Occupational health
and safety

Providing a safer, healthier, and better work environment for our workforce

There was one workforce fatality in 2024/25, following an assault at Ilford station. Overall, harm from assaults on staff was 17% up on last year. This was mainly due to a rise in the number of specified injuries.

The largest contribution to track worker harm is STFs. To combat the problem, Network Rail and the Infrastructure Safety Leadership Group (ISLG) have been holding STF roadshows across the country.

Near misses with track workers also reached historic lows, with a 50% reduction in the number of near misses compared to last year. Near misses between track workers and trains are now around 2.5 times less likely to occur than they were 5 years ago. But they do still occur, as the incidents at Chiltern Green and Morton Junction show.

Much of the reduction has been due to Network Rail’s drive to reduce unassisted lookout working. But more work in line blockages and possessions has led to more irregularities, particularly in failures to apply protection or correctly locate it. There have also been several cases of staff working outside protection limits. The 71^stepisode of our safety video series RED shows some of the risks associated with track work.

There remains a lack of industry-wide normalising data on the volume of work done using various protection methods. This limits our ability to draw safety insights from any increase or decrease in these metrics.

Depots are an often-forgotten part of the network but make up a significant portion of the risk to members of the workforce. In 2024/25, there was an increase in the harm received in yards, depots, and sidings, mainly due to increases in specified, severe, and non-severe injuries.

Work-related driving is critical to the rail industry. It ensures that rail staff can get where they are needed, when they are needed, to keep trains running safely and efficiently. There were no fatalities due to work-related driving that were within the scope of this report in 2024/25. However, a member of staff was fatally injured in a road accident in May 2024 while driving to their usual place of work.

This is outside of scope of this report but has been reviewed by the Road Risk Group. In 2024/25, there were 85 collisions involving road vehicles that resulted in injuries to members of the workforce. This is 18 more than last year. For many of these incidents, it will be only down to chance that they did not cause more serious injuries or even fatalities.

Figure 5: Track worker near misses