Description

The risk that NS fails to take sufficient measures to prevent safety incidents, or to fulfil its duty of care sufficiently, if a serious safety incident occurs with passengers, employees and/or the environment due to non-compliance with safety procedures and infringements of processes by malicious individuals. ‘Safety’ covers 10 safety areas: safety on the railways, personal safety, occupational safety, fire safety, transfer safety, information safety, rolling stock safety, environmental safety, food safety and security (including terrorist threats and cybercrime).

Explanation

Proper and safe operations are always a focal point, given their importance for our operations. NS seeks to transport its passengers and staff in a safe manner and ensure their safety at stations. As of 2015 we have started a programme for further improvement of the safety culture, with learning from mistakes included as an essential part. A survey among managers and staff was part of it; this will be repeated at the beginning of 2018 to give a picture of progress.

Measures

Rail travel is one of the safest forms of mobility. NS wants to continue improving safety, and will make efforts in two key areas: control of safety risks and continuous improvement of safety performance. We will improve the management of this broadly defined field of work by tightening the governance for NS-wide safety and by creating a clearer organisation for the Quality, Health, Safety & Environment (QHSE) departments for each business unit, in addition to the central organisation for Security. Significant progress has been made in the past year but another growth path is still needed to achieve the requisite level of maturity. Improvements have been implemented in various safety areas, which has increased safety. Occupational risks and improvement measures for occupational safety have been mapped out and implemented using various risk analyses and evaluations (RAEs). Bringing access gates into use at more and more stations helps increase personal safety in and around trains. NS is affiliated with various governmental bodies and is kept posted of external developments in the safety landscape. Additionally, NS has reassessed the cybercrime risks and has made adjustments where necessary to ensure continuous improvement in this area.

Risk control trend

The safety of our staff, passengers and environment are a top priority. The level of control in this area was already good and has remained so thanks to the developments mentioned above and is therefore unchanged. Despite the measures, NS cannot rule out safety incidents occurring. According to the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security, the general threat level of terrorist acts in the Netherlands remains high.

Residual risk

Medium. The current risk profile does not yet fully match the desired risk profile.