Tackling trespass and suicide together
Here’s how our new ‘one-stop shop’ will foster cross-industry collaboration and increase the visibility of what the industry is doing to tackle trespass and suicide, says RSSB’s Gemma Lavery.
Trespass and suicide prevention are hard challenges for rail to solve. The rail network is a dangerous environment, and by its very nature, it often attracts vulnerable individuals.
Data from our Annual Health and Safety Report show that 10 people died while trespassing on the railway in 2023–2024. In the same period, there were 274 suicides and suspected suicides. That’s the highest figure in four years. Not only do these events cause individual and community-wide harm, they contribute to rail disruption and performance issues.
Reducing trespass and suicide is absolutely vital. Industry has done some very promising work in this area. Consider Network Rail’s ‘Small Talk Saves Lives’ campaign, the introduction of trespass and welfare officers on some routes, and what it’s done to develop our collective understanding of what drives people to want to trespass. It’s clear that lots is happening.
There’s also a lot of focus on educating children on the dangers of the rail environment. In partnership with industry, Rail Safe Friendly reaches out to schools to deliver key safety messages to young people. So important is this activity that many other rail and safety bodies want to do it, too.
With this enthusiasm comes a chance of duplicated efforts, and that’s why cross-industry collaboration for trespass and suicide prevention is so key. Working together enables effective targeting, means that tasks are resourced appropriately, and gives us greater visibility into the breadth of initiatives taking place across the industry.
This is what the Trespass and Suicide Prevention Group has been working to realise.
To improve visibility into industry’s prevention initiatives, the RSSB-led group engaged all its members. These members hail from each corner of the industry and beyond. This diversity of experience and perspective ensured that there was a robust, cross-industry understanding of this important issue.
Members identified:
where there were overlaps in these efforts
where there were gaps
how the effectiveness and visibility of the work could be increased.
Their conclusion was that industry needed a centralised platform to reduce trespass and prevent suicide—a new ‘one-stop shop’.
The creation of a centralised one-stop shop will give people the tools they need to be able to manage trespass and suicide risk because it’ll be based on input and insights from across industry. People will also be able to look at:
what solutions are available
what interventions are working
specific areas that they could target.
In short, this platform will make it much easier for you to get the resources and information you need to be even more effective. And it’ll be a very useful place to share far and wide the great work that people are already doing and to build on that.
Another significant benefit of this platform is that it will help reduce the duplication of efforts mentioned above. For instance, the Trespass and Suicide Prevention Group identified that a digital map of all UK schools would be beneficial.
Each school would have a marker against it. Changing the colour of this marker for each school where there’d been interaction with the rail industry about trespass and suicide would show where to target future activity. It would reduce the likelihood of different stakeholders engaging the same school. This feature is now being developed.
So, it really is a case of industry-wide collaboration enabling everyone to be more effective—and helping to reduce trespass and save lives at the same time.
This article was first published in the January 2025 edition of Horizon, RSSB’s magazine for rail leaders.
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