Ian Prosser interview: “A high-performing railway is a safe railway”

Recently retired HM Chief Inspector of Railways Ian Prosser discusses the approach to railway safety and the role of Great British Railways with Tony Streeter.

In this article:

• Ian Prosser argues for Great British Railways reform to enhance safety management and streamline operations.

• Prosser highlights significant safety improvements, noting zero workforce fatalities in 2023-24.

• He emphasizes the importance of aligning track and train to reduce costs and improve efficiency in the rail network.

• 

Reform and the creation of Great British Railways should make the network safer.

So believes Ian Prosser, who until this summer was HM Chief Inspector at the Office of Rail and Road’s Safety Directorate - otherwise known as the venerable HM Railway Inspectorate.

Spoiler: he thinks that both the railway and the organisation he led until recently have both reached a good place. But that doesn’t stop him favouring the move towards GBR.

“It will be easier to manage safety,” says Prosser on a sunny morning in Cambridge, from where until recently he commuted daily to London to oversee one of the most important functions of any railway - ensuring it is safe for passengers and workers alike.

“The industry itself has done incredibly well in terms of folk like RSSB [Rail Safety and Standards Board] collaborating with the industry to keep us where we’ve got to… but it is hard work.

“The other thing with a joined-up railway, I think some of the incidents we had, where we get disruption where trains get stranded… that’ll be easier to manage.”

It’s 24 years since Ian Prosser came across to rail from the chemicals sector, bringing with him the experience of working within a truly global industry.

In the near quarter-of-a-century since, 16 years of it as HM Chief Inspector, he’s come to know the railway literally from the inside out, becoming one of the people wielding the greatest influence over it.

His verdict now on the structure is simple: “The railway has become too complex for what it’s trying to achieve.”

However, he is positive in his view of what comes next, arguing that Labour’s appointment of former Network Rail Chairman Lord Peter Hendy as Rail Minister is a clear sign that “the new government wants to get on with reform. Because we’ve been at it for five years and not done it.”

Leaving aside his own clear support of reform per se, Prosser has a further concern about the limbo the railway has endured while waiting to move forward - the corrosive effect of uncertainty on people.

Delay, he argues, has the potential to make them “take their eyes off the ball”.

In Prosser’s view this hasn’t actually happened, which is “down to some of the leadership in the industry”, he notes.

“But it’s been very tough for some middle managers and managers to deal with all of this. The sooner you start getting it sorted out, the better.”

We often hear that the railways are complex, but Prosser rejects any idea that this is a reason to delay. Rather, he argues: “There’s no excuse about it being complicated, because privatisation happened very quickly.”

“It could have been done better, but… I spent a long time in ICI in the chemical and pharmaceuticals industries. ICI split itself in half, between Zeneca and ICI, in six months.”

In reality, though, has the lack of progress on reform not been due to a lack of political will?

“Great British Railways was - honestly, I believe - a Boris Johnson idea. It’s a good one. So, I think cross-party support for that has been important. And I’ve always supported it because I think we’ve got to have much better alignment between track and train.

“We’ve made the railways - which are a fairly simple business, to be honest - more complicated than they need to be. And that’s where cost has been driven in.”

Prosser is far from being the first person to make the argument about costs. They formed a key part of 2011’s Realising the Potential of Rail in Great Britain - the report from the independent study on value for money chaired by Sir Roy McNulty.

“I was on the McNulty study for part of one of the workstreams, and had one of my inspectors involved with it all the way through - he identified the same sort of issues that Keith Williams did.”

In particular, Prosser references the “cost of the interfaces”.

“It’s not me, it’s these guys that looked at this for ten-plus years. So, we need to get on with it. It can be done, and I’m sure that the new leadership in the Department for Transport is going to get on with it.”

Until recently, there was another aspect of the railways that particularly concerned Prosser, again because of the length of time it has rumbled on without resolution - industrial relations.

Although he notes that there have been “no real safety incidents occur during the industrial dispute”, the former Chief Inspector contends that “the length of time starts to impact on… human factors”.

