The Locomotive & Carriage Institution

founded 1911

Railway Safety - What Does Society Expect?

John Cartledge, Safety Policy Adviser, Passenger Focus

1st April 2008

In order to do so, it is necessary to begin by briefly summarising the body of safety laws within which the industry and its regulator operate. This is a mixture of rail-specific and general legislation. The industry-specific legislation tends to be highly prescriptive, and to lay down exact technical requirements. Some of it is venerable, having been enacted in the century before last. A law which makes it mandatory to have block signalling, the interlocking of signals with points, and continuous brakes on passenger trains, is an example of this. Other parts are very recent. Laws which require there to be automatic systems which intervene if trains pass signals set at danger, and centralised locking of doors on passenger trains, have only come into effect in the present century. But the number of such prescriptive laws is few, and given the rapid pace of technological change, it is impossible for detailed legislation to be enacted fast enough to keep pace with new developments in railway equipment and operations - although there are still some people in and around Brussels who clearly think otherwise.

So, for the most part, the industry must set and update its own technical standards, and justify these to its safety regulator. It does so within the framework of public law which applies equally to all industries. Such legislation has by its nature to be couched in general terms, setting goals rather than specifying the means by which they are to be achieved. The over-arching duty which the law imposes on all employers (under the Health & Safety at Work etc Act of 1974) is that of conducting their businesses in such a way that risk (whether to employees, clients or the public at large) is reduced to a level which is "as low as reasonably practicable". This is commonly referred to as the ALARP principle, and it is enforced through the criminal courts.

Provided that the scale of a particular risk and the costs of averting it have been properly assessed, then a decision not to proceed with a particular control measure on the grounds that the safety benefits could only be achieved at grossly disproportionate cost becomes tenable and legitimate. If an accident subsequently occurs, which this measure (if implemented) would have averted, the railway operator has a legal defence against any charge of having failed in its duty to control the risk at a level which is ALARP. Of course, over time the risk profile is likely to change, as are the costs of possible preventative measures. So safety management is a dynamic process, and it is necessary periodically to revisit the options and the costs in order to ensure that their relativities have not changed sufficiently for a different conclusion to emerge. The change, if any is indicated, may be in either direction. In other words, additional controls that were not previously justified may now have become so, if risk has grown or costs diminished. But it is equally possible that control measures that were previously justified will have ceased to be so, because the risks against which they were designed to offer protection have declined or the costs of mitigating them have grown. Such a situation is sometimes called "reverse ALARP", and presents a cost-conscious rail operator with the challenge of persuading the regulator that an existing safety measure can be removed. Operators are understandably cautious about attempting this, but there are instances in which it has been done. London Underground, for example, persuaded both the fire brigade and the safety regulator that it was right to remove fire extinguishers from the passenger compartments of some of its trains, because experience showed that they did more harm than good.

Much of what I have said so far is likely to be familiar intellectual territory for any safety professionals amongst you, and I am grateful for your tolerance in allowing me to trudge laboriously across ground over which you speed effortlessly in the course of your professional lives. My excuse for wearying you with this is that unfortunately the process is not as simple as I have so far described it, and it has been necessary to paint the background scenery in order to contextualise a discussion of the problem. Because, in this country at least, railways are not just another industry. Roughly half their total income is provided by the state rather than charged directly to their users, and the government takes a close interest in their affairs. Indeed, virtually all passenger trains are run by companies which have won time-limited operating franchises issued by the Department for Transport, and all aspects of railway policy and performance (including safety) are subjected to constant parliamentary (and media) scrutiny. The Government has recently published a white paper on their future, an accolade of uncertain value and one with which few other industrial sectors are honoured. This may be irritating to railway managers, but it is a fact of life with which they are compelled to cope.

The rail industry must therefore take due account in its decision-making of political susceptibilities, which are informed by the concept of "societal concern". A definition of this has been offered by the Health and Safety Executive, the public agency which oversees and enforces occupational health and safety legislation. Societal concerns, it says in its policy statement on Reducing risks, protecting people are

To railway professionals it may seem unfair to be told that the potential political fallout from railway accidents is comparable to that which might arise from a leak of radiation from a nuclear power station or the escape from a laboratory of organisms which are capable of causing genetic damage to the human species. But it has certainly been the case in Britain in recent years that when multiple-fatality accidents have occurred on the railway (fortunately a rare event), they have excited political and media interest far in excess of that aroused by the continuous toll of death and injury on the roads.

This preoccupation is not a peculiarity unique to our political class. The European Union has recently promulgated a directive on rail safety setting out requirements for (inter alia) accident reporting and investigation, and the safety authorisation of operators, which is binding upon all of its member states. The directive requires that

The term "reasonably practicable" is one which, for the reasons I have sought to explain, will have a familiar ring to the British railway industry. The unstated assumption underlying the emphasis on "serious accidents" seems to be that it is for some reason more important to seek to prevent (say) ten fatalities occurring in a single event than the same number of fatalities in ten separate events. Why this should be so is not explained, and I know of no ethicist who has been able to offer a justification for it. But if there is this bias in public policy objectives it has significant implications for the railways because the accident profile of different transport modes is quite distinctive.

