Occupational road safety
Overview: Network Rail’s recent focus on reducing risks from the operation of its road fleet appears to show some benefits, with reductions in incidents without injuries and incidents with injuries where the emergency services were called.
Two infrastructure workers were killed and four received major injuries in occupational road accidents while working. There were 104 minor injuries, of which 24 resulted in staff taking three or more days off from their usual duties. Overall harm reduced by 7%. Most occupational road incidents involved Network Rail’s infrastructure workers and contractors.
There have been five occupational road fatalities in the last three years. This is estimated to represent about 4% of the overall harm to the workforce. There were several off-duty fatal road accidents involving railway employees driving home after long shifts, such as two recent multi-fatality traffic accidents in Scotland and Western involving off-duty railway contractor staff.
The inquest this year into the deaths of two rail welders in a road traffic collision at Newark in 2013 highlighted the problems of fatigue and driving risk.
Occupational health performance
Overview: Available evidence shows meaningful progress towards worker health being treated on an equal basis with worker safety, but we are not there yet.
Pockets of innovation and good practice exist, but we served a further two notices in 2014-15 on the basics of assessment and control of health risks. These included sub-standard manual handling and the control of substances hazardous to health arrangements. In the short term, we are targeting our inspection to achieve basic legal compliance with occupational health law. We will continue to focus on industry’s asbestos management, exposure to silica dust in ballast, and management and prevention of HAVs (hand-arm vibrations).
We continue to monitor the network-wide implementation of Network Rail’s Transforming Health and Wellbeing strategy, including the appointment of route occupational health managers and the implementation of their route action plans.
