NETWORK RAIL SAFETY
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Given the railway’s painful - and very public - tribulations when safety fails and a major accident occurs, I’m always sceptical at suggestions that anyone is bending the rules. Especially Network Rail, which would have the most to lose. But I’ve had to reconsider.
Given NR’s enormous size and its persistent management difficulties, it always seemed to me that cock-up, not conspiracy, was the problem - at Lambrigg or Potters Bar, for example. Sabotage always did seem to me a desperate explanation for Potters Bar, while Lambrigg was revealed to be an epic NR management mess. Cock-up, not conspiracy.
So even I baulked when Unite suggested that - of all players - NR wasn’t abiding by the rules on accident reporting. The idea that NR should break the rules, partly to boost bonuses, actually made me scoff. Crass, greedy and freakishly obsessed with control NR’s very top level may be - but even I dismissed any idea that worker safety and accident figures were being distorted for any reason.
Until Unite Railway Officer Bob Rixham calmly talked me through his compelling evidence, and until I talked to the Office of Rail Regulation’s safety team, led by Director of Rail Safety Ian Prosser.
This investigative analysis, which gives all sides of the story, from Unite, ORR and NR, is the result of repeated detailed conversations with Bob Rixham, comments from ORR and close scrutiny of the NR documents made available to me. RAIL readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
Bob Rixham’s path converged with mine with the publication of RAIL 649, in which ORR Director of Rail Safety Ian Prosser implied that NR has been under-reporting RIDDOR accidents to staff and contractors by a very considerable margin.
In a nutshell, international safety modelling since the 1930s (the Heinrich pyramid) makes clear that in any safety-critical industry, for every serious accident (broken arm, leg, or worse) you’ll have between eight and 15 RIDDOR ‘three-day’ accidents requiring a minimum of three days off work before resuming normal duties. These are formally reportable, and form the basis of the published safety figures.
Prosser’s interview, which went to press on Wednesday July 21 (the same day as the NR AGM), indicated NR was under-recording maybe 500 RIDDOR accidents a year.
These unreliable figures underpinned some expansive NR comments about its improving safety record which, as stipulated back then in NR’s now-scrapped ‘Management Incentive Programme’, fed through into the enormous £2.4 million bonuses paid this year to NR’s top team… read more in RAIL 652, on sale 08/09/2010
