TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Legal Tip: Always Incriminate Yourself by Email feat. Gareth Dennis New

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

  For this week's bonus, we speak with friend of the show Gareth Dennis about his ordeal at the hands of British railway consultants who definitely understand the legal system, but also about the ongoing safety concerns at Euston Station, and in the UK more generally. Have you ever taken a train from Euston? Did you also fear for your life? Then perhaps this episode will explain some things. Check out Railnatter on YouTube here! Pre-order Gareth's book here! Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/111594119 *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

My previous employer wasn't too comfortable with me having this persona. Now I went into the new job fully open arms explaining, look, this is what I do. The business development director has bought in, HR fully bought in, so on and so forth. So this is not me speaking out of turn. This is fully bought in. They've got pieces they written about. I want Riley a quote from one earlier. My employer is absolutely fine.

My sister is absolutely fine with this. So a month later, we'll talk about exactly what happens behind the scenes when we go through the sequence of the emails because it gets fun and spicy. But a month later, I was working away and got an email going, ooh, ooh, from a couple of bosses above me calling me in. You didn't say anything else, just that. Just that. Just that. Just that.

Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that.

Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. Just that. So, yeah, so I got called in and said, what evidence did you have for that quote? You know, we've, uh, someone has raised it. Network Rail has raised it. I was like, oh, okay. Well, here's some evidence. Bang, bang, bang, you know, quote various bits of it. I have been to Houston. I think it's so funny to be like, can you show me the evidence of like passengers and you could just be like, well, okay, you could just go to any platform on any day in Houston at any time and you're probably likely to find it. You know?

Full me is I should have called said boss and said, yeah, sure. Meet me at Houston on Friday at 445. Peter Hendy going to London Houston station is like a Barack Obama drinking the Flint water moment. It was just like films himself on a green screen in Houston. Like why? Why? Yes. I love it here in Houston. Look out as fellow traveler. Why let us meet up at some of the great shopping and dining options such as Hwa Smith. So this, so yeah, I'm but it was to me, this, this, so like a few days pass and then I receive

a letter basically say, I have another meeting. And then in that meeting said boss then says, yeah, you're suspended with pay. I'm like, Oh, wow. What? Turn in your, turn in your gown and your badge. Like literally I hand in your laptop. Turn in your autism sunflower badge. You're no longer work at the train company. You've got to turn in that thing that like checks the QR codes for like for train tickets

you buy. Yeah, exactly. Behind the scenes of course, what happened is that Hendy, and by the way, people love putting this stuff in emails. Nice, foiable emails. I swear to God, are you sending discoverable emails about trying to ratfuck someone out of their job? Like, literally, you could just email like, hey, could you call me about this on the telephone?

No one likes making phone calls anymore, it's a very anxiety inducing experience. Then you do your Nixonian stuff, stuff like on the phone, but instead... No, send those emails, yeah. So Hendy writes, please check whether we have or are currently employing Dennis as we should stop. Accusing NR of operating the station unsafely is unacceptable and we should challenge his qualifications to say so, and so on and so on, but ultimately that wasn't just a challenge, really it was that Hendy is sort of contacting Nick Salt.

And more of a kind of like sliding tackle into the back of the leg, you know? Yeah. So it's worth just picking this up. So Hendy's contact was actually replying to the network rail internal kind of media digest. So there are a variety of theories of why he got pissed off. One of them might be that he just read that digest and got angry. He knows about me. He knows who I am. He got pissed off and had expressed that to me via other means when I called him out for being pretty anti-worker during the strikes a couple of years ago. So I kind of, he is clearly, and you see from the sequence of emails that go back and forth

internally with the network, so kind of these back and forth of emails that goes on, by the way, for a month before. So article in April, the meeting that I had with my bosses in May, exactly a month later, Sister by the way, absolutely fine with the article. That's a really critical point of the whole story. Sister, no problems with the article. I'd shared it with my PR and the comms manager. They'd seen that. Absolutely no problem with it for a month. So all this back and forth of Hendy going, who is he? Are we employing him? Increasingly clearly personal. People are suggesting this is a non-personal thing. It was just reputation protection. He was doing his job

as chair. No, this is personal. It's him. He's a prolific consultant. I know who he is. And eventually it ends up with him going after Nick Salt. What action are you taking on Dennis? Eventually saying, finding a potential supplier, criticizing a possible client, reflects adversely on your likelihood of doing business with us or our supply chain. Nice consultancy you got here would be a shame if something happened to it. Oh, say it on the phone! You could even write something that implied that in a way that would like with their left enough room for doubt. That's unambiguously just like, just by the way, I'm just going to like threaten your business. Yeah, and we'll pick up the ramifications of that

sentence. So that sentence was written in a letter that was sent pretty much to the dot a month after the article went out that went directly to Nick Saul, the CEO of my former employer. Now, a little fun tidbit, that letter was uncovered via both Freedom of Information at Request and Subject Assets Request came through the same part of Network Rail, the data protection officer, but they redacted different bits versus the two different legal instruments, which then just assembled it back together afterwards. It's always good.

It's very nice. That's lovely. Again, phone calls, people. Phone calls. That's, I, yeah. Here, say it with me. I do not recall that phone call. So easy.

