Gareth Llewellyn
accident risk by 50 per cent, which is another big challenge when you think that our assets in some cases are over 120 years old. But in setting ourselves those challenges it drives a different type of behaviour; it has forced people to start thinking about what risks they are managing, how they control those risks and how they can reduce them better in the future. And it’s about doing that on a more disciplined scale than before. We are halfway through that process with the board at the moment and we’ve undertaken deep dives on all the big catastrophic train risks – each of those runs to 5-600 slides, so we’ve analysed everything that we possibly can. We know how much rainfall needs to take place in the 15 days before an embankment will fail for example, and whether that embankment is rock, earth or any other construction, so we know at that level of detail now how to control our risks.
anywhere near our switches and crossings - we’ve surveyed and monitored all 23 of the ones we have here so we’ve learned quite a lot from that particular incident.
What are the innovations in safety that you believe have the most potential for the future?
Probably the best is the ability to take people off the track. So if we can do our monitoring remotely, either by having sensors on trains or using drones or whatever technique, taking people away from those high risk areas would be a huge improvement. Once you’ve monitored and worked out where the problems are though, you need maintenance to go on, and if we also can get that undertaken remotely or with fewer people, that has to be a good thing.
What does NR get right and what does it get wrong in the area of safety at the moment?
Those last few words are important ‘at the moment’. There has been a huge change in the executive board’s perception of how important safety is. Every one of my colleagues is leading part of our 10 point safety plan and they are all totally engaged on it to an extent that I haven’t seen before, which is extremely encouraging. That’s been driven a lot by David Higgins, our chief executive, who is very open about some of our challenges. The other benefit is that we have trade union safety
representatives working for us. Within my team there are nine of them and we have reps at every level of safety governance in the company, which is great because as we design the safety changes the unions understand why we’re doing it and they tend to be on board much faster.
What brought about that change in perception? Again I think it’s David’s openness and transparency agenda. He doesn’t see any risk really in asking people to contribute to the agenda and he’s absolutely right.
Do you think future cuts in NR will affect safety at all? Does Manuel Cortez have a point?
I’m not going to be caught on that one! The fact is that when we went into the process with our strategic business plan we set out a letter to the regulator saying that we’d only accept a determination if we believe that we can continue to run the railway safely. We’re not going to compromise on that. I mean it would be the death of this industry if a train came of the track because we didn’t have enough money to maintain the line. Bear in mind we set ourselves two really huge targets in CP5,
one is to eliminate all fatalities and major injuries – and this industry hasn’t had a fatality free year since 2006 so that in itself is quite a big challenge. And the second is to reduce the train
What message do you have for rail managers? There are four really big pieces of work that we are either towards the end of or about to start which will impact managers. Firstly, on whatever site you go to, it has become pretty clear to us that nobody knows who is really in charge, from either a safety perspective or delivery of work. And in many cases, the delivery of the work is separate from the safety management, which is fundamentally wrong. We have this concept in the UK of safety down the line, that
every line manager is responsible for the safety of the people who work for him, but we are going to change that fundamentally by creating a Safe Work Supervisor, who will be responsible not just for planning the work, delivering the work and hand back, but also for safety, and all safety critical roles will work for that person. And all safety critical roles will either work for us or for our principal contractors and no further down the supply chain because we have had incidences where labour-only suppliers have been undertaking the role of the COSS, and the pressure on that person to get the work done and not upset the client by walking away is huge. That’s unacceptable for us so we will start a pilot on that by early January. That work is being led by David Higgins himself because he thinks it’s so important. The second thing is that once you work out who is in charge,
what information do you give them when they get to a site that says ‘This is what you need to do’ ‘These are the risks and this is how you’re going to manage the risks’. At the moment we do that through the Safe System of Work packs which are about two inches thick. We produce 30,000 of those a week, and they’re so generic they don’t tell you anything about the work you’re going to do. So we’re replacing that with a system called Control of Work – very similar to the oil and gas industry where it just says ‘This is your task’ ‘This is the environment in which you are going to undertake the task’ and ‘These are the risks you’re going to find’. People won’t have permission to do anything else, so if they decide to go and work somewhere else, they do not have permission and that would be a breach, in which case they will go through the disciplinary process. It’s a lot less information than we currently give people but it will focus them more on what they’ve got to do. The third thing is that we are rationalising our standards
process. When I came here two years ago we had 1,650 standards in the business. I have never, ever worked in an organisation with anywhere near that number and we’re going to rationalise that down to about 100 by analysing all the risks in those particular areas, all the controls we have in place and the confidence we have in each of those controls; it’s based on something called the bow tie process which other industries have used for decades. For a particular event, it asks what controls you have in place to prevent that event from occurring, and what controls do you
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