“We are trying to help our colleagues in highways monitor where we can,” he continues. “Where we can we share some good practice - we do that already to give our expertise in terms of health and safety in general. It is important we are not complacent. If there are things we can learn from the highways sector, we will try and do that as well. Co-operation works both ways - that’s very important.”
Prosser acknowledges that the job is also far from done for the railways, with the next decade bringing fresh challenges to be met in four key areas.
“One is managing growth as it continues. That will become more difficult with constrained infrastructure - managing people through stations and platforms, for example.
“The second one is maintaining and renewing a safe, sustainable and reliable infrastructure. We have HS2 coming. That’s very important to create capacity, but we still have our main line railway, which is still in the main built on Victorian infrastructure. Going forward, we have to think about extremes of weather that can have an impact on earthworks and structures.
“The third one is around the culture, and I include in that a big push further on health management. That will help improve the culture - if people think you care for them they will start to engage more effectively. That’s both physical and mental health. It is important what the industry is doing on suicide prevention, but we also need to do more about the mental health care of our own staff. There are over 200,000 people working in this sector... they are in some stressful situations, in some cases on the front line, especially as growth has improved. That has had a knock-on effect of more congestion and sometimes more difficult passengers to deal with.
“The fourth one is something we have pushed a lot… safety by design. We’re building more than we have been used to in the past. Thinking about the risks you have to manage beforehand is an important area.”
The Strategic Road Network witnesses 85 billion miles of journeys a year, according to Highways England’s own strategic plan. It carries a third of all traffic and two-thirds of all freight.
Freight on Rail - a partnership between the rail trade unions, the rail freight industry and Campaign for Better Transport - works to promote the economic, social and environmental benefits of rail freight, both nationally and locally. However, according to CBT’s Freight on Rail Manager Philippa Edmunds, modal shift is hampered by the differing safety regimes.
“The safety is much more stringent on rail, and it makes it harder to compete. The road sector is not paying for external costs like safety impacts, which are considerable,” she says.
Edmunds points to problems with enforcement on the roads. “Government figures show that 82% of articulated heavy goods vehicles exceeded their 50mph speed limit on dual carriageways, and 73% exceeded their 40mph limit on single carriageways (prior to 2015). The road lobby pushed for the speed limit to be put up. So instead of enforcing existing HGV speed limits, the Government put the limits up, even though its own figures showed HGVs were five times more likely than cars to be involved in fatal crashes on local/urban roads at the time.”
The lorry speed limit on a single carriageway road is now 50mph.
“Since then, HGVs were over six times more likely than cars to be involved in fatal crashes in 2014, and almost six times in 2015.”
Furthermore, roadside checks revealed UK HGVs had a 61% overloading rate in 2011, 60% in 2012, and 59% in 2013 and 2014.
Says Edmunds: “We did some research using the Government’s own figures - so essentially the costs they attributed to the congestion costs of HGVs, the safety costs and the pollution costs, and we analysed those against fuel duty. HGVs are only paying about 30% of the costs they impose on society. They are getting a massive subsidy. That’s why it is so difficult for rail to compete.”
Edmunds thinks a lorry charging system, similar to the one introduced in Germany, might be part of the answer. Since October 1 2015, the toll applies to HGVs with a total permissible weight of more than 7.5 tonnes. The charge is per kilometre, and is based upon axle classes and emissions.
The UK introduced a daily charge based on the type of vehicle, the number of axles and the total weight in April 2014, in part to ensure that foreign hauliers made some sort of contribution to UK infrastructure. But according to Edmunds, it is not as effective.
“If you charge lorries for the distance they travel you get more efficiency. They are going to make sure they are not running around half empty. Road freight is competitive, but not efficient. The German system has reduced the amount of empty running, because people don’t want to pay for a truck that isn’t properly filled. In Germany, rail was a beneficiary of the system.
“A combined regulator would help. We think that when you are calculating rail freight charges you have to take into account the distortion of what HGVs pay. Road and rail need to work together - they can complement each other and they should. Rail is good at long haul and bulk, but it is not a level playing field.”
