British Leyland is usually remembered for strikes, political drama and missed opportunities, but buried within that familiar narrative is a very different story.
Keith Adams relates how BL Systems emerged to bring order, systems thinking and modern computing to Britain’s largest carmaker after speaking to the principal players in the story.
The BL Systems story – the early years
The British Leyland story is an oft-told one – usually told through strikes, missed opportunities and political drama, a rolling crisis in which even the successes feel unintended. However, hidden inside that clichéd narrative is a parallel story that runs rather differently, one of systems thinking, technical ambition and people solving problems decades before the language existed to describe what they were doing.
That story begins with computers. By the mid-1970s, British Leyland was an industrial giant stitched together from dozens of former companies, each with its own way of doing things. Every major plant ran its own computer systems. Cowley, Longbridge, Solihull, Canley, Jaguar and Pressed Steel Fisher all operated independently, using an extraordinary mix of technologies.
As John Leighfield, then Chairman of BL Systems (below), recalls, ‘we had thousands of different computers… NCR machines, ICT, Honeywell, ICL, punch-card systems – the whole lot’. Each site had evolved its own solutions, often powerful in isolation but impossible to align across the group.
Making order out of chaos
There was no overarching strategy, no common architecture and no realistic way of understanding the business as a whole. Into this chaos stepped Leighfield, tasked with creating something British Leyland barely understood it needed: a systems function that could see across the organisation.
Crucially, and unusually for the time, systems reported directly to the Managing Director, a structure rooted in the Ryder Report. ‘The word systems is key,’ Leighfield said. ‘The Ryder Report unusually highlighted systems as a critical area, and had them reporting straight into the Managing Director. That was very unusual in the mid-1970s.’
Almost immediately, one problem eclipsed all others: people. Computing skills were scarce nationally, and British Leyland was not an attractive employer for young IT professionals with options elsewhere. Staff turnover hovered around 30 per cent. Internally, rigid job-grading structures treated computer specialists as interchangeable administrators rather than scarce strategic talent.
Attracting the right people
Leighfield was blunt about the conclusion he and his colleagues reached. ‘We came to the conclusion we were never going to crack the systems problem without cracking the staffing problem,’ he said. ‘And we were never going to crack the staffing problem while we were tied into British Leyland’s grading structures.’
The solution was radical. BL Systems would have to operate as a separate company, free to recruit properly, pay market rates and behave commercially. To the Board, it felt dangerous. ‘They were deeply nervous,’ Leighfield recalled. ‘They believed that if we did something different for computer people, the Trade Unions elsewhere would demand the same treatment. That fear ran very deep.’
The wider political climate mattered. British Leyland’s effective nationalisation had brought with it ideas about reform, including worker participation. Where much of the company treated it reluctantly, BL Systems approached it differently. ‘We thought, these are bright young people,’ Leighfield explained. ‘We’d like them to participate.’ In practice, the formality quickly became unnecessary. ‘In the end they said to us, “You know what you’re doing. We don’t need this. Just get on and run the strategy.”’
Treating everyone the same way
That openness extended into places where it was least expected. Leighfield remembered arriving at his first headquarters in the Triumph plant at Canley and deliberately seeking out the local Computer Operations Manager, a committed member of the Socialist Workers Party.
‘He couldn’t understand why I was talking to him,’ Leighfield recalled. ‘Or why I was telling him what we were planning to do.’ The encounter never became confrontational. ‘His influence was infinitesimal, really,’ he added. ‘But it was the first time I’d come across someone that far left politically. I found it rather amusing.’
The same pattern was repeated when BL Systems began experimenting with new technology. When Leighfield’s team introduced word processing on a trial basis at Canley, Trade Union permission was required even to test it on their own secretaries.
‘They let us run a six-month trial,’ he recalled. ‘And our secretaries took to it like a swan to water.’ When the trial ended, officials demanded the equipment be removed. ‘The secretaries threatened to go on strike if it was taken away,’ he said. ‘Opposition evaporated very quickly.’
A new type of culture
That openness became cultural bedrock. Graduates were recruited in significant numbers and trained internally. Senior management made themselves visible and accessible. Leighfield recalled being asked whether he wanted to vet questions at graduate forums.
‘I said no,’ he remembered. ‘I told them, “Ask whatever you want, and I’ll answer.” That was fundamental to how we believed organisations should work.’
This mattered because the technical challenge ahead was formidable. BL Systems inherited powerful, semi-autonomous computing departments embedded within individual plants, each effectively a local empire.
Making sense of it all
Chris Chiles (above), later Chief Executive of ISTEL, was brought in to impose order on the chaos. ‘We were running major systems on 15 different software platforms,’ he recalled. ‘You couldn’t rationalise anything in an environment like that.’
Centralisation was inevitable, but it was never going to be painless. ‘These were powerful groups,’ Chiles said. ‘And we had to get them on side, because you couldn’t implement what we were trying to do without bringing the people with you.’
Psychological assessments showed intelligence levels well above average across BL Systems. Leighfield was careful not to romanticise that. ‘We had very bright people,’ he said, ‘but brilliance doesn’t mean they were always easy.’ Some had IQs well into the 140s. ‘One or two were impossible to manage,’ he admitted, with a chuckle. ‘That was my problem, not theirs.’
