Interviews

Tackling health and safety collaboratively

John Abbott, external engagement director at RSSB, discusses the development of a new Rail Health and Safety Strategy that will be launched early next year.

Against a backdrop of increased passenger numbers and record levels of investment, rail safety in Great Britain is among the safest in Europe. However, there is still room for improvement.

The sector has agreed to develop a Rail Health and Safety Strategy, which highlights areas where improvements can be made through increased collaboration.

Rather than being a top-down diktat, the strategy will “guide” the rail industry’s immediate, short- and medium-term efforts in maintaining and developing its health and safety performance.

Currently, each rail company is responsible for the safe operation of their undertaking, including co-operation with other parties, to deliver a safe railway system. But the new strategy, being developed by the RSSB and Network Rail, will provide a framework around which co-operative activities can be understood, aligned, prioritised and communicated.

John Abbott, external engagement director at RSSB, who is working on the development of the strategy, told RTM the work “at no stage” removes the responsibility from individual companies to manage their own health and safety operations.

“But developing the right strategy will enable people’s safety management systems to better align and to recognise there are areas where they need to work together,” he said, adding that the industry has worked together to create the document, which will develop over time.

RTM was told that the strategy, which is planned to launch in early 2016, will not solve every safety issue in the industry. And, rather than being long and convoluted, it will focus on just four key areas.

Leadership

The first strand is leadership. Abbott said that any formal improvement activity, ultimately, needs to start with the right type of leadership commitment.

“The whole manifestation of the strategy means that the leaders of each individual company have to buy into it – and implement it by aligning the right things happening in their own organisations,” he added.

“The strategy isn’t going to be a huge document, but right at the beginning there is going to be a leadership section aimed at individual TOC, FOC, Network Rail and company leaders asking what they are going to do to help drive this strategy forward.”

This is likely to include some practical changes. For instance, companies might have to update their health and safety policy statements to reflect how they are going to contribute to the wider industry strategy.

Improvements

Secondly, industry members have identified 12 areas where they aim to improve health and safety:

1. Train operations
2. Station operations
3. Road driving
4. Fatigue
5. Public behaviour
6. Workforce health and wellbeing
7. Workforce safety
8. Workforce assaults and trauma
9. Freight
10. Level crossings
11. Rolling stock asset integrity
12. Infrastructure asset integrity

Abbott told RTM that the already active cross-industry work on tackling incidents at the platform/train interface, road safety, and health and wellbeing, will be rolled into this strategy.

“In other areas, like train operations, we have recognised that we have gone stale on SPAD (signals passed at danger) management,” he said. “So, what are we going to do over the next decade to revitalise our efforts on that?”

The development team has also adopted a simple maturity approach to explore how much work has been done (and is still to do) across each of the 12 areas.

“If you take rolling stock, and the management of its assets, we are at the higher end of its maturity,” Abbott noted. “Whereas the areas where there is the lowest maturity are managing road driving risk, health and wellbeing of the workforce, and fatigue. The others are somewhere in between.”

Underlying management

The third strand covers the “underlying management” of health and safety – so, general managerial competences, rather than specific risk areas.

Abbott said: “This includes how we are going to get a better understanding of precursor events and develop the next generation of safety reporting systems to capture those events. Another example would be how we are going to build on the way we work together and how we are going to take co-operative working into the field of health and safety.

“Also, we are going to look at how we are going to work with the supply industry to better understand the capability of our suppliers to do the things we ask them to do.”

The ‘health and safety story’

The fourth aspect of the strategy, which was a requirement right from the start, was to tell the “health and safety story” of the railway.

“One of the things we felt would be very useful was if this strategy could help tell the story and signpost people as to where they can get more information, and about how they go about managing health and safety,” said Abbott. “This was identified as a key component and, in actual fact, is the hardest part of the document to do.”

This section will be fairly succinct, but will contain a suite of new resources and interactive platforms that will “bring to life” the arrangements for managing health and safety, including how co-operation and collaboration work.

Finishing the strategy

RTM was told that between now and Christmas the development team plans to finish the strategy as a document, and will put it to the leaders of each company to get them to sign into it.

The strategy is a first version, which will be updated throughout CP5 and CP6, and currently has a working title ‘Health and safety on Britain’s railway – A strategy for working together’.

Responsibility for governance, including monitoring and review, is assigned to the RSSB board as the most suitable cross-industry body.

“From time to time, we recognise that the strategy will need to be reviewed and updated,” said Abbott, who noted that this is the start of a 10-year journey to help the industry work more effectively.

“One of the other things we will do is use the Industry Leader Safety meeting – which takes place only a couple of times a year, but is a good forum because you get all the MDs together – to review elements of progress with the strategy.

“Increasingly, the MDs would be leading on and presenting where they are with different components of the strategy to their peers.”

He added that if anybody has any final comments or input for the strategy the development team would be keen to capture them. However, these would need to be made by the end of November.