David Horne is managing director of LNER and a director at the Rail Safety Standards Board (RSSB). He recently joined RailStaff to discuss his career in rail, emphasising his role in health & safety. We talked about the key safety challenges facing the industry and the initiatives in place to tackle them, as well as the issues that significantly impact on employee health and how these are being managed.
Thanks for joining us, David. You’ve worked in rail throughout your career – what initially attracted you to the industry?
I’ve been the managing director at LNER since the company came into being in 2018 and I’m very lucky that we have more than 3,500 amazing colleagues working here. We’re well known for delivering excellent customer service but underneath the surface we’re also doing a huge amount to ensure the health & safety of everybody in the business, as well as the customers who travel with us.
I’ve been in the rail industry for around 30 years, particularly on the train operations side, and I’ve certainly seen a significant improvement over the years in terms of how the industry manages health & safety.
I initially took a part time job in the industry. That was back in 1988, the year of the Clapham disaster. I also remember commuting to work on South West Trains and seeing the smoke rising from the Ladbroke Grove disaster in West London. Events like these have inevitably shaped our industry and we’ve made such progress since then. However, we always need to be vigilant and keep safety at the forefront of our minds.
Rail is a very people-focused industry. There are some very committed individuals and people who are remarkably generous in terms of sharing their knowledge and explaining how to do things. There’s a real purpose to what the railway does as well. The fact that we’re getting people from A to B, for whatever reason, is very fulfilling.
We can’t sit back and admire a manufactured product at the end of each day, but rail is an industry where we can see the impact that we have on people straight away. There is a fulfilment to be found from, for instance, getting people to a job interview or helping a family reach a holiday destination. To be able to work in an industry that has such an impact on so many people’s lives, is an absolute privilege.
What inspired your commitment to health & safety?
I suppose I only really got close to the health and safety management aspect after I became a director at East Midlands Trains in 2007. That was the first time I’d acted as a director of a train operating company (TOC), and part of the governance of all TOCs is to understand the causes around accidents that are recorded and to have an insight into the resulting investigations. I didn’t have a particularly deep understanding of safety management before then, but I was drawn into it through that role.
Today, thanks to the likes of the RSSB, as well as all the literature and other resources that are available, I do believe that anybody can educate themselves about safety management on the railway.
It isn’t some dark art – there are more resources around today than there have ever been. You can learn about and apply safety management to any role that you’re doing, and there are so many fantastic people within the industry to explain things.
What health and safety challenges are currently cause you the most concern?
When I was at East Midlands Trains we did a lot of work around level crossing accidents. I remember one accident where one of our trains struck a car in Lincolnshire and a child died.
We have a lot of level crossings on the East Coast route and they are one of the highest risk elements of our railway. I think Network Rail has done a fantastic job in terms of reducing the safety risks associated with level crossings, but we’ve still got a way to go.
Additionally, the platform-train interface is a hazard that passengers interact with every day, and one where we can forget the risks. We all get on and off trains – it’s an everyday occurrence – but the fact is there are trains whizzing through platforms at speed and, in some cases, gaps between the train and the platform. Early last summer we had an incident at Newark Northgate where a young child climbed down from the edge of the platform. This is an area where we need to be incredibly vigilant and recognise our role in looking after people and keeping them safe on our stations.
In relation to the health of staff, things have improved significantly over the years. Working in rail can be quite hard. For example, shift work can contribute to poor health and fatigue, and that is something that needs proper monitoring. There are roles where manual handling needs quite a lot of attention as well. The combination of fatigue, musculoskeletal conditions, and mental wellbeing all contribute to a challenging health environment. We need to be conscious of that and work to ensure that we are keeping everybody healthy.
What steps is LNER taking to improve the health, safety, and wellbeing of its staff and customers?
We’ve always had an occupational health & wellbeing service at LNER. Some train companies subcontract this out, but we have had an in-house service since we were Virgin Trains East Coast. That gives us a chief medical officer and a team of medical and wellbeing professionals who are able to tailor the support we give to our employees. We’ve also recently employed a physiotherapist who can address any musculo-skeletal conditions that might be affecting our staff. We’ve seen great results from this one-to-one physio care and that’s a great example of the practical initiatives we offer.
