STATION REFURBISHMENT SAFETY & SECURITY
Light Rail Safety Reporting: What People Say CIRAS’ Susan Gray joined the Light Rail Safety and Standards Board to ask workers what gets in the way of raising safety concerns. Here, she shares the findings
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(l-r): CIRAS’ Sue Gray (stakeholder manager), and LRSSB’s Carl Williams (Chief Executive) and Laura Reardon (Head of Safety Risk Management).
ate in 2025, CIRAS and the Light Rail Safety and Standards Board spoke to safety managers and frontline workers across four GB light rail networks. We were keen to understand how people feel about raising health and safety concerns, and what gets in the way. Recognising barriers is the first step to overcoming them, and the findings offer practical insight for a sector that wants to reduce risk and strengthen learning. Light rail staff delivered a clear message to us: low levels of reporting do not necessarily mean low levels of risk. The evidence points to a more complex reality. People working on light rail overwhelmingly believe that reporting health and safety concerns matters. Most see it as a professional duty and moral responsibility. But belief in reporting does not always translate into desirable reporting behaviour. Under-reporting exists, but the research suggests it happens in ways that can be understood – and addressed. That matters because reporting is one of the foundations of a learning railway. If concerns, precursor events and lowerlevel hazards are not raised, organisations lose the visibility needed to spot patterns, 42
intervene early and strengthen controls before serious harm occurs. Weak reporting can mask immature risk management rather than prove that all is well. A healthy safety culture is not evidenced by silence, but by a workforce that feels confident and able to speak up.
Safety matters
One of the clearest findings was that the workforce is not indifferent to safety. Workers consistently described reporting as critical because it can protect life, prevent harm and improve safety for them, their colleagues and passengers. Safety managers feel the same, so there is no major gap in values here. The challenge lies in the practical, cultural and psychological conditions that shape whether someone decides to report or stays silent.
What’s reported?
Serious, immediate and visible hazards are most likely to be reported. Events that threaten service continuity or demand urgent action usually come through. By contrast, smaller issues, precursor events and routine concerns are less consistently reported. And managers told us that these
lower-level signals often provide the best opportunity for prevention. If they are missing, the industry can only learn from the outcomes of events, rather than from the conditions that create them. The research also showed a difference between what frontline staff and managers most readily identify as ‘risk’. Frontline workers were more likely to describe personal safety threats such as abuse, antisocial behaviour, lone working and violence. Managers emphasised operational and system risks such as degraded infrastructure, trespass, time pressure and trackside exposure. Neither perspective is wrong. The contrast simply shows that people experience risk differently depending on role and proximity to harm. Reporting systems need to capture both lived experience and operational risk. Findings on antisocial behaviour are especially important. Abuse and antisocial behaviour were the most frequently cited risks by frontline staff, yet they also appear to be under-reported, particularly when incidents are verbal or frequent. This is a warning sign. When repeated exposure desensitises staff, the threshold for reporting rises and harmful behaviour can ‘go underground’. For leaders, that raises a broader question: where else might normalisation be dulling sensitivity to risk?
What impacts behaviour?
Our conversations suggested that reporting behaviour is shaped by a combination of capacity, opportunity and motivation. For example, people may know the main reporting route but still feel unsure about what to report, when to do it or what alternatives exist. They may have access to the right systems but find they do not work in signal blackspots, or that operational pressures in control rooms leave little time for listening and follow-up. They may believe in reporting but lose motivation if experience tells them that nothing changes.