HEALTH AND SAFETY
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Competency development: building back safer James Fox, Commercial Director of 3Squared reflects on previous Annual Health and Safety Report published by the Railway Safety and Standards Board, RSSB and role of competency management in keeping our railways safe be that line-side or elsewhere is something that must not be compromised, and something we must all strive to protect.
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ollowing the publication of the 2019 AHSR, Ali Chegini, the RSSB’s Director of System Safety and Health said: ‘We can’t lose sight of the importance of essential health and safety management … Especially in an era of major structural and organisational change.’ Chegini was of course referring to the devolution of Network Rail, which at the time, at the beginning of CP6, was in its very early stages of implementation. The subsequent 2020 AHSR, published shortly before the country was put into lockdown, reasserted that Britain’s railways are still the safest in Europe, a fact of which we should be proud, but a fact which should not cause us to rest on our laurels. Approximately a year on, during the Network Rail National Supplier Conference (6th May 2021) Sir Peter Hendy, Andrew
Haines and the devolved routes’ Managing Directors spoke to a huge online audience. The conference centred on the importance of Project Speed and discussed ways in which Network Rail and its supply chain might work closer together to achieve ‘step change’ in reducing the cost of building and maintaining our railways. In stark contrast to the overall ebullience of the conference, Rob McIntosh, Route Managing Director of the Eastern Region referred to the accident that had taken places days earlier at Ramsden Bellhouse, in which one of the victims sustained lifechanging injuries. McIntosh was clear in his message: that we should not be complacent, that Ramsden Bellhouse, like any accident, is unacceptable, and that in his opinion collective standards in relation to safe working seem to have fallen in recent times. Our own safety and that of our colleagues,
The importance of competencies in upholding safety Rail workers, as with anyone working in a safety-critical environment, need to possess the right competencies to perform effectively, efficiently, and safely, for their own and their colleagues’ and our customers’ combined safety. Competencies in the railway differ from role to role and these comprise many different skills from the ‘pass/fail’ taught and learned skills to potentially more complicated non-technical skills, i.e., social, cognitive, and personal skills; non-technical skills arguably add a layer of sophistication to an individual’s capability and ease in which they carry out their work. The Office of Road and Rail Regulation, the ORR, focuses on improving the safety, value and performance of railways and roads ‘today and in the future’. The ORR uses its Risk Management Maturity Model (RM3) to clearly set out its expectations in relation to health and safety on the railways as summarised in the topics below: • H&S policy, leadership and board governance. • Organising for control and communication. • Securing cooperation, competence and development of employees at all levels. • Planning and implementing risk controls through coordinated management arrangements. • Monitoring, audit and review. Competency management systems, CMSs, provide a framework and process through which an organisation manages its H&S by ensuring that the requisite number of staff possess, maintain and review the necessary competencies at all levels. Securing competence and development of staff at all levels is a crucial element of Rail Professional
