Stephen Kelly

So a lot of obviously the process, you know, inevitably when you're losing colleagues and in the first couple of months, actually there was a lot of, you know, retirement parties and leaving parties and all those sort of things.

It does set the tone within the company and the culture and very important to me is a vibrant culture within all the sort of responsibilities I've had.

So we had to actually personally put our arms around the shoulder of the most talented people

And actually during a time of major change, major restructuring, it is a great time for opportunity because people want to take it on more responsibility.

So the best people actually rose to the top.

No, nothing's easy, Steph.

Nothing actually, wow, I've been in business for 45 years, nothing that you build of substantial value is easy to do unless you win the lottery or something.

I don't do the lottery.

It's a lot of hard work.

I think the start point, you've got to have a vision for what Britain wanted to be.

And then you've got to have a plan.

We had a very clear vision.

And we used to, you know, honestly, with any institution, particularly like people who have been in the civil service 20, 30 years, they become institutionalized.

And sometimes, I hate to say this, but in big companies, it's the same.

They become saboteurs.

They forget the enemy's always on the outside and they start picking kind of internal turf fights.

It's just crazy.

And what we sought to do was say, actually, the reason why you came through the turnstiles at Horse Guards or Caxton House was to improve public service.

You've got that mission, that zest.

for better public services serving citizens and we want to reconnect you to that and we want to actually eliminate all the wastage all the noise the bureaucracy and create efficiencies to allow you to do that and and then what we did and we measure this and actually had the National Water Office auditor and I sat in front of Margaret Hodge of the Public Accounts Committee and Meg Hillier I don't know half a dozen times and