Horizon explores: Risk and Safety Intelligence
LHSBR is ‘running through the veins’ of East Midlands Railway
RSSB member interview
We speak with Katie Arthur, Head of Safety at East Midlands Railway (EMR), to learn how and why LHSBR has been embedded in the operator’s health, safety, and wellbeing plan.
Katie Arthur Head of Safety, East Midlands Railway
Katie Arthur, East Midlands Railway’s (EMR’s) Head of Safety, spoke with us about the decision to build LHSBR into the company’s health, safety, and wellbeing plan. Covering more risk profiles than ever before and encouraging a culture of safety ownership at the organisation, the LHSBR-inspired strategy has already brought KPI improvements and RM3 maturity to EMR. Could it help your company, too?
You’ve been in rail safety for over a decade. What drew you to this career?
I’ve been in rail for almost 19 years now. I came to rail straight out of university thinking it was going to be a short-term stop gap, but I’m still here! I started in finance and then moved into operational performance, and an opportunity came up to move into safety performance.
I’ve now been in rail safety for 13 years. I did my National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health (NEBOSH) certificate very early on, and I got an opportunity to support Sheffield Supertram with their safety needs. That was where I started to develop my safety leadership and gained further safety qualifications. And then, six years ago, I came back to EMR.
I love safety, and I’m a real advocate for promoting it as a career choice—encouraging people to explore the benefits of gaining safety qualifications to support either roles within the safety team or in wider rail operations. It has a value to all.
When you think of the safety landscape, what do you think has changed in that time?
For me, the role of safety has changed. When I first came into safety, it was a very compliance-driven function. But with the amount of change we’ve experienced as an industry in the past 5 years—like COVID—there’s been a need for safety to become more innovative in its approaches.
There’s a need to take safety beyond compliance and really understand how we can create effective risk management that complements our requirements as an organisation. It’s challenging trying to think outside the box, but to improve safety, we can’t simply stick to the way we’ve always done things.
LHSBR is getting an uplift. What sort of changes do you think this will bring?
I’m excited about it. LHSBR encourages us to consider the full risk profile for rail operations. And from the uplift, I’m hoping to see more of what LHSBR was really built on: more people coming together to look at problem statements within specific risk profiles.
I also think this will lead to more structured outputs for each risk area. EMR has been successful in setting the vision for each of those risk areas, but I think the LHSBR uplift will allow us to take a step back and ask ourselves what the tactical steps to achieving those strategic objectives are.
I’m also keen to see a potential further embedding of RM3. We use RM3 to measure our successes and determine whether we can mature in individual areas of risk, and I think it lends itself well to LHSBR.
Why did you build LHSBR into EMR’s safety plan? What did this entail?
In 2020, we made the decision to do a three-year plan rather than an annual plan. Rather than acting as a tactical plan, this would give us the opportunity to look at things a little deeper and move our risk management arrangements forward in a more meaningful way. And it just so happened to coincide with the relaunch of LHSBR.
What really appeals to me about LHSBR is that full, rounded approach to risk management. Traditionally, our safety plans tended to focus on more obvious areas of safety for rail, like signals passed at danger, Train Protection Warning System, and slips, trips, and falls. But what I really like about LHSBR is that it considers the whole risk profile and provides a structure that really ensures that you’re considering every single element. It also gives us a ‘vehicle’, so to speak, to get from one point to another—from idea to implementation.
So, we no longer have a safety plan. Instead, we have a health, safety, and wellbeing plan to align with LHSBR. It provides a neat place for all our health and wellbeing objectives to live and really encourages us to think about health and wellbeing as an integral part of safety management.
Our health, safety, and wellbeing plan uses the safety ‘four Ps’: places (station operations, road risk, depot safety, and fixed asset management); performance (train operations, rolling stock asset management, and public behaviour); people (health and wellbeing, workforce safety, workplace violence and trauma, and fatigue); and partners (like Network Rail, trade union safety reps, and RSSB).
Each risk pillar has a business owner to drive the plan forward. And it’s been great; we’ve seen some real sense of ownership in these different areas. It’s worked really well, and we’ve made the decision to continue adopting the LHSBR structure for future iterations of our plan.
How do you think the safety plan you’ve built at EMR supports the organisation’s safety mission?
One of our key values is that we keep people safe. LHSBR has been a really good vehicle for driving responsibility and clear accountability, so everyone in the business is very clear in terms of each risk profile and who is ultimately responsible for the delivery of the improvements within them.
This has enabled us to turn up the volume of those individual safety responsibilities and even anchor them into people’s personal objectives. So really, the plan we’ve built is running through the veins of the business.
Is there potential for wider industry to learn from your safety plan? If so, how?
We’ve seen KPI improvements since we launched our updated safety plan. We’ve seen RM3 maturity as well; there has been some substantial improvement in some of the risk areas in the same timeframe.
We’re certainly starting to see the benefits for both safety and performance. If that’s a measure of it being something that other companies should adopt, then yes, I would definitely encourage that. It makes sure you’ve got a structure and KPIs in place that cover all of your risk profiles. It also encourages you to really drill down and think, ‘Are we doing enough? Are we doing something in every single one of those areas?’
And there are so many RSSB resources and tools that can help other companies create a similar plan. If you look at each and every one of those risk profiles on the website, there’s guidance, advice, and so many tools that you can use. It’s just about applying those effectively, and your plan should write itself!
Thank you. What’s your parting message to our rail leader readers?
Collaboration is key. As train operators, we’re all trying to solve the same problems every day. We’re all trying to manage the same risk profiles. We need to work together through industry frameworks, like LHSBR and RM3, so that we can come together in our problem-solving efforts. Working smarter in this way—by using the same tools, knowledge, and experiences—can only make us stronger as an industry.
Learn about the LHSBR uplift in previous Horizon articles:
Leading Health and Safety on Britain's Railway is getting an uplift
Strategy challenges rail to unite amid change
Find out more about LHSBR, including key messages from our LHSBR risk groups, on our website.
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