Sir Thomas Philip Winsor (born 7 December 1957) is a British arbitrator and mediator, lawyer, consultant and economic regulatory professional.
Between 1 October 2012 and 31 March 2022, he served as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
Between 5 July 1999 and 4 July 2004, he served as the Rail Regulator and International Rail Regulator for Great Britain. He oversaw the collapse of Railtrack, the infrastructure manager for the British rail network and the creation and refinancing of the successor network infrastructure manager, Network Rail.
Born in Broughty Ferry, Dundee, Winsor practised law in various capacities from 1979 to 1999 and between 2004 and 2012. He maintains his licence to practise law.
In October 2010, UK Home Secretary Theresa May MP appointed him to carry out a controversial, wide-ranging review of the remuneration and conditions of service of police officers and staff in England and Wales, the first for over 30 years. Following the final publication of the review in March 2012, the Home Secretary nominated him to serve as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary in June 2012, the first to be appointed from outside the police service. Following confirmation hearings, he began his role in October 2012. He left office on 31 March 2022, on the expiry of his last term of office.
In July 2017, he was additionally appointed as the first Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Fire & Rescue Services, overseeing an expanded Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services. His policing and fire appointments ran together, and expired on the same day.
From 4 April 2022, he established himself as an arbitrator and mediator, both domestic (UK) and international. He is a member of the London-based Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
In the 2015 New Year Honours list, it was announced Winsor was to be knighted; he received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II on 19 March 2015, at Buckingham Palace.
Early life
Winsor was born on 7 December 1957 in Broughty Ferry, Dundee to Thomas V M Winsor and Phyllis Bonsor. He was educated at Grove Academy state comprehensive school in Broughty Ferry. In 1976, he went to the University of Edinburgh to study law. After graduation in 1979, he served his two-year Scots legal apprenticeship with Dundee law firm Thorntons & Dickies. He practised for a year after that doing mainly litigation in Dundee Sheriff Court. In 1982 he enrolled as a postgraduate student at the Centre for Petroleum and Mineral Law Studies of the University of Dundee under Professor T C Daintith. He received a Diploma in Petroleum Law in 1983. He became a Writer to the Signet (WS) in 1984.
The leading Edinburgh law firm Dundas & Wilson employed him as a solicitor from 1983 until 1984. He then moved to London and joined City law firm Norton Rose, specialising in energy law and project finance. In 1991 he left Norton Rose to become a partner in City law firm Denton Hall. He worked on the design and implementation of the regulatory regime for the privatisation of the electricity industry in Northern Ireland.
After the flotation of Northern Ireland Electricity on the London stock exchange in 1993, Winsor was seconded to the Government Legal Service. He served as chief legal adviser and general counsel to the first Rail Regulator, John Swift QC. The Rail Regulator was the statutory officer established by the Railways Act 1993 for the economic regulation of the British railway industry, which was about to be privatised. Winsor's secondment lasted two years and he returned to Denton Hall in August 1995.
Rail Regulator 1999–2004
Appointment
In July 1999, John Prescott MP, Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions and Deputy Prime Minister, appointed Winsor as Chris Bolt's successor as Rail Regulator and International Rail Regulator.
On his appointment after the British general election in 1997, Prescott had declared he was going to take a far tougher line with the privatised railway industry. Prescott had been fiercely opposed to the privatisation in 1996 and was one of the 'old Labour' stalwarts who wanted to renationalise the industry outright. Despite having said in opposition that its policy was a 'publicly owned, publicly accountable railway', New Labour would not promise renationalisation, even if it could have afforded it. In its manifesto for the 1997 election, it had committed itself to a policy of increased accountability of the privatised companies to the public interest through tougher and more effective regulation.
This was seen as an imaginative policy. If it was properly implemented, it could achieve virtually all the government's objectives for a better performing, more efficient railway without the expense or controversy of renationalising the assets. At the Labour Party conference in September 1998, Prescott declared that he was going to carry out a 'spring clean of the regulators'. Many commentators realised this meant the appointment of a tougher, more interventionist replacement for Swift.
New regulatory approach
Winsor's five-year term as Rail Regulator began on 5 July 1999. He immediately announced a new regulatory agenda, one which contemplated holding the privatised railway companies much more closely to account. It also involved radical changes to the regulatory and contractual matrix for the privatised industry. It replaced enforcement regulation with incentives, and changed the financial, contractual and licensing environment in which the industry operated.
