The Elizabeth line is a modern, high-capacity, high-frequency railway in London that provides through-running service in central London, connecting key destinations including outer suburbs and Heathrow Airport, and is the busiest railway in the UK. In 2024 the GTS consortium, which included Go-Ahead, Tokyo Metro, and Sumitomo developed a bid to operate the line, which The Hub supported. It was announced in November 2024 that GTS won the 2025 Elizabeth Line concession and will operate the line for the next seven years.

Our experts both led and supported the bid team’s People, Customer Experience, and Mobilisation workstreams. Tasks completed included:

• A comprehensive audit of the Elizabeth Line from a customer experience perspective;
• Developing delivery plans for customer experience and mobilisation that detail GTS’ approach to rapidly stand-up the operator and provide an enhanced customer offer;
• Coordinating the development of the proposed GTS governance, organisational structure and ensured alignment of organisational vision across workstreams; and
• Developing proposals for People-related elements of delivery plans, including training programmes, TUPE considerations and industrial relations risks.

Furthermore, our team led the mobilisation activities across multiple key workstreams:

• Mobilisation Leadership and Day One Assurance
• People / Human Resources
• Customer
• Contracts and Procurement

• Collaborated with PMO to ensure key deadlines were ambitious but achievable, motivating workstreams to rapidly develop high-quality content.
• Produced accurate insights on the existing quality of service by developing comprehensive service audit surveys for bid staff to complete when riding the Elizabeth Line
• Enabled knowledge transfer by working closely with Tokyo Metro staff to incorporate best practice in Japan into delivery plans.
• Applied our subject matter expertise in mobilisation and customer experience to lead the development of winning delivery plans.
• Applied our decade long experience with train operator mobilisations to achieve a successful transition.