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Britain’s rail safety record is impressive. In 2013-14 there were no passenger train derailments, for the first year since records began. We have by far the lowest rate of railway deaths in the EU - three times fewer than Ireland, the next-best country.
Britain is ranked best in Europe at managing passenger and level crossing safety. It is also among the best at managing employee safety.
And yet the Office of Rail Regulation’s annual safety report chides the industry for not doing enough, and demands a sweeping change of culture. It concludes: “We are some way from excellence in health and safety management.”
Is it really worth beating the railway with quite such a big stick, when it is demonstrably a world leader in safety? Britain had more than its fair share of catastrophic crashes in the years following privatisation, but from a passenger’s perspective the recent record has surely been exemplary.
Not so, says the ORR. The trend of steady improvement seen in recent years has slowed, and in 2013-14 it was static. Progress has reached a plateau.
Three track workers lost their lives in incidents that the ORR says were avoidable. Two were road deaths, as people drove home after long shifts on the tracks.
The trend in track workers being injured increased to its highest level in seven years, with 79 workers suffering major injuries and 1,641 reporting minor injuries.
ORR says that although passenger harm fell last year by 9%, workforce harm rose by 10%. In particular, risk of harm to infrastructure workers rose by 22%.
Over the past decade, 20 of the last 25 railway worker deaths have involved infrastructure staff, with 60% of injuries recorded among the same group. Thirty-seven infrastructure workers have been hit by trains in the past ten years, with 11 people killed.
“This is far too high,” concludes the ORR. You can’t disagree.
London Underground
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” says Ian Prosser, director of railway safety and chief inspector of railways at the ORR.
“The main line railway is inconsistent in its approach to safety. It needs to learn lessons from London Underground, which is much better at it. London Underground staff have been better trained, on courses based around NVQs . They understand risks markedly better. The statistics prove it.
“Passengers notice it - they tell you they feel better about it. The platform staff are at the microphone providing guidance, moving people along. They stop people running, they put up barriers and railings in the right places to stop passengers doing the wrong thing, and they manage building work on stations well. LU is better at designing safety into its new work.”
Prosser says he is pleased that Network Rail is now consulting experts at London Underground about how to manage risk more effectively.
“The industry does have a plan. But more people are using stations that were simply not intended for such numbers. We get very large numbers in very short periods of time, and disruption can add to that. Managing people through stations and onto trains is a challenge, especially at stations like Clapham Junction, and we will have to make further improvements.”
If London Underground is best at this, which company is worst? Prosser does not say. But it is clear that he regards the gap between best and worst as pretty wide.
Track workers
“We are still seeing infrastructure workers killed every year, and a stubbornly high number of serious injuries,” remarks Prosser.
“We need a substantial shift in culture. The railway is left like a bomb site after a job, with things just lying around. That doesn’t bring about a culture of safety.
“A lot of the major injuries occur in places where the plans have been changed at the last minute. We need better leadership. We have seen it improve since David Higgins and now Mark Carne has taken over at Network Rail, but we have yet to see that strong leadership reach down to the middle layers of the organisation. There are good plans, but they have yet to be delivered as boots on the ballast.”
For the ORR, Prosser wields considerable power. He serves enforcement notices on Network Rail, requiring it to make changes. If it fails to do so, he can prosecute through the courts, leading to substantial fines. The Regulator can bite as well as bark - and he does.
“We still have men waving flags as the main way to protect track workers. In the 21st century! Really, we can do better than that.”
He says the railway is too reliant on methods that have worked in the past, but which are no longer either cutting-edge or even merely acceptable. As he puts it: “What we see on the ground is an acceptance of what we would call non-compliance.”
In other words, the railway takes a certain level of ignoring current best practice as inevitable, and even acceptable.
“We are still doing things the way they were done a very long time ago. In the 1960s hundreds of people a year died - there is an ingrained culture of accepting standards that should not be accepted. We have to get people to stop doing the wrong things.
