CIRAS' Sue Gray is a guest on LRSSB's light rail podcast

The conversation with Sue is about the importance of reporting concerns and listening.

The discussion with CIRAS is episode 8 of the Light Rail Safety and Standards Board (LRSSB) podcast, Let's Talk Light Rail, which is hosted by LRSSB's marketing and communications manager, Carly Swift. Craig O'Brien, LRSSB's head of innovation safety and engineering, was also a guest.

'You might spot when something isn't quite right, whether it's the conditions that you're working in or the behaviour of other people. At that point, you have a choice. You can either say something or not say something. The reason why it's very important to choose to raise it, is it's almost like guilty knowledge. If something happens and an incident occurs and you could have prevented it, because you had knowledge you didn't share, then an individual has to make peace with themselves and live with that,' says Sue. 'The thing is you might think, "Oh, that's a really small issue. It's not big enough to bother about." But if you look at investigations, quite often when incidents do happen it's a combination of things coming together in a perfect storm.

'So if you don't speak up, you have to then accept that you could potentially have prevented something from happening. So there is a kind of moral aspect to it, and it's why we talk about making the right call and raising your concerns.... That doesn't mean it's an easy thing to do. It isn't. Sometimes it can be really challenging. But I would always say to somebody it's really important you speak up using whatever channel works best for you.'

Craig added: 'In an ideal world, we'd all work in organisations that were of 100% trust and we would feel confident enough and secure enough to be able to approach everything with our line managers or superior peers. But that's not the world we live in. You need a kind of forum or a tool, like CIRAS, to be able to get those concerns over...and I think that's where [CIRAS] comes in as an alternative to going through the channels that we're [maybe] slightly uncomfortable with. I think we've all been there, even as a middle manager, or a high-level manager, you may still have some concerns about escalating things because of potential repercussions.'

Craig and Carly also discussed experiences from the light rail and bus sectors, as Carly is a former bus driver, and Sue shared some practical examples of how CIRAS has helped to resolve concerns and highlight wider safety issues. It's worth watching or listening to the entire episode whichever transport sector you work in, to get a deeper understanding of the need to report concerns, and the reason why CIRAS confidential reporting hotline for transport exists.

Listen to the podcast on the Let's Talk Light Rail Spotify channel, and you can also watch it on YouTube.

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