Interview: Robert Symons, WPD

“Worry is like sympathy – it doesn’t do anyone any good, does it?”

Take no prisoners. The phrase could have been coined for Robert Symons. The chief executive of Western Power Distribution (WPD) has a ruthless and focused approach to business that has transformed his sprawling region into the acknowledged leader of the network sector and the “winner” (his word) of the first round of RIIO, the only one of the network businesses to achieve fast track status.

Today, Utility Week is meeting Symons for the first time. He and his business have hitherto been media-shy, dodging requests for meetings and interviews and issuing just a coy one-line statement on the news that WPD had achieved fast-track status. Indeed, a preparatory Google search reveals that remarkably little has been written about Symons. It soon becomes clear this isn’t out of shyness: Symons is more than happy to enumerate WPD’s many achievements and his own role in them. Rather, it’s symptomatic of his whole approach: focus ruthlessly on what you need to do and jettison the rest. His one-time belief that networks didn’t need to speak to the press has changed as their profile rises – hence today’s meeting in a cosy London club, where over a lunch peppered with jokes and anecdotes, Symons outlines why he believes WPD is the best in the business.

Fresh from a meeting with energy secretary Ed Davey and the other network bosses (who must be getting sick of the sight of each other), Symons settles into an armchair and chats with vigour about why he believes the three-digit outage phone number, upon which Davey has hung his hat, is achievable. There are challenges in establishing callers’ whereabouts to route their call when they dial in from a mobile phone, and issues with Ofcom about setting up the number, but Symons is ready to drive a steamroller through all of these to get the job done.

That’s been his approach since day one. Symons is no product of a business school. Rather, he worked his way up from a trainee with the South Western Electricity Board (later part of WPD), covering “all aspects of engineering, from people’s houses to doing live line work and finding cable faults, jumping over hedges, all that stuff”. It’s given him a deep and granular understanding of the networks business, which he uses to run WPD down to a fine detail, eschewing hierarchy and multiple levels of management. When Symons was running operations, if he had a complaint about a linesman being rude to a customer, he would speak to that linesman personally – “not his manager, who’s going to soft peddle it”.

This hands-on style is instinctive to Symons and forms the basis of a business philosophy that was developed further when the South Western Electricity Board was acquired by US utilities business PPL in 1995. The group later bought Hyder in 2000, the distribution arm of which became WPD South Wales; and in 2011, the acquisition of Central Networks saw the creation of WPD Midlands. Today, the business serves 7.8 million customers across the Midlands, South West and Wales and employs more than 6,000 staff.
The acquisition by PPL was the turning point for the business, says Symons (not privatisation several years earlier, of which he disapproved at the time).

“I was running half of the South West at the time of the acquisition and four American directors came over. They had a big emphasis on customer service and the big contrast between them and what had gone before was that level of decisiveness. If something needed changing, it was going to be changed, and if we got it wrong, we would stop and change again.”

This approach reached its zenith in 2000, when WPD won a pitched battle against a private equity consortium, including financier Guy Hands, to take over Hyder, a much larger and more diverse business that owned Welsh Water, among other things. Symons wanted it for its SWALEC distribution arm and promised his bosses in the US that he could be rid of the multiple other business across the globe in a matter of months. “It [Hyder] was five times our size! As someone said to me at the time, it was like buying an alligator to make a pair of shoes!”
The story of what came next is classic Symons and tells you all you need to know about him and his approach to business. He bulldozed through the sale of businesses across the globe. He chartered a helicopter and flew around the country to see 4,500 employees in three weeks, making four or five presentations a day. He immediately introduced new IT systems to save money, replacing every one of the business’s PCs in Wales within the first month.

He took a similar approach a decade later, when WPD acquired Central Networks in the Midlands. “We took possession of Central Networks on April Fools’ Day, which was a Friday,” he recalls. “I went up on the Saturday and terminated the contracts of all eight directors. The reason was that we didn’t actually need them. It wasn’t a comment that they were good, bad or indifferent. I didn’t need them, and I wanted to make sure the people there realised I’m in charge.”

He employed the same tactic with the supply chain: “There was a thing called alliance contracting, where contractors and direct staff worked together to mutual benefit, in effect we’re all buddies and we share the financial pain and gain. My view is that pain only goes one way and the gain goes another. I spoke to the three contractors and told them we were going back to conventional contracting.” This action saved £30 million a year Symons has a direct and very distinct personal style. It’s not that unusual in the private sector, where charismatic individuals build business empires around themselves and lead them through sheer force of personality. It is far rarer in the former public sector, monopoly world – as Symons acknowledges. But it’s not all about telling people what they don’t want to hear. The flip side to this is how people respond to the directness and honesty, the idea being that they appreciate and respect it; those that stay buy into the vision and work harder and are rewarded for it, and they trust this straight-talker as not being your run-of-the-mill suit.

“I got the trade unions in on Monday, explained there would be redundancies, we were going to run the business in an entirely different way.” The unions quickly got behind the changes, which saw the business decentralise and return to regional depots. A few weeks later, WPD achieved consensus on new employee terms and conditions.

Was he surprised that WPD was the only DNO to be fast tracked? “No.” Does he truly believe it is better than the other networks? “It is very difficult for me to find a metric that tells me it isn’t.” And if he did? “I would redouble my efforts. Not by trying to fiddle the numbers, but by trying to work out what someone is doing that’s better than me and how I can do it better.”

The point about the numbers is a swipe at some of the other networks. Symons is critical of what he perceives to be a tendency among some of his peers to bemoan the individual circumstances of their regions. He has championed the “bottom up” approach to regulatory data, whereby the business breaks down its costs by length of cable, number of substations, and so on. His arguments for this granular approach have won the support of Ofgem, which gave this information significant weighting in the RIIO process, hence WPD’s success.
Other networks have been critical of this. “The beauty is that the regulator has consistent information in the form they want it,” says Symons. “The old way was to present things using different definitions of costs and activity. Observe those who want the fog, observe those who want the lack of clarity, and I think that tells you everything about those businesses.”

With the fast track in the bag, what’s left for Symons to do? Delivery – and the next price review. “That’s how your business has longevity. It’s not about promising jam tomorrow – there has to be a record that you have done it in the past.”

He is less evangelical than some others in the sector about the potential of smart grids. That’s not to say he’s dismissive of them, but he warns: “What you mustn’t do is invest in a series of white elephants. The companies that will do best in that area are those with a record. Learning is okay, provided that learning results in something that delivers for customers.”

What keeps him awake at night? “Nothing! When we sold so many businesses so quickly, we said we’d never worry about anything again. Worry is like sympathy – it doesn’t do anyone any good, does it? To avoid worry and stress, decide.”

Symons’ bullish approach will not make him friends in all quarters. But it seems to work where it counts: his employees, customers and the regulator are all on side. For a man who loves to win, that looks like success.