Guy Yeomans
Principal, Horizon Scanning at RSSB
If I asked you to name three major events that had tested rail’s operational resilience in the past 5 years, chances are you could. Your list may even stretch beyond that.
Tempting as it is for me to name some obvious, headline-grabbing examples, I won’t. Because I essentially want to highlight that the landscape in which rail operates can be volatile, uncertain, and complex—and this cocktail challenges our resilience.
I think it’s fair to say that we’re becoming more aware of the disrupters and how to guard our operations against them. Industry’s continuing work to mitigate the risks linked to extreme weather events and other impacts of climate change is an excellent example.
But rail’s current approach to building operational resilience, at both system and individual organisational levels, still has challenges. And this renders us less collectively effective than we could be.
The weak points surfaced amid the delivery of the Rail Resilience Project, which was instigated by the Cabinet Office and senior rail leaders in 2021 to improve rail’s collective emergency management capabilities.
The 3-year project, which concluded in March 2025, was a success in that it delivered much-needed common industry guidance and supporting tools. But it recognised that there’s no clear route or strategic framework to support longer-term industry implementation. Also lacking are ways to broaden consideration from just emergency management to wider operational resilience over time or to support the future ‘stand-up’ of Great British Railways.
Development of the Rail Resilience Strategy
To overcome these challenges, a collaborative partnership from across rail came together to develop the Rail Resilience Strategy. Partners include the Department for Transport, Network Rail, the Rail Delivery Group, the Office for Rail and Road, Transport for London, Transport Scotland, Transport for Wales, British Transport Police, and RSSB.
The 5-year strategy, which will run until 2030, is based on four strategic themes:
- risk
- collaboration
- governance
- leadership.
RSSB’s Foresight and Horizon Scanning team, of which I’m part, sits on the Rail Resilience Steering Group. We’ve been charged with undertaking development work, on the steering group’s behalf, to help set out and deliver the objectives for the risk strategic theme.
The risk theme’s goal is to facilitate a common understanding of operational resilience risks, hazards, and threats. And this goal is informed by a set of overarching challenges in rail:
- We lack whole-system, industry-level risk awareness and understanding.
- We lack an understanding of broader risk dynamics.
- We have differences and inconsistency in risk identification, prioritisation, and management.
- There’s limited consideration of emerging risks and processes for anticipating risks.
- There’s limited development of longer-term resilience management approaches.
We’ve now established three core, interrelated aims:
- develop industry horizon scanning capabilities to support rail stakeholders to better understand and anticipate future risks
- develop the Rail Operational Risk & Resilience Index (RORRI), which will be informed by the National Risk Register but expand to include specific industry risks and longer-term/chronic risks over time, and which will also provide a platform to embed system-level resilience approach and insight
- develop a strategic playbook to help embed adoption and usage of the horizon scanning and RORRI information.
I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss the work we’re doing for the risk strategic theme, as well as the wider strategy, with you and your teams. Rail delivers its best work when we collaborate, so I’m also keen to connect with organisations that’d like to partner with us on this.