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A new “safety culture” programme has been rolled out at a Network Rail team where racial tensions were found to have contributed to a site collision, Construction News can reveal.

As reported on CN last year, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) found a “culture of racial prejudice among members of staff at various levels of the workforce towards contractors supplied by labour agencies” as it looked into an accident where a mobile elevating work platform collided with a stationary machine on which two people were installing overhead line equipment.

Both men suffered minor injuries in the January 2020 incident in Rochford, near Southend in Essex. According to an RAIB report, there was ineffective supervision and a “catalogue of errors and omissions” at the site, while safety was undermined by poor working relationships between machine operators and controllers, including racial tensions and language barriers.

Chief inspector of rail accidents Simon French told CN that his team discovered “a shocking breakdown” of relationships.

“If the guys in one of the platforms hadn’t been wearing harnesses, they would almost certainly had been thrown to their deaths,” he added.