RAIL INDUSTRY SAFETY
Blowing the whistle
David Morris, chairman of CIRAS, considers the changing face of safety in the rail industry and the role of a whistleblowing body in relation to this.
S
afety is often cited as the ‘number one’ priority in the rail industry; but sometimes
issues arise which staff can feel uncomfortable or unconfident in raising directly with their employers.
CIRAS (the rail industry’s Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System) is the self- reporting system that provides railway staff with the opportunity to flag up concerns with safety of practice in a confidential environment.
RTM spoke to David Morris, CIRAS chairman, about the industry’s changing attitudes towards rail staff safety, encouraging a safety culture, and listening to workers.
Considering the awareness and greater acceptance of the importance of a whistle- blowing hotline such as CIRAS, Morris said: “We’re enormously proud about the fact we have always maintained the confidentiality of the people who have contacted us. We’ve never failed to protect that confidentiality.”
He added: “I hope people know that we are a safe route for them to report concerns but I wouldn’t want that to be seen as a suggestion that they should not use their own employer systems.”
“In an ideal word the CIRAS system would have no calls at all”, Morris pointed out, “because everyone in the industry would be entirely happy to raise their safety worries with their own line managers without fear of any adverse consequences. We’re not there yet, but the industry hopes to move in that direction.”
Response from the industry is required for every report that is published by CIRAS, and this ensures issues and concerns are addressed
with a structured action plan in place for how the company or organisation involved will improve their policies.
Pushed too hard
In terms of recent regular concerns, Morris highlighted fatigue as an issue that seemed to be coming up more frequently, although he pointed out that extrapolating from their evidence could only ever be well-informed speculation.
He said: “Fatigue seems to be very much a front-runner:
particularly [people] worried
about excessive total hours including travel time. There’s a lot of worries about contractors: staff working very long hours from the times they sign on to the times they sign off. That has certainly figured quite largely recently.”
“ The fact that you’re a supervisor doesn’t mean you’re always right”
There was increasing awareness in the industry of the issue, he said, as reducing fatigue could generate efficiency and cut costs – yet this was sometimes behind the risk in the first place.
Morris commented: “I do wonder sometimes if some employers aren’t being a little heedless of some of the pressure they’re putting on their staff to work long hours.
“It’s not that there are not good techniques available for us to how to manage fatigue; there’s a lot of knowledge in the industry about how to do it. It’s just that some employers don’t
seem to be applying that guidance.”
Over-tired workers are more likely to be involved in accidents – the human and financial consequences of which vastly outweigh the benefits for individual workers or their employers of working tired.
There is a fine line to be struck between securing efficiencies and pushing staff too hard, especially in work which requires intense concentration, or that poses a high risk to safety.
Room for improvement
Considering the most important approaches to improving safety on the railways, Morris said that in terms of preventing harm to passengers, continued focus on level crossing risk was an area where “the catastrophic risk needs to be kept very well-controlled”.
42 | rail technology magazine Oct/Nov 12
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