Trusting people to do the job
What mattered was what happened when those people were trusted. Leighfield was always conscious that systems thinking did not exist in isolation from industry itself. Born in Cowley, and returning there later in his career, he felt a strong sense of continuity. ‘I was always aware,’ he reflected, ‘that this was about making factories work better for the people inside them, not just producing reports.’
By the time BL Systems was established as a separate entity, one thing was obvious to those inside it. British Leyland’s problems were not rooted in a lack of intelligence or imagination. They were structural – and, for the first time, a part of the company had been allowed to design itself around solving them.
The next step would be to build something unprecedented in British industry: a central computing facility that would quietly become the nervous system of the entire organisation.
Next: Inside the Central Data Centre, and the moment British Leyland’s factories started thinking.
[Editor’s Note: Otter.ai was used to record and transcribe the interview with John Leighfield, Chris Chiles and Dave Handley, and ChatGPT was used as an editorial aid during drafting to help structure, refine and grammar check this article as well as draft several the meta description suggestions. Photoshop was used to recrop and extend some backgrounds in the images, and then it was then human sub-edited. The interview and story were 100% human written.]
Is the Editor of the Parkers website, formerly editor of Classic Car Weekly, and launch editor/creator of Modern Classics magazine. Has contributed to various motoring titles including Octane, Practical Classics, Evo, Honest John, CAR magazine, Autocar, Pistonheads, Diesel Car, Practical Performance Car, Performance French Car, Car Mechanics, Jaguar World Monthly, MG Enthusiast, Modern MINI, Practical Classics, Fifth Gear Website, Radio 4, and the the Motoring Independent...
Likes 'conditionally challenged' motors and taking them on unfeasible adventures all across Europe.
- History : Why British Leyland built BL Systems – Part Three : People, power and pride - 12 February 2026
- History : Why British Leyland built BL Systems – Part Two : The factory that thought - 11 February 2026
- History : Why British Leyland built BL Systems – Part One : Before the cloud - 10 February 2026
I love the bit about the word processors, that the secretaries threatened to strike if they were taken away, but it was the union that had wanted them removed – the tail trying to wag the dog!. It reminds me of working for TXU Energi and its collapse before being bought by Powergen.
The unions in their infinite wisdom had negotiated with Powergen during the takeover, that all TXU staff would get redundancy based on TXU terms if there was to be any. Sounded great, but Powergen redundancy terms were considerably better. Us members were livid as they had not consulted us at all. When challenged both Powergen and the union, neither would back down, so we all cancelled our union membership and I have never been a member of any union since.
The word processor issue reminds me of when Arthur Scargill called for state support of the UK typewriter manufacturing industry.
I wonder how Istel would have coped with JLR’s recent IT problems – would they even have happened?
I remember introducing word processing (equipment made by Olivetti) to a company in about 1983. Everyone, irrespective of position, did a four-day training course after which there was an assessment. It was tacitly understood that some people were likely to be made redundant.
There was Union resistance, until I told them that there would be unlimited overtime available to cover the workload of the staff who were away on the course. And the offer of a 10% “Data processing skills” salary uplift for the best performing 10% of junior/middle sector staff sealed the deal. I also pointed out that those made redundant could get a decent payout, and also would be able to show potential new employers their training certificates in ‘New Technology’.
Everyone then wanted to be in the “10% getting the extra 10%” club.
The threat of strikes by the unionised staff miraculously disappeared.
A fascinating take on an under-reported aspect of the British car industry.
Yes, to me the production side is just as interesting as the product.
In the late-60s/early-70s my father was involved in (and published several papers on) what was then called “group technology” or “cellular manufacturing” – essentially combining processes on a workpiece to minimise the distance travelled and the number of times a workpiece had to be loaded and unloaded into process stations. This was all in the days of mainframe computers with big spinning tape reels, punched cards and ticker-tape, but it meant they could halve the number of process stations.
I am sure that there would have been people within Leyland who would be familiar with these ideas.
The other thing I remember from my father talking about stuff was the computerisation of the “Brisch code” system for parts inventory, where an ICL1906 mainframe computer could then keep track of what was needed for a particular job and what needed to be restocked.
Again, I wonder if BMC/BL had something equivalent. (They probably had several home-grown parallel equivalent systems that wouldn’t interwork!)
While the move to new technologies doesn’t always work and mistakes can be very costly to rectify, in the main, computerisation is far better than the tedious and costly paper-based systems they replace, even if some shedding of jobs is inevitable.
I know in the job I started in 1998, when the internet was in its infancy, we had to deal with thousands of paper forms, where mistakes were common, both at a customer and staff level, and understandably it led to delays and considerable anger from customers. Moving to an electronic system in the Noughties and encouraging customers to use a website, which pre-validated the forms, saw a massive reduction in errors. Now, 98 pc of transactions are done online and it’s vastly better than the old days.
I can remember in my first full time job manually typing details that had been faxed from another company because the computer systems were incompatible! This was eventually rectified much to my relief as it seemed a ridiculous situation!
I have a computer training video which features the Unipart parts hotline computer, based at Cowley. I assume BL systems might have had some input into this.
For once, a positive Leyland story and how the company set up a respected IT department, when this was in its infancy in the UK.
If only this could have been applied successfully to the rest of the company.