Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

Obviously, you know when you come to Woody Bay you have to sign on, using the tablet, and it has the manual entry section for those of us who forgot to pick our card up so there's a record of where people are and what's going on .


Before Hops, it has always been a requirement for all members to sign in at Woody Bay or any other property that is being worked at. Not so much for the insurance to begin with, but more to do with lottery funding and showing how much time the members have done as part of the requirement to show our part in the participation for the grant itself.

It then became an insurance issue when people started to carry out work on the Woody Bay Station building itself.

Somewhere out in the ether, there is a chart showing just how much each activity is worth in the volunteer sector. So I would say that if for nothing else, the use of a membership cards (HOPS) and using Insurance at the railway shows a certain amount of good practice

 

As you mention me, I'll respond. @Steve sums up my reaction about a method like RM3 - they should be agnostic about tools, membership and insurance as these are matters that will quite legitimately vary between organisations. I'm surprised to read that some operations use a tool like HOPS and a manual system; even allowing for the scenarios mentioned by @Jamessquared, the point of a single data record is, well, that there is a single record that can be consulted.

Culture is something completely different, which is about the spirit in which decisions are made and how they are enacted. The discussion about OSI/LBBC above is an example of a poor organisational culture leading to poor outcomes; there isn't necessarily any read across into how HOPS is used at the, legally distinct, L&B company - and where I've heard no serious suggestions that operational management is anything other than of a high standard.

Understanding how they interact, and how criticism of a decision may not be a criticism of those implementing it, is important.

 

I think Lynbarn was merely confirming that there IS no reference to insurance or membership in HOPS or RM3. Having said that though, it is within the L&BRT's remit to insist that all volunteers are properly registered and inducted in HOPS as a pre-requisite to volunteering on Trust property, as was indicated on this thread some while ago in reference to some of us offering to help build fences (literally) for the L&B property South of Blackmoor.

 

Please follow Small Prarier's train of thought.

 

But how does that work for those working at remote sites away from the railway (often by many miles)? Do they simply keep their own records and submit them at the end of the year?

To clarify - taking again the WSR example - it was, and AFAIK still is, a requirement for all active volunteers to have a 'Staff ID' [#]. However, with the introduction of HOPS, for convenience and to avoid unnecessary duplication the WSR adopted the HOPS card as a substitute for its own Staff ID. This is what I mean in respect of the L&BR, simply that the HOPS card authenticates you as a registered member of staff rather than the Trust/CIC having to issue their own ID cards - nothing to do with the workings of the HOPS system itself.

[#] I can recall a specific example of one volunteer on a particular project who only came on site about once or twice a year on Gala Days to man a demonstration stand that was housed in the Gauge Museum. Despite being indoors, nowhere near any moving trains (unlike all the general public on the platforms), he was deemed to be 'station staff' for that day and not allowed to sign on for 'work' without a Staff ID, for which he first had to attend a PTS course on a different day. But attending that course would have meant that he then lost one of the two days that he had set aside for the Gala, so then it was not worth him coming at all. Somehow it was 'smoothed over'.....

 

Which just goes to show that a flexible approach to a system can work wonders...

 

Flexible, and I would say a certain amount of common sense.

 

Surely you only need PTS if you are actually walking trackside-hence the T

 

You might think that, but IIRC as 'station staff' it was a requirement to cover the possibility that you might to do so for some reason. Again, I suspect one of those 'blanket requirements' that had not been thought throught for all the possible scenarios.

 

I think the madness was classifying museum staff as platform staff!

Tom

 

Systems I have seen and worked for single person remote site working have usually worked on the basis of: You sign on at the closest site, note where you are working , expected time of return and contact number. This then covers you insurance wise for travelling to the remote site otherwise your personal insurance could be questioned if you had an accident and your insurance company claimed you were 'working'. Lone working in certain areas or with machinery could require the worker to 'call in' to a manned phone (engineers/ticket office maybe) every hour or so and a missed call would start an organised safety response. 'Closing Off' a remote job would require the worker returning to the original site and physically signing off. Some argue this could be done via a phone call back to base to get someone to sign you off. This system fails if you had an accident on the way home. Your personal insurance could refuse you, saying you were still working until you got home and the company's insurance could say you were not covered because you were signed out.
Sorry for the thread drift but I have seen lone working fatalities. It is a serious business and some of the comments on here seem to treat it so casually that there is obviously a lack of awareness of the dangers or what processes are available to manage/mitigate those dangers.

