Appointment

High Speed Rail Group adds Kier and Arcadis directors to its board

By Staff Writer  |  19 August 2026

The High Speed Rail Group has appointed Mandy Duncan, Managing Director for Rail and Aviation at Kier Infrastructure, and Jonathan Sharrock, Senior Account Director at Arcadis, to its board of directors.

The appointments were announced on 18 August 2026. No term of office is published and none is stated here.

Duncan brings leadership experience from the rail, aviation, water and nuclear sectors, and experience in strengthening supply chains and retaining the skills needed to deliver future infrastructure projects. Sharrock leads his firm's work supporting HS2 and spent 13 years at the Department for Transport before that.

The group describes itself as an industry body representing organisations across the high speed rail and rail infrastructure supply chain. It said the appointments come as government looks to rail infrastructure investment to drive economic growth, improve productivity, unlock regeneration and strengthen connectivity between towns and cities across the United Kingdom.

Huw Merriman, Chair of the High Speed Rail Group, said: "At a time when Government is rightly looking to infrastructure to unlock growth, the debate is no longer whether better connectivity matters. The challenge now is how we deliver the next generation of rail investment in a way that is efficient and affordable, while learning the lessons from projects like HS2 already under way." He added that the two appointees "bring exactly the kind of delivery experience needed to help shape that conversation".

Duncan said: "I'm delighted to be joining the High Speed Rail Group Board at such an important time for the industry. Throughout my career, I've seen first-hand the value that rail investment delivers by supporting economic growth, improving connectivity and creating opportunities for communities across the UK."

Sharrock said: "My experience working on major projects across both the public and private sectors has shown me that successful delivery depends on a strong relationship between supply chain partners and project delivery teams, especially when navigating pressures, constraints and trade-offs."

What the practitioner should take from this

Board appointments at an industry body are easy to pass over, and on a programme the size of HS2 they should not be. Trade associations of this kind are where the sector's collective position on procurement structures, risk allocation and contract form is worked out before it reaches a client. When the supply chain places two people with live delivery roles on such a board, the positions that body takes on future rail investment will be informed by what those roles have taught them about where the current arrangements break.

Sharrock's own words point at the substance. A statement that successful delivery depends on the relationship between supply chain partners and project delivery teams, particularly when navigating pressures, constraints and trade-offs, is a description of the conditions in which change control fails. Pressure, constraint and trade-off are the circumstances in which instructions are given informally, in which work proceeds ahead of a formal variation, and in which a contractor's entitlement later has to be reconstructed from correspondence rather than read off a signed change order. The remedy is dull and well understood: instructions in writing, an early warning procedure that is actually used, and records kept contemporaneously rather than assembled afterwards.

Merriman's reference to learning the lessons from projects already under way carries a similar implication for anyone advising on the next generation of schemes. On major programmes the lessons that survive are usually procedural rather than technical: how scope was frozen, when the target price was set relative to design maturity, and what the contract said about the consequences of a client-side change of direction. Practitioners working on rail investment that has not yet been let should expect those questions to be asked earlier in the process than they were on the current programme.

Nothing in the announcement concerns any contract, dispute or claim. It is a governance change at a representative body, and its interest to this readership lies in who will be shaping the sector's position on how the next schemes are procured.