Interview by Karl Holbrook
If passengers never notice safety, it usually means someone has done their job properly. David Hughes, Head of Safety, Security and Sustainability at Lumo and Hull Trains, explains what it takes to keep millions of journeys running smoothly, and why success is often invisible…
Every day, thousands of people step onto trains expecting to arrive safely, without thinking twice about it.
Making that assumption hold day after day, at speed, across the UK is David Hughes’ job. And if he’s done it well, you won’t even notice him.
While hoards of passengers board their trains each day, coffees in hand, headphones on, eyes fixed on departure boards, Lumo and Hull Trains’ newly promoted Head of Safety, Security and Sustainability, David is already several moves ahead. What happens if a protest spills onto a platform. If a fault escalates. If a decision made miles away ripples through a network at speed.
His job is to make sure none of that is felt.
“When I’m explaining it to audiences at events in the region,” he says. “I tell them, ‘I keep people safe. I keep people secure.'”
It’s an understated line for a role that carries enormous pressure. David is responsible for keeping around 1.5 million passengers a year moving safely up and down the UK at high speed, across dozens of stations, alongside roughly 500 staff working across Lumo, Hull Trains and a new West Coast operation launching this spring. The margins for error are small. The consequences, if something slips, are not.
“If you’re doing your job how you want to do it,” he says, “you don’t want anyone on the outside to see any of the joins.”
That quiet perfectionism, the idea that success looks like nothing happening at all, shapes how David thinks, works and leads. The best day for him is the one where nobody ever knows his name.
It’s a paradox that sits at the heart of modern rail safety. David operates in an environment defined by motion, speed and human unpredictability, yet his work only registers when something goes wrong. Until then, it’s a constant exercise in anticipation, spotting risk early, smoothing pressure points, designing systems that hold when the things are stretched.
“It is a big responsibility,” he admits. And it’s an understatement.
David was promoted earlier this year after eight months in the role on an interim basis. It’s a formal step up, but also recognition of how central his thinking has become as the business evolves, particularly in an open access world where pace, accountability and culture matter as much as process.
David joined Lumo in May 2023 as safety governance manager in the team he now leads. Before that he was business resilience manager at LNER. “It grew my skills quite a lot in a very short space of time,” he remembers.
Even earlier, he worked in operations and control environments, alongside a long stretch in customerfacing management. It’s a varied career path, which has set him up for the complexities of the current role.
For David, safety is a lot more than paperwork. It’s people, behaviour, and the reality of what happens when you put hundreds of strangers into a high-hazard environment.
“It’s not just about investigating when something’s gone wrong,” he says. “We’re out there being as proactive as we can to identify risk.”
In many businesses, safety, security and sustainability sit in different teams, with different reporting lines. Like much of what Lumo has pioneered, David is doing the opposite, bringing them together through what he calls “three lenses [but] one framework.”
“It’s all risk management,” he says.
He gives a simple example. Political unrest and climate change lead to protests. Protests create security risks. Security risks become safety risks. And when safety is compromised, the knock-on effects can damage the long-term sustainability of the business through disruption, absence, financial cost and reputational impact.
“It all then rolls back,” he says, “because we start having financial costs associated with dealing with all of that.”
It’s a worldview shaped by years of asking what could go wrong, and what needs to be done now so it doesn’t.
As David puts it, he’s a problem solver who likes “to get in the thick of a problem and find solutions for it… not a problem that’s necessarily happened, but a problem that could.”
The open access difference
There’s another reason this role matters at Lumo and it goes beyond the scale of the network. It’s embedded in the culture.
“One of the big things that stand out for me,” David says, “is within open access, because we’re very flat with our culture and our hierarchy. When we want to do something, there’s nothing holding us up or getting in the way.”
The non-negotiables remain non-negotiable. Risk assessments, safe methods of work and governance still matter. But the layers are reduced to what’s needed to maximise outcomes and speed of delivery.
“I don’t want unnecessary layers,” he says. “If I need to find something out, I know I can go and talk to a frontline member of staff. We have that conversation like we’re just two human beings.”
Less politics. More pace. More ownership. And in a commercial open access world, there’s a shared urgency underpinning it all. “We have a common goal,” he says.
Sustainability people planet and profit
For David, sustainability goes far beyond running electric trains, although Lumo does operate a 100 percent electric fleet on the East Coast. His definition is broader, and more human.
“We monitor what are we consuming in our offices. What water are we using. What waste do we produce,” he says. “That’s the planet side. But then there’s the people side. Recruitment practices, apprenticeships, people development.”
There’s also the financial strand, where procurement, local supply chains and community relationships become part of sustainability too. Economic resilience matters to the places Lumo serves.
That thinking becomes more complex as Lumo expands to the West Coast, with a new operation launching this spring connecting Stirling to London via Preston.
It’s a technical challenge and a reputational one, given how strongly Lumo has built its name on the East Coast. David sees it as an opportunity to apply the same ethos of learning quickly, building strong local partnerships and pushing constant improvement.
Powered by care – driven by purpose
If David’s professional world is built around risks, frameworks and controls, the most revealing parts of his story sit outside the day job.
He’s deeply involved in the North East charity sector, including serving as a trustee for a cancer charity focused on respite support for teenagers and families. He talks about it matter-of-factly, as something that just needs doing, but it clearly shapes how he thinks about leadership.
“It’s all about improving outcomes,” he says.
That instinct feeds directly into Lumo’s community work through Daft as a Brush Cancer Patient Care, the Newcastle-based charity that transports cancer patients to and from chemotherapy and radiotherapy free of charge, supported by hundreds of volunteers and a fleet of ambulances.
For David, this is where Lumo’s sustainability work becomes tangible.
“[Daft as a Brush] don’t have all the skills and expertise in their organisation to work towards” sustainability reporting and emissions requirements,” he explains. “So I’m supporting them with that. Helping them develop reporting, metrics, systems and policies.”
It’s skills-based volunteering in action. He’s also helping connect the charity to more visible, everyday opportunities for passengers to support the cause, including enabling donations through Delay Repay and exploring tangible fundraising goals people can understand and get behind.
“I always use the church roof fund example,” he says, describing the classic thermometer-style fundraising tracker. “Let’s get some of that on our website. Let’s show how much has been done here.”
That desire to make impact visible, to connect systems to people, mirrors his approach to safety. It’s even captured in an internal message he’s created for Lumo’s safety culture, “safer today than yesterday,” with a strapline that sums up how he thinks.
“I thrive under pressure,” he says. “It’s fast paced and that’s what I like.”
He has two young children. He travels frequently. He volunteers. He’s involved in community roles. He still finds time for the gym, often at 4.30am.
“I’m very lucky that my kids sleep from seven at night until seven in the morning,” he laughs, as if that explains everything.
And when he does switch off, it’s rarely by slowing down. He’s a skier, and it’s fast becoming a family tradition, even for his three and four year old children who have just returned from their first ski trips.
It all fits. He’s someone who likes motion, momentum and systems that work.
Because whether he’s thinking about protests, passenger behaviour, supply chains or community partnerships, David keeps coming back to the same underlying goal. Making things better…before they break.
And if he does that well, most passengers will never know his name. Which is exactly the point.
David lives with his husband and two children near Newcastle.
lumo.co.uk