In addition to all of this, at LNER we have seven colleague networks all with a focus on a different area of wellbeing. These are: Being You, Nurture, Empower, Together, Elevate, Mankind, and Flourish. They focus on inclusion, families, men and women’s wellbeing, LGBTQIA+, race and ethnicity, and disability. All of these are sponsored by a director within the business and I sponsor the inclusion network. These groups are very much a place for colleagues to come together to share experiences and encouragement, and to support each other. You can join as many or as few as you like, and there’s no pressure either to join at all. They’re all colleague-led and are a significant means of supporting our staff.
One thing that you may or may not have noticed if you travel with LNER is that we’ve also introduced single whistle dispatch. At York, for example, there would historically be lots of whistles blown as a way of communicating between the members of platform staff. We did some health surveillance work around the impact of this on platform staff and came to the conclusion that it is actually an excessive noise impact that may have a long-term impact on people’s hearing.
In response to this, we’ve modified the dispatch process so that, instead of lots of whistles being blown, if all is going well the whistle only gets blown once. Not only has that improved the way we dispatch trains, but it’s also reducing the long-term impact that occupational noise is having on our colleagues at stations.
In relation to safety, we found that the introduction of our Azuma trains has significantly reduced the number of onboard accidents that we see.
Our operation involves a lot of catering delivery on trains – we have chefs preparing food in kitchens and catering teams preparing hot drinks. The old High Speed Trains (HSTs) were fantastic from a customer point of view, but the kitchens were just not as safe as on a modern train.
For example, hot water used to pour from the onboard stills at a height, which was a safety concern. You’d have to fill a hot water jug using this contraption which was probably state-of-the-art back in the 1970s but doesn’t really have a place on a modern train. Employee accidents have been reduced thanks to the introduction of the new fleet, and that’s made a big difference to our overall health and safety numbers.
We also encourage reporting of accidents and incidents by our staff, as well as close calls through our dedicated app.
For a project like our work on the impact of whistles on hearing, we rely on our health and safety professionals to analyse the impact of different activities and the potential impact they have on long term health.
Collectively, we’re all very determined to take practical steps to keep our staff and passengers safe and healthy, and we really do welcome it when someone flags a potential opportunity for us to improve.
Finally, health & safety is a concern for everybody involved in Rail. How well is information shared across the industry?
As part of my role at RSSB I chair the Rail Wellbeing Alliance, so I see quite a lot on the health & wellbeing side of things.
We recognised as an industry that there were lots of statistics about safety and about the accidents that we were seeing, but there wasn’t much data or insight about the health conditions that people on the railway were experiencing.
One of the first steps has been to create a system where the train companies, Network Rail, and infrastructure contractors share health data so we can see the common patterns in the industry and have knowledge of which other industries are facing these problems.
And then the second step is to ask ‘what are you doing about that, what are you trying, and what’s working?
Again, this is where the Rail Wellbeing Alliance and its subgroups enable the sharing of ideas and sharing of initiatives. Mental health is a good example. We have the Rail Mental Health Charter and everybody has a very good idea of the things that employers and individuals can be doing to look after each other.
The work that the Rail Health & Wellbeing Alliance has done to pull together health and safety data is not only an industry first, but an example of how the rail industry is leading others. England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has cited it as a leading initiative in terms of employers working together to better understand health concerns. It’s something that we, as an industry, can be very proud of.
The annual Rail Wellbeing Live event, as well as the Wellbeing Wednesdays that take place every month, have reached a lot of people working in the industry with health & wellbeing information. We have some very inspirational speakers and the content has been great in terms of elevating the conversation around health and wellbeing in the industry.
That’s so important because we talk a lot about safety in the industry. We have lots of rules and lots of training. We have lots of investigations when things go wrong. But health is just as important as safety, and we need to get better at looking after ourselves and each other.
I would certainly encourage anyone who has an interest in health and safety to get involved as a health and safety rep or involved with an industry group. Even just a having a conversation with a colleague can bring about change.
Image credit: LNER
