Improving our capability and managing risks
We need to improve our capability to address the key risk areas identified in the rail industry’s strategy, Leading Health and Safety on Britain’s Railway.
Monitoring safety is a fundamental aspect of managing safety risk effectively and efficiently. While operators monitor their own safety, RSSB monitors at sector level. Our Safety Management Intelligence System (SMIS) is a rich source of shared safety data, and we continue to make it quicker and easier to use, including by establishing automatic data transfer between SMIS and individual company systems.
RSSB has also developed new monitoring capabilities, including introducing a thresholds approach for safety metrics. This approach tests changes in the number of events recorded against historical data to identify significant changes and where further attention or action might be required. It ensures that any action (including taking no action) is conscious and does not result in action by default. We will be making better use of technology to introduce automatic alerting when thresholds are breached, and we will be building interactive dashboards.
As the railway goes through a period of change, RSSB is also monitoring safety to identify any adverse trends that could be related to rail reform. We feed this information into the Rail Transformation Programme’s Safety Working Group to support the industry in reforming safely.
Effective hazard management is key to railway safety. RSSB has continued to build risk management capability in GB rail by continuing to develop its bowtie library and by publishing a new Generic Hazard List. This will save rail companies time and provide them with confidence that their hazard lists are complete and consistent. It also provides a framework for linking requirements in standards to the hazards they manage.
RSSB has built a new user interface for the Safety Risk Model (SRM) v9, enabling users to access and interact with its outputs more easily. It will help them make use of the localisation features and provide the information they need to make the best evidence- and risk-based decisions.
RSSB is currently using the SRM to support the operational response to adverse weather, to evaluate options for guiding derailed trains, and to support changes to standards requirements on the provision of lineside telephones.
Human factors (HF) is concerned with the optimisation of human performance in the workplace. In the rail sector, it considers working environments from a human-centred perspective by studying how the whole system influences the way people behave and interact with the railway.
RSSB’s HF team has developed new and enhanced resources to help managers, trainers, assessors, and frontline staff use non-technical skills (NTS). The materials developed in this project will help users to better understand, observe, evaluate and develop NTS in a range of rail safety-critical roles. Rail companies have already begun to implement the revised NTS framework and new NTS supporting materials.
The research into the evaluation of human performance provides a human factors methodology for identifying reasons for incidents and developing solutions. A key output from this project is a good practice guide which shows how to apply the human factors process for incident reduction. It’s aimed at operational managers, risk practitioners, safety and project engineers, and senior managers.
A part of SMIS, the SMIS causes form provides an industry-wide mechanism for collecting underlying cause data. Structured around the human performance factors and the 10 incident factors, the causes form allows for the better understanding of the underlying causes of accidents so that informed safety decisions can be made. However, a small number of companies are not meeting the required level of data quality on SPAD causes; we are targeting them for improvement.
The HF team delivered a significant number of training courses to passenger, freight, infrastructure and railway suppliers. The training has helped build internal capability of railway companies in the areas of HR, NTS, risk-based training needs analysis, operational decision making, frontline leadership, and carrying out safety conversations on site.
The future presents both opportunities and unknown risks. As the rail industry undergoes a transformative period of change, the demand for insight on emerging challenges, and potential advancements, is even greater.
There are hardware- and software-related cyber security risks that the railway must be able to manage. There are also opportunities as well as threats posed by artificial intelligence. We must be able to take advantage of the opportunities but be aware of and manage the threats.
Covid-19 showed us how devastating a pandemic can be, but the next pandemic might be different. RSSB’s ‘Pandemic Playbook’ draws on scientific literature, white papers, industry interviews, and pandemic playbooks from other industries and countries to provide rail companies with a framework to support them in building disease-agnostic plans. But GB’s rail faces many other major threats, such as those listed in the national risk register. Rail must be adequately prepared to manage all risks.
To support the industry, RSSB has developed a horizon scanning capability to look beyond the day-to-day challenges of the rail sector. It helps us consider future threats and opportunities so that we can provide insights to inform the rail industry’s long-term thinking and foresight.