Show notes: Tavid Dobson, RSSB Increasingly, good management of work-related road risk is becoming a pre-requisite for winning new work, with the power of procurement being used to drive up standards through supply chains, and even across entire sectors. Rail is one sector where this approach is being rolled out My guest for this episode is Tavid Dobson who is the road risk lead for RSSB – the Rail Safety and Standards Board. Tavid is leading efforts to get rail sector organisations including Network Rail, train and freight operating companies and construction firms to collaborate on an innovative project to improve road risk management across an entire industry. National Highways and the Driving for Better Business programme are working closely with Tavid to ensure its success. https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/tavid-dobson/   Useful links Tavid Dobson on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tavid-dobson-365203116/ RSSBhttps://www.rssb.co.uk/   Transcript Simon: Increasingly, good management of work-related road risk is becoming a pre-requisite for winning new work, with the power of procurement being used to drive up standards through supply chains, and even across entire sectors. Rail is one sector where this approach is being rolled out My guest for this episode is Tavid Dobson who is the road risk lead for RSSB – the Rail Safety and Standards Board. Tavid is leading efforts to get rail sector organisations including Network Rail, train and freight operating companies and construction firms to collaborate on an innovative project to improve road risk management across an entire industry. National Highways and the Driving for Better Business programme are working closely with Tavid to ensure its success. Tavid, welcome to the show. Simon: My first question is that everyone understands the railways can be a dangerous environment to work in. What does safety management mean in your world Tavid:   Safety management systems and application is incredibly important – it’s a very dangerous environment with lots of engineering and passengers moving around. It helps to recognise lots inf incidents over the years like the Kings Cross Fire and Clapham Junction which helps us focus to ensure we manage the risks and the causes of those risks. We now have a mature approach to this management, but the roads area is something we haven’t looked at until recently. Simon: When we talk about the rail sector we think about trains and the obvious risks, but what are the typical road risks you have to manage in the rail industry?   Tavid:  This is an interesting question. I think there’s an assumption that it’s just about road fleets. The rail industry has unique road risk profiles to address. Taxis – procurement of taxis, replacement buses,  and there are road fleets obviously. Network rail has a road fleet of 10,000 vehicles and there’s the road fleets within each of the supply chain areas. There’s also grey fleet, people using 2 wheels, so there’s a whole range of areas we have to take account of and obviously the process and standards we are looking at need to address all of those. Simon: Now I’ve worked with businesses in other traditional hazardous industries such as energy production or dangerous manufacturing processes, and  I’ve found it can be common in other traditionally hazardous industries for business leaders and safety professionals to focus solely on the hazardous work and either forget, or fail to see the level of risk involved in driving. What’s driven the increase in focus on road risk? Tavid: There’s been a number of key areas coming to light – it’s been activated by things like CIRUS who identified the issues around fatigue and we’ve also had a number of fatalities investigated by the LORR recently so I think we realised that road risk is a significant issue when we’re killing more of our staff on the roads than on the railway itself. Simon: What’s the split between incidents on road and rai