Winsor's ability to pursue his new regulatory agenda was significantly hampered by problems with Railtrack coming to a head very shortly after he took office. One of Winsor's principal motivations in applying for the post of Rail Regulator had been his frustration with — some critics elevated it to a visceral hatred of — Railtrack's incompetence and how it impeded so much progress in the privatised railway. He was also reported as being increasingly exasperated with the failure of his predecessor to hold Railtrack properly to account, and to use the powers of the office to apply pressure on the company and to reform—increase—the powers of the Rail Regulator to make regulatory and contractual accountabilities more effective.
Winsor was severely critical of what he found when he took over the office of the Rail Regulator. He described it as a dysfunctional organisation, which was inward-looking and barely able to do the job it had been given by Parliament. He said changing this quickly was all the more important because the ability of the train operators—Railtrack's direct customers—to apply pressure and secure fair terms and reasonable performance from the infrastructure operator was weak. This was because their contracts were weak, with a poor specification of what they got for their money and uncertain and ineffective remedies when things went wrong.
His reform agenda had three major planks: changing the financial framework in which the infrastructure manager operated through the periodic review of its revenue requirements, changing the structure of access charges so as to introduce a higher degree of incentives; this led to his deciding (in October 2000) to increase Railtrack's income from £10 billion to £15 billion for the five-year control period 2001–2006. reforming Railtrack's network licence—its principal instrument of accountability to the public interest—by the introduction of nine new conditions covering matters such as its disposal of land, dealings with dependent users, the establishment of a reliable, comprehensive register of the capacity, condition and capability of its assets, its means of accounting and its stewardship of its assets (including the setting up of a system of regulatory reporters to assess the company's progress and competences in areas of network operation specified by the regulator). completely rewriting the contracts at the track-train interface, replacing a contractual structure which set the infrastructure manager against its customers with a true, co-operative joint venture of mutual interest, recognising the intensity of the interdependence of the two parties; this was achieved by the establishment of a new model track access contract and major reforms to the industry-wide network code.
The reform to the financial structure was announced on 23 October 2000, only a few days after the Hatfield rail crash. The aftermath of Hatfield—what it revealed about the state of Railtrack's asset knowledge—led to the carrying out of a further financial review in 2002–2003. The conclusions were announced on 12 December 2003 and gave Network Rail (Railtrack's successor) an additional £7.4 billion.
Problems with Railtrack
Winsor's focus was on Railtrack, which he regarded as performing most unsatisfactorily. He criticised it for 'policies of neglect of its assets and hostility to its customers'. In his first month in office he took enforcement action against it in relation to its performance. He threatened a maximum financial penalty of £42 million if it failed to improve its performance towards passenger train operators by 12.7% in the operating year 1999–2000. The penalty would be £4 million for each percentage point it missed. Railtrack eventually missed this target by 2.7% and was fined £7.9 million in December 2001. Railtrack criticised the penalty as 'the largest fine in corporate history' which it was not. But it did represent a significant hardening of regulatory approach to the one which the company had enjoyed under the previous regulator.
Winsor's relationship with Railtrack was stormy. He saw it as his duty to hold the company more closely and vigorously to account. He criticised its many failures, including its poor knowledge of the condition, capacity and capability of its assets, rising numbers of broken rails and deteriorating track quality measures, its bad relationship with its train operator customers, its performance shortcomings, poor contracting and procurement strategies and the soaring costs of its projects (especially the renewal and upgrade of the West Coast main line). Instead of getting involved in eye-catching new projects such as taking over the London Underground and High Speed 1, Winsor believed Railtrack should concentrate on the core job of operating, maintaining and renewing the national network.
Gerald Corbett, Railtrack's chief executive, led the management team which resisted this new regulatory pressure. On 3 April 2000, under the headline 'Railtrack Declares War on Regulator', The Guardian newspaper reported that 'Railtrack is adopting a "culture of defiance" against the rail regulator.' Winsor was reported as describing this stance as an 'attitude which beggars belief'. However, the relationship between the two men was courteous and professional, even though Winsor was a severe critic of the philosophy and approach underlying Corbett's leadership of Railtrack.
Hatfield and its aftermath
Further enforcement action came in 2000 over Railtrack's inadequate work on the renewal and upgrade of the West Coast main line. But the watershed for the company— and the British railway industry—was on 17 October 2000 when a broken rail caused a high-speed train, travelling at , to derail at Hatfield, north of London, killing four passengers and injuring over 70 more. Corbett immediately offered his resignation, but the company's senior management tried to rally support for him amongst senior figures in the railway industry to persuade him not to go. Prescott and Winsor withheld their support, although they did not do it publicly. Corbett's resignation was not accepted by Railtrack's board, but a month later when he offered his resignation a second time, it went through. Steve Marshall, the company's finance director, succeeded Corbett.