ADDRESS BY THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF THE RAILWAY SAFETY REGULATOR, MR MOSENNGWA MOFI, ON THE OCCASSION OF THE SABS CONVENTION AT SANDTON CONVENTION CENTRE, 11 OCTOBER 2007

 Chairperson, honourable guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.

 It is indeed an honour for us to be invited to make this key note address at such an occasion.

The subject of my address is setting standards for safe operations in the railway industry.

But before I share some thoughts on the importance of such standards, I thought that I would digress for a moment to think about the world without standards. In so doing I hope that I will stimulate  conscious decisions by each one of us to reflect on standards that we break, sometimes wittingly but more often than not through bad habits.

Three dictionary definitions of standard read as follows:

• A level of quality or achievement;
• Something used as a measure in order to make comparisons; and
• Principles of good behaviour.

 Imagine for a moment if we did not have universal time in the modern world. How would we tell someone overseas when we would contact them? How would stock exchanges operate, or aircraft departure and arrival times?

Most if not all of us drove our cars to this convention. What if there were no rules of the road? Most of us wonder if there are, and we tend to blame the taxis for our own behaviour- if they can do so and so, then why should I care? Let me do it as well. Another example is IT and Communications standards. Imagine the chaos on the internet if there were no internationally agreed standards and protocols.

Society determines what acceptable behaviour is, and government is charged with the responsibility of creating an environment for order to exist in society. What constitutes acceptable behaviour changes over time and this in turn creates a challenge for the development and enforcement of standards.

 This brings me to the heart of my address.

 A technical definition of a standard reads as follows:

 It is a document, compiled by a recognised body, that provides for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context and includes vocabularies, specifications, codes of practice, guides and recommendations.

 Interrogating the definition reveals some important facts.

• Compiled by a recognised body: The SABS is the recognised body for the development of standards in South Africa. In terms of the Memorandum of Understanding between the RSR and the SABS, the RSR plays a lead role, together with the railway industry, in the development of standards for safe railway operations.
• Provides for common and repeated use to achieve an optimum degree of order. Without standards chaos would prevail, no more so than in the railway industry.
• Includes vocabularies, specifications, codes of practise, guides and recommendations. This was an eye opener when I first encountered this definition. Traditionally I imagined that standards were non negotiable “rules” that had to be abided by, only to find that standards are far wider than this to the extent that even a guidance document is considered to be a standard.

 Now how are we applying these concepts to the railway industry and what is the RSR’s role in the process?

 Rightly or wrongly, I have assumed that not too many of you are aware of existence of the Railway Safety Regulator, let alone what it does. So let me give you a brief overview.

The RSR was born out of the necessity for an independent body to oversee operational safety in railways. Historically, Transnet Freight Rail (formerly Spoornet) was the only major player, and it decided on the rules of the game and evaluated its own performance. The concept of player and referee being the same person is fundamentally unacceptable.

The Government decided to follow the international trend to create an independent agency to oversee safety. The stated policy of Government to open the secondary lines to other operators will introduce numerous additional operators, and already neighbouring railways of Botswana and Mozambique operate into South Africa. And then there are the numerous private sidings and surface railways on mines which add to the conundrum of managing safety in a multi-operator environment.

 With this in mind, the National Railway Safety Regulator Act was published in 2002, but it really only began functioning from about June 2005.

The RSR is a public entity reporting to the Minister, and is governed by a non-executive board. The staff complement is currently 43 persons. Interestingly, our Inspectorate comprises mainly of retired railway engineers, who play a critical role in the execution of our oversight responsibilities.

 The primary functions of the RSR are to:

• Issue safety permits to operators in order to legalise railway operations.
• Develop and implement a legislative framework through the development of railway safety regulations.
• Oversee operational safety by operators through conducting audits and inspections; by undertaking accident investigations; by analysing accident statistics and performing trend analyses; by monitoring implementation by operators of findings and recommendations arising from audits, inspections, accident investigations. Operators are required to develop an annual safety plan which contains interventions to improve safety performance. The RSR monitors the implementation. Lastly, the RSR oversees safety by issuing directives where unsafe conditions or activities are found.
• To conclude agreements with other organs of state to minimise duplication of functions in order to improve efficiency and minimise beaurocracy.
• Develop and adopt standards;

Referring to the development and adoption of standards; regulations for the development of 3 levels of standards were developed and recently promulgated after consultation with Standards South Africa and the railway industry at large. I need to admit that for the past few years the RSR has been applying these regulations as if they were already in force.

At the highest level are national standards. These are developed in terms of an MOU with the SABS and are given an SABS number. Standards SA procedures and processes are strictly followed. These standards apply to the railway industry at large and will range from high level policy and guidance type of standards to detailed technical standards.

