Interview with Professor Phil Blythe

Phil Blythe was born in Durham in 1963, he was a premature baby having been born 10 weeks early. He has a younger sister. The family returned to Durham where his father was originally from, after being based in Cornwall while serving in the Fleet Air Army. Just after he was born, his father was posted to Malta. Phil’s mother followed later once Phil was able to leave hospital. He says: “The fact I survived all that back in 1963 has always given me an optimistic view of life.”

The family stayed in Malta until Phil was four and were then posted to the Royal Naval Air Station Condor in Arbroath, (now the Royal Marine base). Phil adds: “We came back to Durham when my dad retired from the Navy in 1969/1970. Sadly my dad passed away at the age of forty-two at the end of 1971 when I was eight, so my mum brought myself and my younger sister up by herself. I’m eternally grateful for what she did and she sacrificed everything else, as a mum does, to look after her kids. We had the best of what we could have, it was a happy childhood.”

The family lived in a council house in Durham opposite the schools the children attended, he adds: “It meant my house was the hub for a lot of people to come to before and after school. We had the best of what we could have, it was a happy childhood.”

Phil attended his local primary and secondary schools, he says: “I worked hard but I wasn’t in the top ten per cent or twenty per cent of the class. I did my A levels. I was looking at doing chemistry but our chemistry teachers weren’t particularly great at the time, so I chose maths, physics and politics. I was really pleased I did, because you  learned to see a lot of things in a wider context than just looking at it from the science and engineering point of view.  Who’d have thought that forty years later I’d end up being Chief Scientific Adviser at DfT, where you’re thinking about science, technology and the policy all at the same time.”

Asked about inspirational teachers, he identifies his English teacher, Mrs Dickinson, who encouraged students to challenge themselves to be expressive in their writing, and his politics teacher, Dennis Harrigan, who encouraged students to think about the bigger picture. Phil adds: “We had a fab physics teacher at A level who made it interesting, you didn’t only learn the formula, you actually understood what it meant in the real world, which I think was really helpful. One of the criticisms I sometimes have of some of the teaching I’ve seen is that it’s all the formulae, but does not provide the application of understanding what does it mean in the real world.  I think that’s really important, because once people get what it means for them, they become far more interested in learning more about it.”

 Phil also enjoyed the more practical elements of the curriculum, including craft lessons where he built balsa wood aeroplanes and he took O level metalwork for which he built a small steam engine, he says: “I did all the very delicate measurements and boring in a lathe to make the pistons etc.  It was good fun.  It blew up in the end and nearly killed us all, but it was good fun while it was there.”

Phil’s first encounter with computers was with a ZX81, a home computer, he says: “It had just a few kilobytes of memory and a 16-kilobyte extension memory which was about the size of a big mobile phone, which you plugged in the back and then you could load programs from a cassette on.  That was my first and my only experience of a computer until near the end of my time at university.

In 1981, Phil, having finished his A levels considered his options for university. He says: I really didn’t know what I wanted to do at university.  I knew I probably wanted to do something practical or something engineering, but in those days it wasn’t very clear what an electrical engineer or a chemical engineer or a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer did. In the end I chose electrical electronic engineering.”

He went to what was Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University where he did a four year sandwich degree which involved working in industry during the summers.

For his project, Phil did research on vehicle communications using microwave communications. He explains: “In those days there wasn’t any way for vehicle and roadside to communicate with each other and there were some interesting looking things like what could be done for automatic tolling and road pricing.  So I got involved in a research team doing that. It was a joint project between Northumbria University and Newcastle University. Although I loved doing the technology stuff, I got more interested in wondering about all the applications that technology could be applied to in the transport field so I moved over to the transport group at the university where I became their technology guru, although I wasn’t really a technology guru. I looked at all these opportunities for new tech. This was in 1985 when technology was very expensive, clunky and largely didn’t work, and there was virtually no communications, virtually no use of computers whatsoever within transportation at the time.”

