In preparation for this year’s Rail Safety Summit, we sat down with leading figures from the rail safety industry and asked them a series of pressing questions about safety practices within the rail industry.
Today’s question is:
Has the profile and hence effectiveness of the Railway Inspectorate been reduced by being subsumed into the Office of Rail Regulation?
Answers:
Willie Baker, Emergency Incident Consultant:
There is probably a debate to be had about the individual and aligned roles and responsibilities of these organisations, along with the RSSB and the RAIB.
Seamus Scallon, Safety Director, UK Rail, FirstGroup:
I would not agree that the profile or effectiveness of the Inspectorate has reduced since the change.
In my opinion they are making effective use of both their powers and resource, though there is a perception that the general public see ORR as the financial regulator, rather than safety regulator and believe the HSE are safety regulators.
In terms of the Inspectorate itself, they actually have more power as they can see the finance behind franchises more easily, and can therefore look more closely at CBA output and attempt to influence franchise change.
They have perhaps lost the close interfaces with HSE experts in non-railway fields which is a problem as they do not all have a broad enough skill set to cover the whole area of regulation which they have to cover, eg COSHH, construction etc.
I’m not personally convinced that the HSE support to them fully appreciates or understands the rail industry as well as it used to, and at times this can lead to some misunderstanding.
Steve Diksa, Assurance Services Director, Bridgeway Consulting:
No I do not believe it has. In my view, the move has been a positive one with the Field Inspectors now being more visible and being acknowledged as adding value and making a difference.
Overall the collaboration and working partnership of the ORR and Network Rail has also been viewed in a positive way by the Supply Chain.
Catherine Behan, Head of HS&E Capital Programmes, Transport for London:
No. I believe that it’s a positive move in terms of ensuring that the ALARP principle is consistently applied by our regulators.
Dr Liesel Von Metz, HM Inspector of Railways:
No, quite the opposite. It’s been recognised for a long time that good management and good safety management go hand in hand.
The highest performing organisations are those where there is good management of the whole of the business – which delivers safety and sustainability (reflecting financial, social and environmental factors).
There is no long-term substantive conflict between safety and economic regulation. When the Economic and Safety Regulators work together, we can drive those wider benefits of good management.
We can make sure that the 5-year funding cycle considers safety and longer-term improvements, and we can better challenge high costs of safety improvements, for example at level crossings.
Tomorrow’s ‘We ask the rail safety experts’ will see our experts answer this question:
How could the devolution of Network Rail into route responsible management improve both safety culture and performance?
To read yesterday’s interview click here
The Rail Safety Summit is taking place on April 19th 2012 in Loughborough.
For more information, please visit www.railsafetysummit.com
Back from a long rail circuit round Europe, we have hardly seen a lineside fence other than on 200kph+ lines. Farmers protect their livestock from straying on to tracks, and people (even children) are assumed – correctly -to be as careful near rail tracks as they are near roads. That must account for a good slice of the extra cost of railways in the UK – with no clear data either way of any effect on safety. Time we tried it in a well publicised area!