Freedom of Information (FoI) requests can often lead you down a frustrating rabbit hole, but the flip side of that is sometimes they unearth a much bigger story than you were expecting.
A case in point is this example of a FoI request to Network Rail to find out how much they spend flying their staff around the country rather than letting them take the trains, which of course they have some responsibility for.
So when the first FoI request dropped into my inbox it made a good story about their £10,000-per-week spend on air fares, while the rest of us are busy filling in our “delay-repay” claims.
But in that FoI there was a tiny nugget of a story which revealed one of the firm’s executives, £330,000-per-year Michelle Handforth was one of the biggest beneficiaries of these tickets.
The fact that she had been in charge of Aberdeen port and was now in charge of the west of England and Wales rail network, while all her plane tickets were to and from Aberdeen made me a bit suspicious.
So, when I received a second FoI response specifically about her flight tickets it emerged she had been a one-woman carbon bomb as she jetted too and from Aberdeen and the west of England. Network Rail even admitted in the response that she could work from home in Scotland but get expenses for travel and accommodation to jet over to her “patch” on the other side of the UK.
These two articles that were published in the Sun in July 2023 can be seen here along with the two FoI responses that provided the information behind them. PDF PDF
The postscript to this is that a few months later, in December, there was chaos on the line she was responsible for in an incident called the Great Paddington Dewiring. An overhead cable failure caused all trains leaving London Paddington to come to a halt.
Ms Handforth duly fell on her sword and resigned from the job saying: “It’s been a real privilege to work with you all through the highs and lows of the past couple of years, and while this decision is a real wrench to me, I believe it is the right one for me, my family and the business.”