After finishing his degree, Phil stayed on to start on his PhD, of which he says: “That was the theory, but I never actually got round to submitting it because I got so busy with the other stuff, developing road to vehicle coms, microwaves for that.  That’s how I got known in the transport field as one of the technology leaders.”

In 1989, after completing his degree and starting but not finishing his PhD, Phil was appointed as a contract researcher at Newcastle University and continued his work in the field of transport communications which was originally called Road Traffic Informatics (RTI), then Advanced Transport Telematics (ATT) before intelligent transport systems (ITS) was adopted as the global term.

He was part of the Transport Operation Research Group (TORG), led by transport professor Peter Hills, who tried to push the UK to think about road pricing.  As part of the team, Phil worked with and managed a number of research associates, working on a large number of projects across the UK and Europe.

Phil was appointed senior lecturer in 1999 and three years later, just before he turned forty, he became Chair at the university.

He highlights some of the project work, saying: “We won a European project, which I wrote in the late 1980s, for the first EU programme on transport technology, called Drive, which started in 1989. The aim was to look at the potential for developing this road to vehicle communications for automatic tolling, the ambition was to try and replace the toll plaza by communications that would deduct money from a device in the vehicle without having to be in lane, without having to stop.

“We were also looking at the potential for doing that for road pricing as there was a real interest in the UK and in many parts of Europe to look at could road pricing be a way of managing traffic demand.  In Hong Kong, in ’85 they introduced a demonstration system of road pricing, which was basically inductive loops in the ground talking to a tag on the bottom of a vehicle about the size of a litre of fruit juice, and it passed an ID code back to the ground and you could charge on that.  We wanted to look at what were the next generations of that, how they could be used for things like introducing road pricing in a big city or a complex city.

“We won some money from SERC (now EPSRC), and from the EU, and from what was then the Department of Transport, now Department for Transport, to develop a technology to do that, with the view of demonstrating it in the city of Cambridge.”

Cambridge was chosen because it was the base for Brian Aldridge, the then Director of Transportation in Cambridge who had an idea of congestion metering. Phil explains: “We developed a system for that and put it into Cambridge between ’92 and ’94, called the Cambridge congestion metering scheme. It was the first ever demo of smart road pricing in the UK and indeed in Europe, apart from a couple of trials we were also involved via our European projects in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen in Norway at the time.”

At the same time, Phil was also advising the European Commission on demand management of road pricing. He says: “I was in Brussels almost every week and travelling to somewhere in the UK, it was interesting, advising at the very high levels of European Commission, giving presentations to the parliament.”

Phil was also advising the Senior Officials Group IT Standards Europe (SOGITSE) on the frequency that should be used for road to vehicle communications. He explains: “In Europe, we’d all focussed on 2.45 gigahertz, which is the same frequency as our microwave ovens and is known as the industrial, scientific and medical band (ISM), which means anybody can use it without a licence within reason and within limits of how much power you use.”

However, when Amtech, an American company, started to introduce container tags using the same sort of frequency, Phil and his team wrote a business and technical case for Europe to start using 5.85 gigahertz, also an ISM band. He adds: “That’s where all the tolling systems, road pricing, vehicle to roadside coms for things like route guidance and connected vehicles all exist now.”

Phil took two secondments to Philips research and a Saab Computate, he says: “These were the two companies really taking what we’d done and developing the technology.  I was also seconded to the European Commission as the Area One Chairman, and then working with the strategic assessment team, which tried to identity what were the next generation of exciting things and challenges we should be trying to fund through European research in transport technology. However, I was always attached to Newcastle university in one way or another.”

Phil highlights the work he has been involved in the lead up to the taking on the role of Chief Science Advisor to the Department for Transport in 2015. This included his first interaction with the Department as part of the Transport Operation Research Group (TORG) at Newcastle university and his work as part of the Review of Charging Options for London (ROCOL).

He says: “We produced recommendations of how a road pricing system could be implemented in London within three years of the first mayor of London being elected.  At the time, the communications technology probably wasn’t reliable enough for the numbers of vehicles we were dealing with, and so we came up with a camera solution.” As a result of this work, in 2003, the new mayor delivered congestion charging in London.

