Safety responsibility

Everyone within your organisation should have clear responsibilities and understand them. Your organisation should identify who is accountable for the safety of work. This should normally be the person who is accountable for the work itself. They will stay accountable even if they ask someone else to do the work for them. Any organisation whose work might contribute to an accident will have a corporate responsibility for safety.

This will cover the safety of everyone who might be affected by its activities, which may include workers and members of the public. Your organisation should be set up so that its people work together effectively to meet this overall responsibility. Everyone should have clear responsibilities and understand them. People’s responsibilities should be matched to their job. Anyone whose work creates a risk should have the knowledge they need to understand the implications of that risk and to put controls in place.

The organisation that takes the lead in changing, maintaining or operating some aspect of the railway should make sure that the other organisations are clear on their safety responsibilities and that these responsibilities cover everything that needs to be done to ensure safety. For each part of the railway, someone should be responsible for keeping up-to-date information about how it is built, how it is maintained, how safely and reliably it is performing, how it was designed and why it was designed that way, and for using that information to evaluate changes.

ESM is a team activity, involving people with different backgrounds from across the organisation and outside it. Therefore, an important part of ESM is the allocation of safety roles with clearly defined safety responsibilities.

This chapter describes some common safety roles and the related responsibilities, and explains how they can be allocated and transferred, both within an organisation and between organisations. Responsibility is not necessarily the same as accountability. You are responsible for something if you are entrusted with making sure that it happens. To be accountable for something means that you can be called to account if it does not happen. Generally, managers remain accountable for ESM performance even though they may delegate responsibility for ESM activities.

This fundamental applies to people whose action or inaction might contribute to risk. This will include most, if not all, maintenance personnel. As the fundamental implies, you can only give responsibility to someone who is prepared to accept it. There are certain legal obligations placed on employers and employees with regard to defining responsibilities. See volume 1 for further details. The guidance in this chapter is applicable to all phases in the System Lifecycle. This chapter is written for:

• managers responsible for the appointment of staff to safety-related tasks or for determining organisational structure; and

• anyone performing an assessment of personnel competence.