Strip Railtrack of safety role, ministers are told

Sweeping changes to safety management on Britain's rail network will be recommended tomorrow in the Cullen report, which is expected to express deep concern at the fragmentation of the industry.

In his third and final dossier on the beleaguered network, Lord Cullen will urge the Government to set up a body to monitor safety on a day-to-day basis, stripping Railtrack of such responsibilities.

The document is also expected to recommend establishing a special organisation for investigating rail accidents, as a result of lessons learnt from the Southall, Paddington and Hatfield disasters in which a total of 42 people died. But relatives of those killed in the crashes will take issue with the suggestion, because the new unit will have no responsibility for taking legal action against those responsible.

The Government is also likely to be urged to provide the Health and Safety Executive's rail inspectorate with additional resources to ensure that the new organisation to monitor safety is itself the subject of scrutiny.

The recommendations are intended to build a framework that will ensure greater independence and objectivity.

The creation of an accident investigations group, to match the Air Accidents Investigations Branch of the Department of Transport, is aimed at ridding crash inquiries of the "blame" culture. At the moment disaster sites are sealed off by the British Transport Police and HSE rail inspectors who determine whether a crime has been committed. Witnesses at last year's inquiry run by Lord Cullen said such procedures encouraged people to "clam up" and resort to legal advice.

Under the new system, the crash investigation organisation will have no power as far as prosecutions are concerned, but will simply attempt to discover what happened. The HSE and the police will retain powers to prosecute.

The recommendations by Lord Cullen are expected to be adopted by ministers, but some may require primary legislation, which means the industry will have to wait some time before changes are made.

At the moment the day-to-day responsibility for safety is undertaken by Railway Safety, a semi-independent subsidiary of Railtrack. The subsidiary was created to ensure that commercial considerations did not affect decisions over safety.

Lord Cullen's savage criticism of the fragmented nature of the network – prompted largely by the Hatfield crash – is expected to have the most impact on the industry. Ministers may decide on a strategy in which train operators are given the responsibility to look after the infrastructure in place of Railtrack.

Tomorrow's report was prompted by the 1999 Paddington disaster in which 31 people died. Lord Cullen has also taken into account the 1997 Southall crash in which seven lost their lives and last October's Hatfield derailment when four people were killed.

The Paddington crash prompted two other official reports.

The first, written by both Lord Cullen and Professor John Uff, who chaired the inquiry into the Southall disaster, called for the installation of the automatic train protection safety system by 2008 on all lines where trains travel faster than 100mph. The second report, in June, into the causes of the Paddington disaster, accused Railtrack of "lamentable" failure and "dangerous complacency" over the signalling system outside the west London station.