Phil adds: “I was very proud of that, and I try and offset any travel I do, and I don’t do a lot of traveling nowadays, against the carbon savings we have from congestion charging in London.”

The group was also involved in advising the Department on national ticketing schemes. While London had set signed a deal with Prestige to introduce a new ticket scheme for London, the rest of the country were lagging behind. He says: “The rest of the country were leaderless in terms of what to do, so we worked with the Department to come up with the idea of a national specification for public transport smart-cards, this was at quite an early stage for smart-cards, and that developed into what’s known as the ITSO specification, which is still the standard that is used for interoperable fare payment.”

Following on from this work, Phil was then invited to join the Government Smart-card Working Group, under the office of the e-Envoy, set up by Tony Blair set up in ‘97/98. The group were looking at how to push forward technology and the use of computing and data and look at the options for how smart-cards could be used across government.

Phil says: “At that time, I wrote the spec to introduce a smart-card for Newcastle University, which included the public transport app, not just a student card.  It was also used for voting, it was the first time in the UK that a smartcard had been used for voting anywhere. A number of ministers came up to see that.  I’m quite proud of those achievements and that led to me being invited by what was then known as Go Science, to lead on one of their foresight studies on future intelligent infrastructure. I became the lead adviser on that, pulling a team of academics and industry together to report on that which we delivered in 2006. That’s probably where I began to get  recognition on the more policy side of government; I was someone that they could call on to do stuff.”

In 2015, Phil became Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for the Department for Transport (DfT). Having accepted the role, Phil’s arrival was a little bit chaotic, he explains: “There was nothing ready.  I didn’t have an office, a team, no one knew what science was in the department, so I turned up there almost after the first week or two suffering from toxic shock, thinking what have I let myself in for?  I feel like just going back to the university for a quiet life, but I decided I had to give it a go.”

Phil’s initial priority was to build the the profile of science and engineering and what his CSA role could achieve, he concentrated not only on the DfT but also on other government departments.  In 2015, the Volkswagen emissions scandal gave Phil the opportunity he needed to demonstrate what could be done. Phil explains: “It was a real opportunity because it meant I could bring a team together.”

Phil was supported by Sir Mark Walport, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, who helped him pull together whatever was needed. The team included CSAs from DEC,  BEIS, Defra, etc, and seconded in experts from government departments.  Phil adds: “I had a proper science team, getting the evidence together, writing reports for the Inter-Ministerial Group on Clean Growth. It was really a great example of how you can bring that science and engineering expertise from across government together and deliver on something and understand it really quickly. In a way, that really led to the role Chief Scientific Advisers having that much higher profile and being seen to deliver on really important things for government.”

During his time as CSA, Phil worked on numerous large projects, including the industrial strategy, and the four grand challenges, among others, Phil explains: “Through pushing with others we got future mobility to be one of the four grand challenges, along with big data and AI, green tech and smart health systems. We really pushed the agenda on automation, electromobility, decarbonisation, accessibility, future urban aviation including drones and flying taxis of the future. It was a really good time because everybody was bought into that.”

During the last two years of his role as CSA, Phil was focused on Covid. He says of the experience in the early days when data and information was very limited: “I was looking at it from a transport point of view, what was needed, what data might be needed, what was the best approach to take.  It was a really tricky time because the SAGE and other groups were trying to give advice based on incomplete evidence, but at least something the government could use to try and make decisions. I was talking to my counterparts around the world trying to find out what they knew, what they thought, to just try and understand whether we were all in this almost black hole of lack of information, and we were.  We looked at all the data sources, we got Royal Academy, Royal Society, others to do rapid reviews to see what people were publishing or what they were thinking, whether it was akin to anything else that had happened in the past.

“It was a real time of uncertainty, and having Sir Patrick as GCSA and Chris Whitty as Chief Medical Officer were definitely the right people at the right time, they fronted everything on the science side, were able to speak in a very clear way to politicians and to the general public.”

Having completed four years as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Transport, Phil returned to his role at Newcastle university.

