One year later, are we any safer?

On the first anniversary of the Paddington crash, a transport expert asks what the rail industry has done to prevent a recurrence - and is it worth it?

At exactly 08.11 on Thursday morning, Paddington station will fall silent in memory of the 31 travellers killed in the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster.

At exactly 08.11 on Thursday morning, Paddington station will fall silent in memory of the 31 travellers killed in the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster.

One year ago a Thames and a First Great Western train collided outside Paddington, with results that shook the nation. Neither scheduled train will run on Thursday, the first anniversary of the crash, which will also be marked by a memorial service for friends and relatives. Terrible as the disaster was, it has also left the rail industry in a quandary over what to do about safety.

The public perception is that nothing has been done to improve safety in that year and that the railways are a relatively unsafe mode of transport. This view has been strongly propounded by the survivors and the relatives of the dead and their lawyers who have been very prominent in arguing for all kinds of additional safety measures, ranging from seat belts and openable windows to reduced speeds and, most prominently, the automatic train protection (ATP) system which would prevent virtually any train from going through a red light.

The problem for the rail industry is twofold. First, it isn't easy to argue against people who have had relatives killed in an accident where clearly the railway companies had made a series of mistakes. And second, those running the rail companies continue to be regarded as fat cats who profited from yet another botched privatisation.

So industry statements about progress in improving safety since Ladbroke Grove, are seen as whitewash to try to fool a gullible public. Yet, in truth, a lot has happened - but little of it, apart from the odd safety message about evacuations from trains, will have made any impact on travellers.

In a letter to the editor of the Independent on Sunday timed to coincide with the anniversary, Gerald Corbett, the chief executive of Railtrack, has outlined the measures that his company and the rest of the industry have taken to improve safety since the accident. He points to increased investment, a programme of risk assessment for signals which have been passed at red, the start of the programme to fit the train protection and warning system (TPWS), the setting-up of a confidential incident reporting system, and a review of training procedures for drivers. Other major changes are on the way, too. The Health and Safety Executive has drawn up new regulations which will make rail companies set out ways in which they will continually improve safety, rather than just sit back on their past record.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the whole approach to safety in the industry has been transformed as a result of Ladbroke Grove. Rightly so: although the Cullen enquiry into the disaster has not yet reported, the evidence has revealed a catalogue of errors and instances of sloppiness which, with hindsight, made a major disaster very likely. Driver training, the lay-out of the track, risk assessment procedures and the structure of the privatised industry have all come under scrutiny and been found wanting.

However, the most clear area of failure was the way in which incidents of Spads (signal passed at danger) were treated. Even without the benefit of hindsight, it is quite easy to see that the railways' lax attitude towards Spads would lead to a major disaster. Indeed, most of the major accidents in the 1990s such as Cowden, Watford and Southall were also caused by Spads. Yet, the procedures to investigate them were woefully sloppy; nobody took much notice particularly about signals where multiple Spads had occurred; there was no coherent detailed analysis of where and why they were occurring; and there was a tendency to put them down to driver error and forget about them. Worst, there was an acceptance that a certain number of Spads were inevitable rather than the zero tolerance to which the industry is now working.

It is on the issue of what safety system to introduce in order to minimise the danger of Spads that the campaigners, backed by large sections of the public, and the railway companies and safety authorities are most at odds. The industry, backed by the HSE and the Government, has speeded up the introduction of TPWS, a relatively unsophisticated device which will ensure that trains will be forced to stop at red signals in most instances. However, it will not be effective at very high speeds and therefore some accidents, such as Southall, would not have been prevented. In sum, TPWS will prevent around 70 per cent of accidents involving Spads and reduce collision speeds in many of the others.

The campaigners do not feel this is good enough. They want the railways to introduce an automatic train protection system which will prevent virtually all such accidents. There are two problems. Firstly, TPWS can be introduced on most relevant signals within a couple of years relatively cheaply - the latest estimate is £460m - while ATP would take at least a decade and, moreover, will cost at least £1.6bn and probably a lot more to implement nationwide. Secondly, the current type of ATP which has been trialled on a couple of lines is not compatible with a new standard which is being implemented across Europe. The issues, therefore, are damnably complex and the campaigners' chant of "ATP now" is both naïve and, indeed, by slowing down the pace of introducing the TPWS alternative, may result in more rather than fewer deaths in the next decade.

The campaigners argue that the expense is an irrelevance, especially as it would just come out of the greedy rail companies' profits. This is patent nonsense. The cost would either be borne by passengers, pushing up the cost of rail travel, or by the Government, which would have to divert spending from all kinds of other uses - ranging from health and education to road safety measures that would save many more lives. There is always a trade-off between safety and cash and we should not lose sight of the fact that the railways are already, pace Ladbroke Grove, some hundreds of times safer than the equivalent journey by road. Since Ladbroke Grove, 3,500 people have died on Britain's roads while not one rail passenger has been killed in an accident.

But there is a bigger hole in the campaigners' argument. The wider public are not interested in seeing billions frittered away on preventing very small risks. An analysis of rail passengers carried out for the enquiry into train protection systems currently taking place shows that even high rail users are unwilling to see massive amounts of money spent on improving safety on the railways. As counsel to the inquiry put it, the research "strongly supports the proposition that if disproportionately large sums of money are to be spent on rail safety, the justification for that expenditure will not be found in the public's willingness to pay".

But can we really trust the rail companies to be getting on with improving safety? Broadly, yes given the changes which have already occurred and which Cullen is likely to introduce. Moreover, to view it cynically, another Ladbroke Grove would be incredibly bad for business and everyone in the rail industry is conscious of that.

The biggest danger is the fact that the industry has never been good at predicting risk, but has always acted on preventing further identical types of accidents. Therefore the next disaster is likely to be caused by something completely different such as a broken rail or even cows on the line. The most likely cause is vandalism, of which there are three incidents a day on the network. The industry has begun to tackle the issue with education programmes and extra security, but with none of the urgency which the situation demands. And so much health and safety work has been concentrated on Spads that vandalism is being neglected. The campaigners, in focusing such attention on past accidents, may ultimately be doing passengers a disservice.