Leading Health
and Safety on
Britain's Railway
is getting an uplift
Summer workshops pave the way for a health and safety strategy that’s fit to take industry further into the present century, says RSSB Operational Feedback Lead Greg Morse.
Greg Morse LHSBR Editor and Operational Feedback Lead, RSSB
What does an accident cost? It costs money. It costs time—and time is money. But behind every pound, every penny, and every data point is a person. A person with a family, friends, and loved ones. Stopping accidents saves.
The railway was once said to save the nation by providing the arteries through which our lifeblood flowed. This ebbed as more traffic was lost to road and air, but the pandemic showed how we can step up to get people and goods where they need to be when they need to be there. For a few short years, the railway was more important than at any time since the Second World War. It will be again—it has to be if carbon emissions are to be cut. But to return to its former glory, the industry must be efficient. Efficiency goes hand in hand with safety, but we’ll have to work together to achieve it. And that’s where RSSB comes in.
RSSB was set up in part to get the right people round the right table to focus on interface issues. This led to the establishment of systems interface committees and specialist cross-sector risk groups covering train accidents, station environments, asset integrity, and workforce safety, among other risk areas.
When Leading Health and Safety on Britain’s Railway (LHSBR) was first produced in 2016, it identified 12 specific risk areas where collaboration between duty holders, and others, would be essential to deliver continued improvements in the industry’s health and safety management maturity and performance. Each area was overseen by one of those cross-sector groups, which created and implemented their own plans to address the areas under their control. RSSB helped draw the lines between them—as in objects on the line, where the risk involved both infrastructure staff and train operations.
At the time of writing, the new industry structure is being debated, but it’s clear that the relationships between Network Rail and operators will soon be different. Network Rail will be replaced by Great British Railways (GBR), for one thing. The new organisation has been tasked with developing a long-term strategy to meet the government’s strategic objectives of meeting customer needs, delivering financial sustainability, and so on.
To answer the government’s call, GBR’s Long Term Strategy for Rail (LTSfR) will set out the industry’s response. But it’s not a health and safety manifesto. LHSBR, however, does set out the industry’s strategy for health and safety, without which the government’s strategic objectives cannot be met. To help it achieve those aims, LHSBR is being uplifted, and that means working with the industry.
Since collaboration is a continuous, flowing workstream, RSSB ran two workshops with its members. Most sectors were represented. Walter Cartwright, DB Cargo’s Operations and Safety Training Manager, for example, was there for freight, while on the passenger side, Imran Chaudry, MTR Elizabeth line’s Head of Driver Projects & Assurance, rubbed shoulders with c2c’s Stuart Browning and Ben Doran of ScotRail, among many others.
Samantha Facey, Govia Thameslink’s Health, Safety and Security Director, spoke for many when she said that ‘it’s never been more important to come together and discuss health, safety, and security on our railways. Train operators, having proudly continued to operate through some of the most challenging times of our generation, have emerged the other side of a global pandemic and are only now able to pause and reflect on where we find ourselves.’
‘There are many new and emerging risks, and LHSBR provides us with a framework we can refer to when assessing our own and collective risks, having the opportunity to discuss these in more detail has been invaluable.’
With these workshops complete, RSSB will analyse the outcomes and rank the opportunities to forge the new LHSBR—an LHSBR fit to take our industry further into the present century. We’ll bring you more news in the November edition of Horizon.
Both workshops saw debate, discussion, and delegates prioritising the opportunities we can see before us, including:
understanding red aspect approaches to signals more fully, to help us tackle SPAD risk more effectively
addressing newly emerging station risks, such as people sitting over the platform edge
identifying higher-risk customer profiles, to help break down the barriers to independent travel
enhancing our understanding of our asset base to help us plan for and respond to the effects of climate change
coordinating our approach to cyber security threats to critical assets and systems
collaborating and sharing resource to tackle trespass and suicide risk more effectively
educating more people in safe level crossing use, where crossing closure is not an option
encouraging more freight from the road to the railway, which also involves the condition of freight vehicles and embedding good practice across the industry
safeguarding the health and wellbeing of railway staff, with the aim of having the healthiest workforce in the world.
RSSB’s flagship Annual Health and Safety Report unpacks the risks across the rail network, as identified in LHSBR, and the work that’s under way to avert them. Check out the latest issue.
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