Asked about the intersection between computing technology and transport, in particular for automated vehicles, Phil, who is leading on automated vehicles explains a project with Nissan in the north-east.

He says: “The north-east is a real hotbed of innovation in automation. We’ve got some big projects running around Nissan, the motor manufacturing plant, where we’ve developed a driverless electric tractor unit which can pull forty-ton loads from the logistics companies around Nissan into the Nissan factory.

“They’ve been developed with all the sensors to work out where they are on the road, they have a 5G connection and there is a teleoperator at the logistics company, VANTEC, who replaces the driver. If there computer is not quite sure, maybe there’s something parked in the way or something else, then the teleoperator can take it over and drive it remotely.”

Phil is also involved in set up a National Innovation Centre on Connected Autonomous Logistics (NICCAL).

Phil and his team have also won a project to introduce a driverless bus in the centre of Sunderland. He says: “All the computing science and sensing around running a driverless bus in the centre of an urban environment is really challenging, so we’re looking at all the sensing needed, what people would accept as driverless, what their perceptions of that will be, how it can be made more autonomous to the point where a smart software will take over from remote supervisors etc, because I think that’s the only way the business case will stack up. People challenge on that, saying, but what about all these poor drivers, they’re going to be out of a job. I don’t think that’s going to happen because there’s a massive national shortage of drivers, whether it be for HGVs or buses, and you’re still going to have some.  Some will be driving vehicles, some might be teleoperators, but for future productivity we need to move towards that automation, I think that’s really important.”

Phil explains that the other side of automation is to ensure that the transport management and control infrastructure is fit for purpose.  Newcastle University is the home for Newcastle’s regional urban traffic management and control centre, giving Phil and his team opportunities to use it as a research tool. The centre receives data from every CCTV camera around the entire north-east transport network. Phil explains: “We do lots of deep learning and AI on that to understand all the patterns that occur in traffic management, how that can be used to support automation, but also how it can be used to support smart traffic management.”

He points to a system called cognitive ITS where travel lights and vehicles talk to each other so that priority vehicles can transit in the most efficient way, helping to save fuel but also reduce emissions. Phil adds: “We’ve already got a couple of corridors running in Newcastle, one for Express buses coming in from Northumberland, and another one for passenger transport ambulances along Heaton Road, Chillingham Road, to the local hospital where they get smooth journeys because they don’t have to stop.  I think the future of traffic management will be in joining all that information together into a really smart computer system with really smart algorithms that understand the patterns.  As we have more automation, that will become more to the fore.  There’s been quite a lot of investment from Department for Transport and there’s quite a lot of investment from the local authorities to try and make this happen, I think this could be one of the next big things. If you get it right it also contributes really significantly towards decarbonisation.”

Newcastle University, Phil and his team have also been awarded the national hub looking at Decarbonised, Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructure for Transport (the DARe hub). Phil adds: “That’s where the big data and the models really come in, because there’s a lot of work on decarbonising transport systems and services and decarbonising infrastructure to some extent.  Not so much on the resilience.  So trying to put the two together is really interesting, because what you may think is good for decarbonising infrastructure and decarbonising transport systems such as electrification, may not actually be very good for resilience, for example, if you have electrification, resilience of the transport system may be less if you’re relying on just one fuel source which isn’t as distributed as fuel stations where you collect petrol and diesel.”

The hub brings together expertise in the UK from Newcastle, Heriott-Watt, Cambridge and Glasgow universities along with all the relevant stakeholders, Phil adds: “We’re trying to bring the whole of the UK expertise together to understand this field and provide that advice to government.”

The group is also looking at the potential impact of climate weather changes on the transport systems and infrastructure. Phil adds: “There’s a whole bunch of sensing, trying to understand our infrastructures better, trying to understand the infrastructure’s interaction with things like flooding, heat, wind, snow and the like. That’s really focussing a massive team of academics and industry at the moment. This is where the IT of machine learning, big datasets, collecting data at big scales, regional scales, even national scales as well as local scales, and putting this all together to actually form a picture of the future.  We couldn’t have done this twenty years ago. I hope that will help make the UK more resilient to the future challenges of climate change and provide evidence both on where investment should go in the future, and also how decarbonising the infrastructure can actually maybe reduce the impacts of climate change through less heating of our planet overall.”