Industry Standards are developed for a particular sector of the industry by the industry under the auspices of a recognised industry association, and follow the same rigorous process as for national standards. An example of such standards will be those applicable to the Gautrain.

Local standards apply to a particular geographical location and are developed by the operators in consultation with all the affected parties. These standards are particularly necessary for train operations to cover unique local conditions.

 So how does the RSR envisage the process of development and adoption of standards being applied and the impact on safe railway operations?

 Firstly, one cannot separate technical standards or operational standards from safety standards. For example, the technical standard for maintenance of a railway track or rolling stock (wagon, coaches and locomotives) has both a safety element and an economic component, and the challenge is to optimise both. Similarly, the operational standard for the length of time a driver may drive a train is dictated to by both safety and financial considerations.

 With this in mind, one of the highest risks in railway operations is where the activities of two or more operators meet or when a train moves from one network to another. There needs to be consistent standards for train signalling to ensure that there is no misinterpretation of the intent of signal. Another example is the braking systems of different locomotives, wagons and coaches. They need to be consistent to ensure the safe working of trains made up of wagons from different operators, or even different countries.

 And then there is the consideration of interoperability of rolling stock. Besides the safety considerations, there are the commercial aspects. For example, the vision for railways in the SADC countries in terms of the protocol on transport, communications and meteorology, is for seamless services across borders. Without uniform safety and technical standards this would be impossible. Fortunately there have been forums and processes that have addressed these concerns, but the need is even greater today for the survival and growth of the economies in the region to ensure there is interoperability of rolling stock.

 As I indicated earlier, Transnet Freight Rail has been the primary generator of standards for railways in South Africa. The challenge is to ensure that standards developed or adopted are accepted within the region, and StandardsSA, as the secretariat of SADC Standards, will in my opinion play a vital role in this regard.

 I need to highlight a critical matter than should not be overlooked in the process. The people issue.

 There are two aspects that I would like to touch on.

Firstly, the need to optimise the utilisation of scarce technical resources is vital. Any standard developed or adopted requires considerable technical input that is implementable. This is an ongoing challenge for both the RSR and the industry.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the attitude of people to compliance with agreed standards. Referring back to that apparent total disregard for road standards by motorists is symptomatic of the general attitude to what is acceptable behaviour. This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest challenge facing railways. The RSR will play its part in monitoring this aspect. In fact, a standard for human behaviour called Human Factors is currently being developed to address a whole range of behavioural issues. Technology can never replace the human being entirely and the RSR intends ensuring that this aspect receives the necessary priority.

In conclusion, let me say that the state of safety of railways is not satisfactory. We have recently published an annual state of railway safety report for the year 2005/06 and our findings were worrying. Amongst other issues, the report indicated that collisions and derailments were high, representing 33.5% of all reportable occurrence categories. The major contributory factors to accidents have been identified as human error, which points to the need to urgently develop standards that will guide human factor management practices, with particular reference to safety critical positions. Of the accident investigations that the RSR conducted in 2005/06, about 33% of the findings directly relate to human error whilst 22% relate to poor infrastructure/technology. The rest were attributed to both human error and infrastructure.

 The ageing rail infrastructure has been identified as one area that plays a significant role in the lack of improvement in the state of safety in our railways. In this regard, I need to point out to our historical legacy of gross under-investment in the railway system.

The costs associated with incidents for 2005/06 were dramatically high and it can be assumed that this impacts heavily on the cost of doing business in the country both in relation to Transnet Freight Rail and freight consignors.  For the year under review, incident costs in the railway industry were well over R700m. High incident costs impacts negatively on the economy as the costs of running the increases and have to be passed on elsewhere.

This state of safety report provides us with an objective yardstick to measure the progress we make in ensuring that we make sustainable impact in the improvement of the state of safety in South Africa’s railways.   

 While the report itself may highlight areas of serious concern, tremendous progress has been made during 2006/07 to correct the state of affairs reflected in this report, and the directives we have issued to operators from time to time in order to avoid recurrence of incidents have yielded notable results.  This progress will be reported on in detail in the next State of Railway Safety report to be published during the course of this year.

The RSR has only been functioning as a fully fledged entity for just over 2 year. In this time systems and processes have been developed to assist in performing its functions. Operators are beginning to feel the presence of the RSR, and for some it’s not too comfortable. As we develop or adopt standards, the railway industry will be empowered through their Safety Management Systems to manage safety more effectively and efficiently and the RSR will be able to proclaim that railways are indeed safe, secure and on track.

 Thank you.

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