A study published a few years ago by Professor Andrew Evans of Imperial College reported that in the 35-year period up to 2001, there were 178,226 people killed in road accidents in Britain, compared with 270 in train accidents. [Evans, 2003]

Now, of course, the volume of traffic by road was greater, and the figure includes pedestrians, but when normalised against distance travelled, the roads were several times more dangerous. By any objective measure, it is road safety which should give rise to the greatest "societal concern". However, of these fatalities, 85% of those which occurred in train accidents were in multi-fatality events, whereas on the roads this was true of 13% of deaths. Fatal train accidents are far fewer than those on the roads, but when they do occur, the casualty toll is generally greater. It seems to be this which makes them less commonplace and more newsworthy – which in turn excites a political reaction.

This phenomenon was well described some years ago in a paper by June Bridgeman, who was then the Director of Road and Vehicle Safety at the Department for Transport :

Most people in this audience would immediately recognise a list consisting of Ypres, Vimy Ridge, the Marne, Mons, Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme, Jutland and Gallipoli as being major battles of the First World War. These names are infamous because the casualties which were caused at them were numbered in hundreds of thousands (there were more than half a million casualties at Passchendaele alone). But most of you would probably also recognise a list consisting of Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar, Great Heck, and Ufton Nervet as being the locations of all of the events giving rise to multiple passenger fatalities that have occurred on Britain’s railways in the past decade. The fact that the total death toll in all of these railway incidents taken together was less than the toll on Britain’s roads each week merely helps to illustrate the double standards which seem to be in force.

It is a compliment to the railways that their superior safety record makes lapses from it, when – exceptionally – they do occur, the more remarkable and therefore the more likely to attract comment. But it is a backhanded compliment, because such comments are likely to be critical, and to be accompanied by calls for remedial action. Such action will have a cost – and if the railways are expected to bear it, they will be placed at a commercial disadvantage relative to their competitors. Is this just? And if they are already meeting the ALARP test set by law, what obligation are they under to heed such calls and take such action?

This inconsistency in the level of importance ascribed to safety lapses by different modes was nicely illustrated by two items which I found in heavyweight (i.e. non-tabloid) newspapers.

One read

You will note that the effects of this accident on traffic flow seem to be almost as newsworthy as the fact that four people lost their lives. The other news story read

You may think that as it is highly improbable that these children will often encounter steam engines in their lives (unless world oil depletion results in a reversion to the technology of Watt, Trevithick and Stephenson), they are unlikely to relate the adventures of a collection of anthropomorphic locomotives to their own journey experiences. But the main point I’m trying to convey is the relative seriousness with which these two stories were perceived to deserve to be treated. The first occupied seven column centimetres on page ten of the paper. The second was given 51 column centimetres (including a picture of the fictional engine in question) on page one. What subconscious factors caused the editors to deem the second story to merit seven times as much space as the first, and ten times more prominence? What does this say about the relative level of interest by their readers in road and rail safety?

If it is true that large-scale accidents arouse more societal concern than small ones, you might imagine that when they occur, they would have the detectable consequence of deterring fearful passengers from travelling by rail. But – unlike terrorist bomb attacks, and concerns about personal security, i.e. the risk of becoming the victim of crime in the course of a journey – there is little or no hard evidence of any such effect. The only multi-fatality rail disaster that does seem temporarily to have suppressed demand was the fire at Kings Cross Underground station, and not a train accident. Equally, you might imagine that a higher level of aversion to such events (the so-called scale effect) would be reflected in a greater willingness to pay for their prevention. But, again, the evidence does not support this. When asked by researchers whether a given sum of money should be spent on preventing (say) five fatalities in one accident or ten fatalities in ten accidents, members of the public invariably opt for the latter.

Until recently, the rail industry used a "multi-fatality multiplier" to allow for this scale effect in its cost:benefit appraisal of safety improvement schemes. But it has now been actively discouraged from doing so by the Treasury, because there is nothing to show that this reflects the revealed preferences of its users. [HM Treasury, 1996] What the public seem to be saying is that they wish to see such accidents prevented or at least reduced, and that they expect the industry to do so, but that they are not willing to pay more, either through fares or through taxes, to achieve this result. But how else they believe such improvements should be funded is an unanswered question.

In a paper on Societal Risks commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive, two academics (David Ball and Peter Floyd) alluded tactfully to another factor which may help to explain the industry’s preoccupation with this issue.

