Oral history interview with Graham Hewett, conducted and recorded by Gordon Dudman at the interviewee's home in Surrey on 7 March 2018. Duration: 1 hr. 42 min. 1 sec. Civil Service career; joined Network SouthEast (NSE) 1990; privatisation; London, Tilbury & Southend (LTS) shadow franchise directorate set-up as experiment; Conservative Party outsourcing dogma; preparation of legal agreements; Boston Consulting Group impact on Treasury thinking; splitting up freight; freight customers threat to acquire open access rights; businesses sold together; transferring passenger assets; authorisation and validation process; ScotRail; documentation requirements; resolving issues; Waterloo & City line; station branding change; transfer of staff Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (TUPE); company structure; LTS ticket fraud; reducing role of British Railways Board (BRB); Railfreight Distribution; complexity of privatisation; micro-franchising; risk; Waterloo & City; privatisation focused attention on value for money

One of over 150 oral history recordings made as part of the Britain’s Railways All Change (BRAC) archive project. BRAC was set-up to cover gaps in documenting the railway privatisation process in the United Kingdom, between 1994 and 1997, when the government-owned British Rail was dismantled into over 100 privately-owned companies. The interviews capture the recollections of people involved in the planning and implementation of the privatisation process, the management of change and running the railway during privatisation.