SPEECH BY MINISTER ABDULAH M OMAR INTRODUCING THE RAILWAY SAFETY REGULATOR BILL

National Assembly, 18 March 2002

Speaker,
Honourable Members,

The bill before this house heralds a new dawn for rail safety in South Africa. It will place us in a position to bring to an end the situation in which the operator is both referee and player at the same time. Whilst safe rail operation is the responsibility of operators, regulatory intervention, oversight and monitoring safety practices can never be left to the service providers themselves.

I want to point out that this is the National Railway Safety Regulator Bill and not a rail safety bill. We are talking not just about things or operations but people because people come first. The bill covers facets of safety of persons, and is not limited to the safety of the steel rail that the train runs on. The bill covers not only Metrorail and Spoornet. There are other operators like heritage railway steam clubs, rovos rail and traffic crossing our borders at six different locations, and also surface railways in mines. The bill covers all of them. The premise of the bill is co-regulation. In short, railway operators will be responsible for managing safety. The proposed railway safety regulator will oversee safety.

We have drawn from international practice. Our team of South African and canadian experts looked at safety regimes in North and South America, Europe, Scandanavian Countries, China, Japan and Australia. We used the Canadian model as a benchmark in developing our legislation but we have customized the bill to meet the needs in our country.

I highlight five points:

  1. The railway safety regulator bill intends to establish an independent regulatory, and oversight body, to ensure that the necessary rail safety framework is managed to the best of the country's ability.

  2. The railway safety regulator will work in close partnership with the industry to conduct safety audits, develop appropriate regulations and to ensure that appropriate safety management systems are established, and adhered to.

  3. The intention of the bill is not to establish a vehicle for creating endless legislative requirements which can not be enforced or monitored, but rather to create coherent regulations which can be implemented by operators within an overall safety framework and safety management plan.

  4. The railway safety regulator will be empowered to conduct accident investigations and audits across the industry, in order to inform and establish realistic and practical measures to prevent accidents, and to address, in a structured manner, any unsafe condition in the rail system.

  5. What South Africa needs most is a mechanism for creating and establishing a rail safety culture. This will require a process involving government, operators, labour, communities and business, which will over time instil an understanding, and sensitivity for caring, when we deal with dangerous equipment and the lives of our people.

In order to promote the culture of co-regulation, all operators will be required to be licensed. Once licensed, an operator will need to develop its safety management system in accordance with norms and guidelines that will be specified in the appropriate regulations and standards. The regulator will oversee safety by conducting audits of the safety management system, by inspection, by carrying out accident investigations; it will analyze accident reports from operators, and accident trends; it will benchmark operators and consult with interested and affected parties; it will oversee safety by ensuring that the industry regularly reviews its standards, and by issuing directives to limit operations should the operator fail to comply with a provision declared in its safety management system, or should an unsafe situation exist.

Although the primary focus of the bill is to address "safe railway operations", the need to address the security of the travelling public on our stations and trains is recognised. Government is concerned about crime in which people are attacked, robbed and even raped on trains and at stations. Therefore government has recognized the need to create a division or wing of the saps to address crime on all our modes of transport. The minister of safety and security has been tasked by cabinet to lead this process. The railway safety regulator will co-operate with the saps to ensure maximum effectiveness of such a transit policing wing from a regulator point of view.

There are also economic considerations.

For the economy of the subcontinent to flourish, we need to ensure that the cost of transport of goods from the hinterland, including from our sadc neighbours, is kept to a minimum. Provision is made to promote the harmonization of the railway safety regime of South Africa with that of the sadc railways. In so doing, the opportunity will be created to have a seamless railway operation within the region, which will contribute to the minimization of costs.

I am mindful of the importance of rail transport in South Africa.

More generally, I want to emphasize that the bill must be seen in the context of a broader vision:

  1. To make rail transport - both passenger and freight more attractive, efficient, reliable, affordable and safe so that more and more people move to use rail rather than road transport. We must do so without hurting our economy because road transport also plays an important role. The point is that there are many benefits (eg relieving road congestion, less pollution, less road accidents) which will accrue if we can make rail transport more attractive.

  2. To curb the number of private vehicles on our roads by making public transport more attractive.

  3. To level the playing field between road freight and rail freight by acting effectively against overloading and requiring road freight to bear externalization costs.
When we speak of railway safety we remind ourselves of the terrible tragedy at charlottsdale, kwazulu-natal which claimed 25 lives. We must recognise that a better safety regime and better compliance would have avoided the tragedy and those lives would not have been lost. Our Metrorail services currently serve our six metropolitan areas but there are many complaints - unreliability, heavily laden trains on certain routes, ageing rolling stock, crime on trains and stations and filthy trains and stations.

We want to extend our rail system, but before doing that, we must save the existing services and improve them. Instead we have seen services cut from time to time.

We are determined to change this situation and to this end the state must accept responsibility because for millions of people affordable transport is a basic need.

Recently government and labour arrived at a historic agreement on rail restructuring. Part of the agreement relates to rail passenger transport. It has been agreed that our metro rail commuter service will be combined with the long distance main line or shosholoza meyl service and that the whole of the passenger service will remain state run and will be subsidized.

We are currently finalising a total rail plan for South Africa which also makes provision for institutional reform.

We see our rail system as part of a rationalized and integrated transport system with an emphasis on multi-modalism and interconnectivity. We are acutely aware of the weaknesses in our cargo handling. It needs to be improved urgently.

This means greater chain awareness - a good understanding of multi-modal transport, logistics, integrated transport services, distribution process, cargo brokerage, electronic data interchange and warehousing. To achieve this we need good physical and knowledge infrastructure covering ports, road, rail and air.

This is what our restructuring processes are all about.

Rail safety is crucial, like road safety, safety in the air, safety at airports and safety at sea.

The step we are taking today is an important step in government's programme to transform transport in South Africa.

I thank you.