Asked about other technologies, Phil highlights that “government see quantum computing as a game-changer for quite a lot of really mega processing, which is what government needs.  They need things to join up lots of different aspects of government in a way that makes some sense.”

He also highlights the area of position navigation technologies PNT, adding: “Position navigation and timing, are really important. Government’s looking at some ground-based versions of that to back up GPS, because so much of what we do now, so much of our computing systems, our transaction systems, our financial systems, rely on those signal timings from GPS.  That’s quite vulnerable.  We need alternatives, both for commerce and the timing signals, but also potentially for navigation in the future.”

He also highlights the need to be cognisant of how technologies can be used to jam communications, explain: “They can jam signals from satellites which are becoming mainstream primarily because of the innovations that are happening around the Ukraine war.  We need to be cognisant of that, because transport relies so much on navigation, so much on communications and information and so much on the whole PNT signals, so it’s pretty critical.”

Asked about what the next ten years might hold, Phil says: “We’ve got the potential, and we have essentially got an all-seeing, all-knowing transport system which knows broadly what your journey’s going to be from your habits, how you like to travel, what you’re willing to pay, what journey times you’re willing to have, what modes are you willing to use.  With that you could make a really optimal transport system that could be much, much more efficient.

“I think we’re going to see more rollout of electromobility.  I don’t know whether it’s going to be as fast as government’s hoping for, I still don’t think they’ve sold that well enough to the public to meet their 2035 agenda that all new vehicles will have to be zero tailpipe emission.

“I think there will be a role for hydrogen in transport, a role for e-fuels and drop-in fuels. One of the reasons that Rolls-Royce and others have been arguing for small modular reactors is they could be used to generate e-fuels by sucking carbon out of the air and turning them into aviation fuels, and fuels for lorries and ships as well.

“I think we’re also going to see automation, particularly for logistics, and possibly for public transport, where the game-changer will be if you can make it work, if you’ve got the data and the smartness in the system to make it work, the business case will only happen if you can replace the driver.

“I think we’re going to see some really interesting stuff with urban aviation as well.  We’re seeing drones being used for delivery, we’re seeing a whole bunch of trials and demonstrations on two-person drones, flying taxis, flying cars, etc.  And I could see over the next ten to fifteen years a real consideration about what could near vertical take-off, zero carbon or very low carbon urban aviation deliver.  Could it deliver a hundred-plus passenger aircraft flying from city to city in the UK?  That could have interesting things for the business case for HS2 and for trains, it could have a really interesting business case for National Highways, because if you have cars that are flying above the road rather than on the road, your maintenance may be much less than it is at the moment.”

Phil explains that the Department for Transport has disparate elements within it each looking after a different aspect of transport, e.g. road, rail, air, maritime etc. He says: “I think it’s important that the transport system is joined. … At the moment, they’re all in different directorates, they don’t really talk to each other, they don’t tend to share data, and the opportunity to bring all that together into a much more efficient system in the UK that’s joined up.  My mantra at DfT, and I even got some of the ministers using it by the time I left, was de-silofication, trying to bring transport out of the silos, looking at the opportunities that digital connectivity and data could do to make it a one transport system, and making sure it delivers for all.  I think that’s where we could get to.”

He concludes: “The UK has some fantastic innovations in this space, we just need the opportunity to bring them to market and to demonstrate them at scale so that other countries and other parts of the world can learn from us and take some of our ideas and implement them there.”

Talking about the consideration of how technology can be applied, Phil says: “If you understand what new technologies are coming along, you can then think how that can be applied to solve problems.  …. It’s linking up the IT, it’s linking up all the other science and technologies coming along, and looking at what can it do now to deliver a policy in a different way, maybe more efficiently.  But looking at all this stuff on the horizon that’s coming, AI, machine learning, new sensing, new computing, smaller size of all of this, smaller cost, and if you nurture it well so it lands well, how it could lead to whole new paradigms in transport like an all-seeing, all-knowing transport network which potentially we had twenty years ago but never really exploited.  The role that automation could play, the role of doing things that could help reduce vehicle emissions.”