Prosser speaks about the railway not only as its former safety ‘gatekeeper’, but clearly as a passionate advocate for it as a mode of transport as well.

“We have a real opportunity to put the railways back at the forefront of the transport system,”, he states.

“And to get the staff engaged better and get it all out of the way will be enormously beneficial.”

Current challenges

If Prosser could offer a snapshot of where the industry is in 2024, what would he say?

“I think we’ve got to a good place. But there are lots of challenges.”

Areas of safety that have “really improved” over the past 16 years are “workforce safety and health in particular, level crossings, and track”.

He notes: “We’ve transformed the way we manage track, particularly since all the terrible incidents in the early 2000s, such as Potters Bar. Those areas are really improved a lot, and that’s driven down the risk to half what it was 12 years ago.”

However, he argues that the challenge “is not looking back, it’s to look forward”.

Prosser refers to the “last major incident” - at Carmont (near Stonehaven) in August 2020, when a ScotRail HST derailed after hitting a line blockage following heavy rain. Three people died (RAIL 912).

While this was obviously tragic, he says this was “associated with very extreme weather and old infrastructure, although there could have been better drainage. But Network Rail has actually realised that drainage is a very important asset. As an industry, for far too long, we’ve treated it as a sort of Cinderella asset.”

However, Prosser emphasises that NR has responded.

“The thing is to keep up the work, because the need is only going to increase. And if you can’t look after your drains, you’re not going to be able to look after the water. It’s really, really important.”

Infrastructure safety is clearly about a lot more than simply drains. It’s also about what Prosser describes as the “stuff that sits around the railway”.

But in an era of potentially worsening climate change as well as constrained budgets, he remains confident that we can actually look after this increasingly ageing infrastructure.

“We are going to get the rain. And we’re going to need to manage the consequences, in terms of the controls that need to be put in place just to manage the railway safely during those periods of times when we have this climatic behaviour.

“So, they’re putting in more tools. The weather forecasting is… better, you know, really improving.

“It might hit performance at times, because you might have to close the railway, and sometimes in Scotland they have closed large parts of the railway. It might hit performance, but hopefully for as short a time as possible.

“The thing that mustn’t happen is people feel that they have to try and keep the railway going when it’s not safe to do so. But I don’t see any signs of that at the moment.”

The cost of safety?

Zero workforce fatalities. In 2023-24 Britain’s railways achieved precisely that - a clear indication that the network has become safer not only for passengers, but employees too.

It is an immense achievement and follows consistent investment and effort in various areas - not least that of trackworker safety.

But being blunt, it could be argued that this has come at (literally) a cost. Money spent on the railway is money that’s not then been spent elsewhere on, for example, the NHS.

In Prosser’s view, the debate is actually wider, and “business and safety go hand in hand”.

As an example, he cites the freight operators: “They have been really good on collaborating on safety, even though they’re competitive companies… because one freight train on the floor is a freight train - it doesn’t matter whose it is.”

“This was the same as we felt in the chemical industry. A chemical fire, or a chemical explosion, damaged the whole industry.

“And so, you know, you’d have to be sensible. But there’s so many things that improve safety that can cost less than what you’re doing now.”

Prosser recalls the “debates and arguments about pushing the industry towards not using lookouts, for example, and having no red zone working”.

He adds: “But you can’t tell me that red zone working is efficient. Or the fact that people just stand there with a flag or a horn all day is efficient. It’s about driving the sector to spend money wisely, to actually not only improve safety but improve efficiency.”

What’s more, Prosser points out that safety “moves on all the time” - as do society’s expectations.

“Some people ask: ‘why are people more worried about… safety on trains than in their own car?’, but that’s not really relevant.”

Rather, he argues: “People get on a train, and they expect it to be safe. And they actually do feel it’s safe now.”

Does this mean that the former Chief Inspector doesn’t actually accept that there’s a cost to safety?

“What I believe is that there’s a cost and it has to be reasonably practical, and which doesn’t want to be grossly disproportionate. But every example I’ve ever worked on, there are also other benefits.

