RSSB
Where does your assurance come from?
Ian Moreton talks about how good safety assurance drives an effective safety management system, and how new guidance for rail companies can help
O
n 6 July last year, an unattended 74-car freight train carrying crude oil in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, ran away, derailed and caused
a fire and multiple explosions, killing 47 people.
Just days before, Canada’s auditor general had finished researching a report on Canadian rail safety. Published in November, it revealed a range of issues that Transport Canada needed to address in terms of the safety of its railways – one of these was the implementation and oversight of safety management systems (SMS’s). Although Canada’s railways were required to apply SMS’s 12 years ago, the report suggests that there is little assurance being generated. In Europe, there are similar requirements about SMS’s, as documented in EU directives and specified in the UK by the Railway and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations. Does the Quebec accident, and the auditor general’s report, provide a wake-up call for anyone running a safety management system?
A positive safety culture An SMS basically consists of the arrangements and process used by an organisation to effectively manage health and safety to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable. Its objective is to provide the necessary framework around which good performance can be established and maintained, and which will in turn, support the development of a positive safety culture. Most organisations are likely to have
something resembling an SMS (even if it’s embedded within general business management processes), but all rail operators and infrastructure managers have to have one by law under ROGS. This all sounds fine. But the Canadian experience shows that you can have the requirements in place, but if there are
insufficient checks and understanding with no assurance given or received that things are actually happening in the way you expect them to happen, then the SMS is probably not going to be providing the level of safety you need.
This gap was identified by the GB rail industry a few years ago, soon after ROGS kicked in. Prior to this, organisations had to submit ‘safety cases’ to the infrastructure owner (Railtrack, or later, Network Rail) in a fairly hierarchical- cum-contractual arrangement. ROGS changed all this, and all organisations became more responsible for safety of the system, both for themselves and their people, but just as importantly, also to the people and organisations they interfaced with, regardless of whether they were in charge of track or trains.
Self-checking now required Legislation has recently made it clearer with the introduction of the Common Safety Method (CSM) for Monitoring which has, since June 2013, made requirements on SMS
supervision which places requirements on the ORR to ‘supervise’, i.e. to check on the effectiveness of SMS’s of rail companies, and counterpart systems for entities in charge of maintenance (ECM’s). 2014 will be the first true test of both CSM’s but will require efforts from both transport operators and the regulator.
Guidance from RSSB
As a result,
industry has asked RSSB to produce a range of guidance to support companies building SMS’s, and more
holders in relation to their safety assurance processes. In essence, the new regulation requires the self-
checking of how effective the SMS is and how it’s applied, including its processes and procedures, plus the checking that it achieves the expected outcomes. It then requires preventative and/or corrective measures to address weaknesses. Running in conjunction with the CSM for monitoring is the CSM for
recently, to specifically address safety
assurance.The concept goes back to first principles. It says that if you have good safety assurance (i.e. that you have a strategy, you monitor, you review and then you follow up), that this generates the right momentum to make the SMS effective. The concept is also fairly free-moving and flexible too, it’s not a rigid model, but a way of working which recognises that there is a wide range of information ‘out there’ which can be used to provide safety assurance. Distilling it and getting the right people to absorb it is part of the challenge. It can be applied to three dimensions: at company
February 2014 Page 59
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164