 

H&S is never a high priority until something goes wrong. While I was working for Serco at one of their hospitals, they introduced a system where we had both mobile phones and radios and where possible, lone working and working in confined spaces was not encouraged. Hourly radio checks were carried out, and if you didn't call back in with your last location, you knew someone would come and find you very quickly

The thing is, I found that the Union reps knew more about H&S than the manager did.

 

As an ex-Unite H&S Rep. (albeit in an office environment) that certainly rings true, although they tried, bless 'em!

 

>>> The thing is, I found that the Union reps knew more about H&S than the manager did.

Years ago, our H&S Officer was housed in a flat-roofed building across the car-park from mine. When the roof was being repaired the contractors had a habit of lighting up the gas-powered cylinders that lit the bitumen boiler, then going off for a long coffee-break and forgetting.....

Looked out of the window one day and saw the boiler well alight, with flames starting to reach the gas cylinders. Rang the H&S to warn them of the danger and possible risk of explosion, while we all stayed well away from the windows in case of shrapnel from any ballast. "Can't see any fire", he said. "It's right above your office", we said, "come out into the car-park and take a look". "Not ****** likely"" he said, "sounds too dangerous to be outside" !!

Some months later the same thing happened at another building. The cylinders were stored in the car-park at the main entrance, next to all the staff cars with tanks full of petrol, and no fire extinguisher to be seen. I became quite familiar with the LPG storage and use regulations after that

 

Meanwhile......

There was a tendency for the early staff to switch on all the lights when they arrived and it was still dark-ish, then as the sun rose and it got very light no one noticed that they were still on and needed to be turned off. So the Facilities Management (FM) nominated an 'Energy Warden' for each building, whose job it was to go around about every hour or so and turn off any unnecessary lights (this was in the days before motion sensors and timers etc) to save electricity.

He/she would be followed shortly afterwards by the H&S Officer, who would turn back on all the lights in the long, windowless corridors, on the grounds of a potential H&S hazard of staff inadvertently tripping over obstacles unseen in the dark! Mind you, such obstacles were usually such things as ripped carpets, loose floor tile etc which the FM had failed to repair as "no money left in the budget"......

 

Lone working comes back to……..

Conducting a suitable Risk Assessment.

A person working at home, in their own office space is a lone worker but is exposed to different (lesser) risk than someone doing inspection work alongside a railway line alone.

First step is always to ask the question, is the task and environment actually suitable for lone working- then taking it from there with establishing controls.

One of the most robust lone worker systems I have come across was a Pig Farm, which had radios with motion alarms and GPS, as well as using the radios to notify a person in charge when entering and leaving some areas of the site.

Chris

 

Deleted double post

 

Such a system seems fraught with risk if the volunteer is using their own vehicle. Most insurers will include travelling to and from a place of volunteering as part of cover for social domestic and pleasure use, but not all. The Association of British Insurers publishes a helpful list of those insurers who include such cover, those who impose restrictions and those where it's excluded. That's risky enough so it's always advisable to check with your insurer/broker before using your own vehicle to travel to work as a volunteer. However, where a volunteer uses their own vehicle after signing on duty anywhere their personal car insurance would almost certainly not provide cover unless they have paid for an extension to use on their "employer's" business. Signing on at the closest site then driving to another could be very risky. A railway's own insurance is unlikely to include cover for use of volunteers' own vehicles.

 

Another 'catch' is if you sign on, then pick up any equipment and carry it in your vehicle to another location - that might be classed as 'business use'.

I used to have potential problems if my employer sent me to across to our other office on the other side of town. If I drove from home to the other location and then back home, that was 'commuting' and covered by my comprehensive 'Social, domestic and commuting' policy. If I drove from home to my usual office, then went across to the other later, that was regarded by some insurers as 'business purpose' rather than commuting. If I took an office laptop or other items with me, that was definitely 'business' use. At one time I actually had to go as far as ringing the insurers before I set off to get a temporary extension of cover for the day !!, but eventually they started to charge an 'amendment fee' for each such occasion, so I stopped doing it.