The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Charter for Rail – Annual Report
The EDI Charter represents the industry’s commitment to openly support the EDI agenda. It is open to all companies, clients, and organisations working to promote positive change in the rail industry. It seeks to recognise and build upon the progress that has already taken place, providing the basis to encourage further collaboration and action across the sector.
As a signatory, RSSB is committed to setting the right conditions for colleagues to thrive. We want to provide a collaborative, healthy, and safe working environment in which everyone is treated fairly and feels a sense of belonging. So, over the past few years, we have taken steps to improve diversity and inclusion across the organisation.
Creating company-wide engagement opportunities and forums that foster employee participation, including holding awareness days and sharing and championing new ideas, has been crucial to improving EDI in our workplace. It enables colleagues to contribute to a healthy, positive, and inclusive culture. Page 50 of the Annual Report provides a full breakdown of our activities to increase EDI, not just within RSSB but across the rail industry as a whole.
In addition, our own Vaibav Puri—Director of Sector Strategy and Transformation—represents RSSB on the Sector Culture and Behaviours Senior Sponsor Steering Group, along with representatives from DfT, GBRTT, NR, ORR, RDG, and Transport Focus. Last year, this cross-sector group set out to develop a framework for rail sector culture.
Inclusion is at the heart of this approach. The process began with listening to what people had to say, speaking with hundreds of individuals from their own organisations as well as from train operating companies, the RIA, and Connected Leaders cohorts.
From this, the group identified seven common attributes where we need to think, feel, and do things differently:
- collaboration
- commitment to our people
- customer focus
- innovation
- safety and wellbeing
- sustainability
- value.
To find out more about the outputs of the group, see page 18 of the Annual Report.
We need to change the way that we behave now. Through our culture, we can all make a positive stand and effect change within ourselves, our organisations, and across the sector. So, through the Charter, we have agreed that we must stand together—building partnerships, calling out the tensions between us, and challenging each other to live by these principles.
