We carry over 200 million passengers a year on our public transport systems around the world.  It is therefore important that all rail safety goes to the heart of our culture as a public service company.  It’s a powerful and emotive issue. And it’s too important to leave to ‘management’ or the safety specialists alone: we’ve made it the explicit responsibility of every Serco employee involved in transport operations, from top to bottom.  The public is entitled to demand nothing less.

Each member of staff is required to take an active role in maintaining a safe working environment.  They’re required to put maintaining safety above any other consideration in doing their job, and to take whatever action is necessary to maintain safety to themselves, customers and the public.

We’ve developed a formal Safety Management System for each of our rail contracts. This dictates how safety matters are to be managed throughout the operation, defines everyone’s responsibilities, and describes the processes and procedures that will protect the safety of customers and employees.  To provide a degree of impartiality, each contract appoints to its board a Non-Executive Director with Special Interest in Safety.  This director, normally an expert safety professional from outside the contract, advises the board on best practice and the effectiveness of its safety management process.

We undertake risk assessments on tasks throughout the system to ensure that each operation is undertaken as safely as possible.  These assessments are reviewed regularly and after incidents to seek out scope for improvements.  Each division responsible for rail activities includes within its quarterly assurance report information on initiatives being progressed to deliver strategic objectives, specific performance measures, collated from information generated through ASSURE, and any incident that may have occurred.  This is reviewed by the divisional board and then provided to the Corporate Assurance Group for consolidation into the report to the Serco Group plc Board.

To review safety across all our rail contracts we have a Transport Risk Oversight Group which meets quarterly.  This consists of safety professionals from each contract and is chaired by the Non-Executive Director with Special Interest in Safety on the divisional board of Serco Integrated Transport.  This group brings a degree of independence to the safety management process and allows matters of concern to be brought to the divisional board without relying on normal line management communications.  The primary purpose of the rail safety oversight group is to:

• develop and review harmonised rail safety objectives and Company rail safety policy
• advise the respective divisional boards with rail responsibility on rail safety related issues
• review safety trends and major incidents and highlight any area of concern. Attendees are required to propose and manage initiatives to address any adverse trend or concern.
• ensure that identified rail safety issues are resolved.
• ensure that the rail safety risk is reduced to a level as low as reasonably practicable.
• ensure that an unequivocal and pro-active approach to safety management is taken to minimise the risk of a rail accident or incident to a point as low as reasonably practicable.
• liaise with and ensure regular exchange of safety data with appropriate internal and external industry safety agencies.
• highlight any changes to legislation that may become apparent, bring them to the attention of the relevant operational boards and, if necessary co-ordinate any response associated with any proposed legislative changes.
• to provide input to the review of Contract Safety Reports and Consolidated Safety Reports.