To complicate things further, the scale of the outcome of an accident is not the only characteristic which may make it necessary to modify the application of the willingness-to-pay approach in its simple form. Recent research has shown that there are a number of other contextual factors which can influence the public’s perception of the seriousness of lapses in the railways’ safety performance, and thus society’s judgement of the competence of the industry’s leaders. These include

None of these effects is amenable to easy quantification – but if the industry is to be responsive to societal concern, it cannot disregard them, and it must find some way of taking them systematically into account in prioritising its safety programmes and objectives. This may lead it into situations in which it has to make difficult judgements of a quasi-moral nature. As already indicated, a large proportion of risk to the public is faced by trespassers, who have no legitimate (or at least no legal) right to be on railway premises. And a large proportion of risk to passengers is faced by those with what is delicately referred to as "impaired competence" – i.e. they are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. There is little or no public concern at their fate. Does this entitle the railway to be indifferent to it too?

Whether it deserves it or not, the rail industry’s safety performance has demonstrably been an issue of public interest and, in some quarters, of public disquiet. At the Ufton Nervet inquest last October, there was a determined attempt by the relatives of some of the deceased victims to put the rail industry on trial for its alleged unconcern at preventing their fate, even though this disaster was directly caused by the homicidal behaviour of a car driver and was not, strictly speaking, an accident. But the evidence suggests that most members of the public have at best a sketchy understanding of the industry’s true safety performance.

For example, a survey in 2003 revealed that passengers believed that the most frequent "incidents and accidents" occurring on the system were derailments, collisions, landslides, falls from carriages, and injuries due to overcrowding. [Rhind and Thomas, 2003] In fact, these are all infrequent and together account for less than one tenth of the risk on the railway. Instances of the last two categories are virtually nonexistent. In another recent survey, when people were asked to name the mode of transport in which they believed that travellers are least likely to be injured in an accident, more than twice as many nominated cars as nominated trains, even though the opposite is true by a wide margin. [CfIT, 2001] And when a motor insurance company asked drivers whether they felt safer in cars or in trains, cars won by a similar two-to-one margin. [Green Flag, 2006]. So the rail industry clearly has a major task before it, if it is to win the public’s hearts and minds, or simply the public’s serious attention to the facts.

The most systematic measure of public attitudes to safety on the railways can be found in a MORI tracking study commissioned by RSSB, and I can offer you a few of its headline results from 2006, the latest set of findings to have appeared. The respondents sampled included both users and non-users of the railways, with only 7% using them at least once a week, which reflects the national average. Unprompted, only 10% offered prevention of accidents as one of the industry’s two or three priorities for action, putting it eighth on a list headed by reducing fares. 66% thought they’d be killed or seriously injured if they were in a train accident, compared with only 28% in a car accident where they were the driver. When told that on average 7 people a year are killed in train accidents , 56% expected the figure to be higher. 53% thought that privatisation had increased the risk of railway accidents (which is simply not true, and even cynics must recognise that accidents are unlikely to be good for profits).

The net proportion who thought that the motor industry is good at implementing safety measures was 63%, compared with only 41% who thought that of the railways. When asked about what should be the railways’ top priority for safety investment, the largest vote (33%) went to preventing a child from being fatally injured whilst playing on the line, compared with only 19% to preventing a train collision resulting in a passenger being fatally injured. Quite how an operational railway line could ever be made safe to play on is an interesting question the surveyors unfortunately did not explore. 69% thought that the rail industry should spend whatever it takes to eliminate all risks of accident on the railways. When asked how this should be paid for, 46% said the Government and 42% said reduced profits of train companies – compared with 7% who said higher taxes and 7% who said higher fares. It’s not clear where they thought the Government gets its money from other than from taxes, and given this result you may be worried that 55% agreed that the public should be involved in deciding how the industry should invest in rail safety.

Encouragingly, when asked about the best way of spending public money to reduce death rates generally, 17% said road safety compared with 4% who said rail safety. 54% said the rail industry only listens to public opinion when forced to do so by pressure groups (which presumably means there’s a continuing role for Passenger Focus), and 59% said that the industry takes too little account of the opinions of the public (1% of the public said it takes too much account of its opinions). 84% trust train drivers to keep them safe while travelling, but only 45% trust the people running the railways. Net trust in news programmes as a source of reliable information about railway safety runs at 77%, net trust in the railway industry for this purpose at 14%, and net trust in the government at –33%. There’s a lot more in this study which deserves attention, and I commend it to you.

But, does any of this matter? I think it does – because, as a passenger, I have a personal stake in the industry’s success. The Chair of the National Consumer Council (Deirdre Hutton) gave evidence to the public inquiry into safety regulation and assurance in the rail industry which took place after the Southall and Ladbroke Grove collisions. She said :

[This was a reference to the then-recent outbreak of "mad cow disease" and to false claims made by firms selling personal pension plans.]

conflicts of interest

a lack of transparency in the decision making process

a lack of accountability and feedback to the public