“There are really three things that are really critical. One is performance, which is your quality of the product. One is the efficiency. One is the scale of safety delivered. And they’re all intertwined.

“And the thing that’s wrong is to try and separate them. Because a high-performing railway is a safe railway. There’s less disruption and passengers feel more satisfied.”

Prosser argues that what’s needed is to focus on “a system solution”. That, he says, will be helped by reform: “Because it’s about the system - because a poor-performing railway is not as safe as a good-performing railway.”

As an example of all this, Prosser uses that focus on improving track worker safety, while also bringing in more efficient working: “It’s improved safety, and it will improve the efficiency as well.”

One of Prosser’s aims at ORR was to seek continuous safety improvement, something that led to the regulator introducing new tools such as ‘RM3’ - its Risk Management Maturity tool that “encourages organisations to achieve excellence in health and safety management”.

However, rather than ‘gold plating’, he argues that the way forward is “doing things right first time, so that they’re effective and efficient. Not having over-complicated processes and procedures, so that people understand them. Risk assessments that are sensible, not over-elaborate.”

Under Prosser, ORR increasingly prioritised not only safety in the classic sense, but also health, which he says is “something I really drove in my time in the role of Chief Inspector”.

He explains: “Poor health costs the industry tens of millions of pounds.

“I think that when we first engaged in some of this stuff, we and RSSB calculated that it cost around £350 million a year.

“So, poor health, both mental and physical, is expensive. And long-term, it does more damage to people than safety…”

Indeed, looking after people’s health, in the former Chief Inspector’s view, “makes economic sense, efficiency sense, performance sense, because healthier people perform better”.

Plus, he adds: “It’s morally obviously right. But what I’m pleased about is that the industry seems to be in a place where it can keep moving forward. And that’s one of the things that I’ve said to my successor - keep an eye on it, because during reform and difficult economic circumstances, it’s not something we want to lose.”

Where next?

Prosser is a clear advocate of reform - but what might that mean for the Office of Rail and Road itself?

The organisation currently covers the regulation of both economic aspects and safety. However, with the move towards GBR, does the economics side sit more comfortably there in the future - with the consequence that the safety functions should perhaps once again be separate, along the lines of the once independent HMRI?

“In my time in ORR, there were some real benefits of having the economic asset management-type regulation alongside the safety regulation,” says Prosser.

“And we did work together well in the last few periodic reviews. Really well.”

However, that was with the structure of the railway we’ve become used to until now. What government needs to decide now, he says, is what sort of oversight they want of GBR.

“Obviously, in the Labour party manifesto they talked about retaining ORR. They also talked about having a regulator to ensure that access is fairly distributed, so that that protects the freight sector, which is going to remain in the private sector.”

Therefore, he says: “It then depends on what government ministers decide they want in terms of oversight of GBR. And that, I think, is still open.

“There are going to be changes to the regulator - there’s no doubt about it. But the thing that’s core, which is really the engineering and asset management, and the health and safety bit, need to be kept together.”

Dealing with such debates will now fall to Prosser’s successor - Richard Hines.

Prosser judges that the inspectorate is in a “good place”. But he says that a challenge facing the new Chief Inspector (as it latterly did him) is that “we have seen some more of our highly capable people being poached, basically by other regulators like the nuclear regulator”.

That, he argues, is because “the people are extremely good and so they’re attractive to others”, although compensating for this is that “we are able to recruit trainees, because we have that reputation”.

Such challenges have been in the past for Ian Prosser since his retirement in June, when he turned 65. But what’s next for him on a personal basis?

“I’m going to get my golf clubs out of the cupboard, but I don’t know how successful that will be,” he jokes.

“No, what I want to do is add value across the whole sector. I have to sit outside the sector in the UK for six months… under my contract. But what I do want to do is add value across the globe.”

When Prosser moved into the railway sector from chemicals some 24 years ago, did he think he’d do the best part of a quarter-century, and with maybe a bit more to come?

“No. But I’ve really enjoyed it. And I love the railways. As everyone knows, they’re a hugely important part of our transport system and we need to make the most of them… to get a greener, better economy and use them as effectively as possible.”