All of that, right, is let's just like sum up, right? Cause I think this is important, especially because we're going to go to talk about the Grenfell Inquiry that was released today as well, right? Which is essentially that an engineer raises safety concerns, or not even raises safety concerns, the engineer notes that something is, broadly speaking, unsafe. The Houston was designated possibly unsafe by the Office for Rail and Road Improvement, and then Network Rail, not specifying what exactly they did, did whatever they needed to do to comply with the ORR. And so it said legally, we are safe. And I think the important thing to do

is to distinguish between an engineer's assessment of is this safe? Will this hold up? Versus the box ticking regulator's assessment of does this meet our standards? Because the whole argument that Network Rail seems to be making is we ticked the boxes. We are legally safe. And I think there's such a, and this is something you've talked about, there is a moral imperative on engineers especially to design structures that are safe,

which goes beyond has this met the minimum standards for regulatory compliance, especially given. I mean, if you want to talk about regulators, like that something is like, that's something that is regulated about being an engineer. Yeah, one of the very few people left to have Bushido codes. Basically, yeah. It's true. It's in our code of ethics, literally, yeah. Part of your Bushido code as an engineer is to put safety first, right?

And this is something where you are putting safety first, and then you're being sort of punished for it. And yet they have the report saying this is safe according to this regulation. You have testimony from disabled people, for example, saying I do not feel safe here. You have your professional opinion being like this isn't safe, especially for disabled people. There's a couple of things to, I mean, absolutely with all this, a couple of things to pick up. The first is that there are a lot of people on Twitter going, oh, you know, anyone who talks out about, you know, criticises a client is going to... They can't do that. They're going to

expect some consequences. You know, you can't do this. Just a good point. Yes, no, you don't understand engineering. Engineering is, as with any kind of profession that involves caring for people or a civic duty, like being a someone who works within health or somebody who works within the, I don't know, the nuclear industry. Something like this. You have a duty of care on the public. As an engineer, I am bound ethically to describe anything that I perceive as unsafe within my professional expertise or adjacent to it, by the way. It's my duty to raise that. Other challenges were, well, you could have raised this through proper channels. The proper channels of, well, there aren't any for structural issues or for issues around accessibility, which is

part of the bloody problem. But the official channels might be, oh, through Network Rail. Well, perhaps say through getting requests, going through FOI requests to understand what changes they have made. Well, they've rejected all the FOI requests that have been made since the improvement notice was closed. People have gone, okay, what have you changed to make it safe? And Network Rail have rejected all of those requests. So how do we hold them accountable? Or you go through SIRAS, which is a reporting, ostensibly anonymous reporting thing for health and safety issues, located in the same office as the RSSB, the Railway Safety and Standards Board, which is a private organisation that ought to be part of the public realm. But it's been shown multiple times that it is not anonymous and

that they have resulted in going after people who make that reporting. And also, the whole point is that the existing, going through journalism and raising things with the public. Firstly, this is me talking about existing stuff in the public domain and essentially disseminate, again, another engineering duty, disseminating complex information to the public via the form of journalism. But also raising stuff through journalists that are a risk is an absolutely valid process for raising safety risks that you feel are not being paid attention to. That's a really key thing to understand. And ultimately what we're talking about is the difference between safe and sufficient. Yeah, absolutely.

Gareth, I'd like to note, you know, this is something that someone who's talked about your case in response to the Grenfell Inquiry, Arnold Tarling, who's a building surveyor and a witness for the inquiry, has said that the lack of care for safety rather than just box ticking could lead to, and this is his words, a Grenfell on the rails. And what we're talking about is that distinction between minimum and legal, and actually safe. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Yeah, and that you have a regulator who has signed off on something, and that regulator

has been through this era of deregulation, slashing of red tape and privatization. In Grenfell that's the building research establishment, here it would be the office of road and rail, but in both cases you have this case where something is patently, obviously a risk to a number of people, but the regulatory framework and institutional defensiveness don't allow for recognising that, let alone ameliorating. Mason- That's exactly it. It's the defensiveness. The mind did not go to, ah, right, is it safe, or what are the challenges? It went straight to the reputational thing. I think a really key thing to dig into is that, say, you will never make something perfectly safe. When

we talk about the railways, it will never be perfectly safe. There are inherent risks in all of it. The discussion here is professional people describing that they think the institutionally decided position on that risk, or the balance of risk, is not the correct one. And that those risks are unacceptable. That they are, to use the legal term in my profession, not, al up, not as low as reasonably practicable. That's the really key measure. And my view as an engineer is that Houston was not achieving that measure, that critical measure that as an engineer I have to achieve, which is as low as reasonably practicable. I do not believe it is what it is achieving though. And that was the premise of, I'm making it more serious, that the interview is very softball, but actually that is, as I've been challenged on it, I've had to go, well no,

my instincts are on this and my informed opinion based on a huge amount of other information, publicly available reports, leaked reports from HS2 when they're considering what the station will be looking like in 10 years time. and then feedback from all the involvements in accessibility charities I do. I have lectured in station flow, I have worked on accessibility, worked on station flow plans, all this stuff. What you're forgetting is that that might have been embarrassing for someone who counts as a full human. That might have been embarrassing for Peter Hendy, and who cares if a bunch of like pig people get hurt.

That's, that you are, that you raise a valid point. Yeah, or not get hurt could get have you considered that actually you just might be woke and that actually People really like standing for four hours plus on trains