Mark Phillips
Chief Executive, RSSB
The Hidden Inquiry brought stricter testing controls, limits on working hours, and a culture of accountability.
But I also helped write business cases dressed up as responses to Hidden's recommendations to win approval. Scarce funds were allocated on flimsy grounds. Money spent in safety's name is not always money spent on safety.
The lesson stayed with me. Safety and efficiency are allies: the better we understand risk, the less we waste and the safer we become. For more than two decades, RSSB's Safety Risk Model has quantified the risks of running Britain's railway, letting us test decisions against evidence rather than instinct.
The evidence saves serious money. When retrofitting enhanced power doors was proposed to cut trap-and-drag risk, the model showed which options were justified—averting up to £50 million of spending on those that were not.
It also saves lives. After the tragedy at Carmont in 2020, I championed Proportionate Risk Response to Implementing Mitigating Speeds to Assets (PRIMA), a decision-support tool helping operators and infrastructure managers set optimal train speeds for forecast rainfall. A wind-speed component, matched to the condition of our assets, will soon go live.
From operating a railway, I knew what blanket speed restrictions do: services collapse, passengers give up and, in extreme cases, drive instead. Five people die on Britain's roads each day. Pushing passengers on to them is no safety policy. PRIMA replaces blanket caution with targeted speeds, so we run the railway that is safest—not the one that feels safest.
Climate change raises the stakes. The risk to our assets is growing before our eyes, and public funds face many other claims. We must be far more discriminating in how we spend to protect the railway from a rapidly developing threat.
My ask of Great British Railways is simple: use the Safety Risk Model on every safety-related investment. It need not be complicated. It guides you to the right answer.
My worry is human nature. People are sometimes afraid to take a decision and own it; covering every outcome feels safer for the decision maker, whatever it costs the railway. We cannot afford the easy answer. The railway that honours Clapham's lessons is not the one that spends most in safety's name; it is the one that puts its money where its risk is.