Asked if the UK has fulfilled its early lead in this technology, Phil says: “This is very typical of UK even now, we are a nation of great innovators, great thinkers, great researchers, we come up with some fantastic ideas and innovations, and we take them so far up the technology readiness levels (TRL), but in terms of turning them into products and making global markets out of them, we’re not so good.

“When I came into government in 2015, the innovation strategy was just coming into being, and that was a really important way of saying we recognise we’re innovative, we’ve got fantastic innovators in large companies and the universities, in the SMEs, how do we translate that into products and services that the UK can make money out of and encourage inward investment and investment of companies to locate in the UK.

We’re better than we were, but there’s still a lot more we can do.”

He continues: “I think Innovate UK has made a difference to some extent in doing that. However, one of the challenges is that the funding is always quite short term, with SMEs having to bid for more money to take them down the TRL levels every year.”

Asked if would do anything differently, Phil says: “I was so busy with projects that I never finished my PhD, that’s always been a regret.  The fact that people still recognised that I had a value and hence even being appointed as CSA without a PhD, is a really important point, but I wished I’d moved away from the projects, moved away from being asked to do all the stuff and got the PhD under my belt. I think that would have given me a lot more confidence to go forward both in academia and in other spaces as well.

Of his proudest professional achievement, Phil says: “I run a Masters degree in transport where we have modules on future mobility, it’s seeing those students move out of academia to work in local authorities, industry, government and the like, and actually implement these solutions. Seeing all those smart people with the energy and the ambition to move forward.  I’ve told them what’s coming in twenty years’ time, so I wonder how they can use that now, how they can plan for that now, and actually deliver.

“Everybody uses transport, everybody has a view on transport, if you didn’t have transport you wouldn’t have an economy, you wouldn’t have a society.  It’s really important, but it’s going to have to change to meet the demands of de-carbonisation and net zero and the resilience of the future.  With the urbanisation putting more people into cities, that puts a whole bunch of different challenges on what transportation means, so you’re never going to be out of a job, but the opportunities to make a real difference to society are massive.  I’m proud of my students.  I’m also obviously eternally grateful to my wife and my kids for supporting me through this, particularly in those years where I spent a significant proportion of my time down in London.”

Asked what advice he’d offer young people aspiring to join the field of engineering today, Phil says: “There’s so much to do in this space.  What’s now badged as future mobility, bringing science, technology, computing, communications, AI and everything else to solve transport problems is massive.  As an engineer, what we do is we bring the science and the maths and we turn it into solutions.  We build the solutions that you see, every building, house, car, ship, everything you see, it has been engineered. If you really want to make a difference do engineering.

“The diversity of the career paths you can have working on the technologies, on the applications, developing whole new solutions for cities, delivering on the solution for decarbonisation, net zero and making sure we’re resilient in the future is really important.  Also, transferring those skills to other countries that are less fortunate in terms of funding and trying to solve the problems elsewhere in the world are really important.  Only engineers can do that.

“As an engineer you’re trained to solve problems, think logically, it doesn’t matter what engineering skill you’ve been trained in, you can bring ideas, work out the problems and the challenges and deliver that into solutions.  Unless your parents are engineers or if the teachers really understand that broader aspect of engineering, you’re not going to be told that, you’re not going to realise that once you’ve got that skill, you can think about the bigger system, think about the wider context and go and solve those problems.

“You can go and do environmental science which will give you great data and tell you what the problems are, but it won’t tell you what the solutions are, the engineers will find the solutions for you.  That needs data, needs a whole bunch of skills on understanding data, using data, how AI can be used, but also those softer skills of engaging with the wider community, the wider project team and understanding what you’re doing, what context that means for the community, for society, for the individual, for government, and for the economy, because at the end of the day, if it’s not generating money and doing stuff, people are not going to fund it.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nichollas

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley