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RSSB


Ian Moreton asks: where does work-related driving feature in your business processes and safety management systems?


A


ll industries rightly focus attention on systems and processes to address risks that their workforces face and that their operations present. The


railway is not risk-free to its employees, but no one can deny that today’s rail staff benefit from higher levels of safety on the actual railway than ever before, and that there is a lot of attention on recognisable risks such as those associated with working on or around the line. But what about something more outwardly everyday as driving a car or works van? Are we managing the risk posed by work-related driving? How does it feature in our safety management systems (SMS) or the way we manage risk in our organisations? Pretty much everyone drives. There are likely to be at least 75,000 road vehicles linked to the rail industry. This includes use by mobile operations managers, maintenance teams and contractors. Staff may need to travel from job-to-job early in the day or late at night, depending on the task in hand, and to access very particular bits of the infrastructure, depending on engineering schedules and incidents that occur.


In fact, we probably feel quite safe in


our car, despite the fact that 1,901 people were killed on the roads in 2011 - a three per cent increase on 2010, and the first increase since 2003. What felt like the scariest feeling


imaginable on our first driving lesson became second nature, and we will confidently drive from A to B without any kind of anxiety or association with


risk; such are the automatic behaviours and mental short-cuts that come with motoring. But this risk is probably bigger than we


think. Currently, on average five people die on Britain’s roads every day. The Royal Society for the Prevention


of Accidents (RoSPA) calculates that ‘after deep sea fishing and coal mining, driving 25,000 miles a year on business is the most life-threatening activity we undertake - more dangerous than working in construction.’ 2011 may have seen the first increase in fatalities on the road since 2003, but it also saw a decline in road use. Economic welfare costs to society for road traffic collisions come between £15 billion and £35 billion. Now the rail industry wants to grasp the nettle and embed the right processes and practices into safety management systems, and has asked RSSB to investigate.


Underreporting of road accidents by rail staff


The first challenge is to understand what to report and record. The rail industry’s Safety Risk Model, which provides a picture of where risk comes from, has road risk positioned at three per cent of total workforce risk, whereas RoSPA found that work-related driving in similar industries can account for up to 30 per cent. This suggests gross underreporting and some confusion about what is ‘in scope’.


Duty holders are obliged to report into


the systems managed by RSSB, and that includes the incidents that occur across all the contractor organisations on duty holders’ watch, but who don’t have an obligation to report in directly themselves. A recent RSSB survey of rail organisations confirmed the level of underreporting prevalent around RTC's (road traffic collisions). Responses revealed 500 RTC’s, 100 injuries and five


Estimates suggest anything between 25 and 40 per cent of road traffic incidents involve work-related journeys, which would be equivalent to between 475 and 760 work-related driving fatalities a year. Compare that with 173 work-related fatalities in total recorded by HSE in 2010-11 across all sectors, and which do not include road traffic events.


June 2013 Page 53


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