It would be the death of this industry if a
train came off the track because we didn’t have enough money to maintain the line
Gareth Llewellyn, Director, Safety and Sustainable Development at Network Rail spoke to Lorna Slade about the big new safety developments taking place within the organisation
What does your role involve? I look after safety, health, environment and the broader sustainability agenda. The sustainability agenda is pretty broad and covers a lot of areas which I don’t specifically manage but come under that umbrella such as diversity and inclusion, transparency and ethics. I specifically manage the environmental component but I take an overview of all the rest as well. As an executive member, I also have other business critical roles including, rather bizarrely, crisis management.
Why is that bizarre? Because a crisis can occur from anywhere – it can be a financial crisis – anything in fact, but for some reason I got lumbered with that.
Have you noticed that social value is a term that is being used increasingly in rail business procurement? Social value has been there for a very long time but we haven’t really captured it as well as we could. There’s a huge social value to the rail industry more broadly if you think about what would happen if we shut the network down today for a year. The social impact would be absolutely huge and the environmental and economic impacts would be astronomical.
The Commons Transport Select Committee has begun an enquiry into NR’s level crossing safety record. What do you expect the conclusion will be? That’s a very good question. We are in a better place with level crossings than we were a few years ago – we’ve reduced the risk by 25 per cent in the control period we’re now in, which is a huge success story really. We’re making the case to make another 25 per cent saving in the next control period and currently talking to the regulator about the right level of funding to achieve that target. When you’ve got 6,500 level crossings though, it’s really difficult to know that you’re controlling the risk every second of every day at every level crossing. So if you have a lot of public misuse, how are you held to account for that when you can’t possibly spend enough money to minimise the risk at
Page 40 November 2013
every crossing? I hope the Select Committee comes out with a more pragmatic view asking that, rather than having the risk minimised at every level crossing, we take a look across the whole 6,500 and think what can we realistically do for the amount of money that society is prepared to give us – because it isn’t prepared to give us billions of pounds to reduce the risk.
Watching the video of the young girl at the level crossing showed that there is no accounting for human behaviour... That’s the problem, and I think there’s a lot we can do around level crossings but at some point people have to take personal accountability for what they’re doing. Once we get to a situation where we’re confident that we have all the risks under control as best we can, I think we need to be a more forceful with the public, and when there’s misuse of that type we need to be very forceful…
Prosecute them? Yes.
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