 2012, there weren’t that many experts. Related to that was the need to increase competition in the marketplace. Network Rail also wanted a reliable ‘internal’ provider of these services. I say ‘internal’ because we’re a subsidiary of Network Rail. We are structured like that to satisfy independence requirements under our accreditation.

We’ve made really good progress on each of those objectives. The most obvious measure of this success is that we won the 10-year HS2 contract in competition back in 2018, which is now a large chunk of our work. We’ve also played a leading role in defining what ‘good’ looks like for railway infrastructure assessment and we have a reputation for being among the best, technically. In terms of being the internal provider, we do still have around 80% of the Network

Rail market share, although what that means has changed in the last couple of years with the rollout of the various agile client models. In terms of our people, we have 40 highly experienced railway engineers covering all disciplines. They know the relevant standards inside out and they’re expert practitioners in the CSM-RA regulations, under which many projects need to appoint an assessment body.

We’ve learned a lot in the past 13 years. We now understand much more than we used to about how our clients can get value from what we do. Clients are not just getting a certificate or an assessment report, although they are obviously the main deliverables. The process of getting to those deliverables provides them with assurance throughout the project that they are, and will be, compliant with the various standards and common safety methods regulations required of them. That enables any issues like emerging non-compliances to be addressed as early as possible before they become expensive to fix and cause delays.

We remain independent of our clients when we’re doing this work, but we do have shared objectives with them. That is that they want to be compliant, and we want them to be compliant. We all also want the project to be completed on time and to budget. In the last couple of years we’ve expanded our competence management system, to promote ourselves in railway systems engineering competence, and also competence in IT. We’re utilising that skill set in our people to get into broader rail assurance work, including cyber security assurance and what we’re calling ‘safety management’. Clients don’t need to have a well-defined problem. We will work with them to develop bespoke solutions to their assurance needs.

This journey has led us to recently make subtle changes to our name and logo, so that rather than just being Network Certification Body (NCB), we’re NCB Rail Assurance.

You mentioned cyber security, which is as a huge concern for the industry. Can you tell us more about your work in this area?

Cyber-attacks pose a significant threat to railway infrastructure and train operating companies, as many people know. A cyber-attack can disrupt essential services, compromising safety and damaging public trust. The rail network is increasingly reliant on interconnected digital systems for operations such as signalling, ticketing, and train control, so it is potentially vulnerable to malicious activities like ransomware, data breaches, and operational disruptions.

We’re giving our engineers training in this space and we always have experts in this area on hand. We also have people in our organisation who are involved in the work to set future global standards around cyber security assurance for rail.

The synergy with our core services in terms of safety assurance and assessing compliance to applicable standards is strong. The combined experience we have in this space gives us a unique capability to assess our clients’ approach to cyber security and whether what they’re doing is likely to be best practice.

In what other ways is NCB Rail Assurance now helping organisations within the rail industry?

Providing safety management as a service is an example of one of the broader roles we can play using the same skill set required for independent assessment of certification. We have in place the internal mechanisms to manage any impartiality risks, meaning that we can provide a service to clients needing support with working through the CSMRA process. For example, we can compile system definition documents, we can manage hazard records, facilitate hazard identification sessions, and produce project authorisation strategies.

We can either do that under the management of the client who may need an extra pair of hands, or we can provide more senior engineers who will manage the process for the client completely, including the interfaces with designers, delivery teams, suppliers, and so on. Many of our clients consist of teams who do not do these things frequently, so it makes sense for them to seek support from our engineers, who are doing it all the time.

Looking ahead, what do you think is in store for your organisation in the next 12 months?

Although we’re broadening the services we’re providing, our core services of independent assessment certification still make up the bulk of what we do, and they, in turn, rely on there being a good pipeline of infrastructure enhancement work, which is currently quite uncertain. HS2, Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU), and East West Rail are the big projects. We’re involved in these as well as many others. However, there’s a lot of risk at the moment and that’s one of the reasons we’re diversifying our offering.

Finally, there are a few organisations offering similar services to NCB Rail Assurance.  What sets you apart from the competition?

A lot of our core work – independent assessment and certification – is now done using our IT portal, which we rolled out a few years ago. This is a shared platform enabling clients to upload information to be assessed, such as drawings, hazard records, and so on. The system will notify our assessors when this information arrives, and then they will report their assessment directly into the system. If they have any technical queries or find any non-compliances, they raise those via the portal, enabling clients to respond quickly.

The system will manage communications to and from the client, with new evidence provided, and provide full traceability of the status of the findings. You can go onto the system and easily see what the status is of any particular assessment, and any assessment reports and certificates are produced by the system, having been populated as the assessment progresses. We’ve seen real efficiencies achieved and cost savings from the use of this system, leading to lower prices.

Another of our unique selling points is our relationship with Network Rail, our parent company. As mentioned, although we were set up as an independent legal entity and we’re not subsidised by it, our staff are Network Rail employees, working under the same terms and conditions. Most of them came into our organisation from roles within Network Rail. They know Network Rail intimately and understand what our main client needs and how it works.

Something else to celebrate is our customer satisfaction scores. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the year-to-date is 82 which means that our clients overwhelmingly feel that we’re supporting them to the point where they would promote working with NCB to their colleagues. Digging deeper into the details, another metric of which we’re very proud of is that 81% of our customers say they’re very satisfied with our responsiveness to the needs and requirements of their project.

This is a great achievement because as projects are getting more complex it shows we’re responding in a very positive way.

If you would like to find out more about NCB Rail Assurance please contact [email protected] or visit www.net-cert.co.uk