How industry is coming together on trespass and suicide prevention

In this episode, we're joined by Rich Godwin. Rich is the Chair of industry's Trespass and Suicide Prevention Working Group. He's also a Suicide Prevention Co-ordinator at Network Rail, North West and Central Region.

Optimising safety and satisfaction for passengers is vital for both RSSB and Network Rail. So, today, we're discussing how industry has been coming together to drive down numbers of trespass and suicide incidents.

Find out more at: https://www.rssb.co.uk/safety-and-health/trespass-and-suicide

And have a look at www.railsuicideprevention.co.uk, which is designed to help you make effective and potentially life-saving interventions.

Transcript

Host [00.17]: This episode contains numerous mentions of suicide and trespass. Please feel free to skip this episode if you’re not comfortable with these topics of discussion. 

Today, we’ll be exploring the critical issue of trespass and suicide on the rail network. These incidents not only cause immense emotional distress, but they also disrupt services, pose significant safety risks, and incur additional costs to industry.

Addressing these challenges requires a collaborative effort from various stakeholders within rail. Together, we can work towards creating a safer and more supportive environment for our passengers and the communities we serve. This work is underpinned by industry’s Trespass and Suicide Prevention Working Group. The chair of that group, Rich Godwin, is with us today. 

In this episode, he will talk with us about how industry has been coming together to drive down these harmful and costly events. 

Hi Rich, and thank you for joining us today. 

Rich Godwin [01.05]: Hi Jasmin, it’s lovely to be here. 

Host [01.07]: So, first of all, could you set the scene for us on the issues of trespass and suicide on our rail network? And why are they such important issues for us to address?

Rich [01.15]: Yeah, so over the last 3 years, we’ve seen just over 19,000 trespass incidents recorded each year. What we have though is seen a rise in the impact of them in terms of delay minutes and disruption to our passengers. And, worryingly, around 4,000 trespass incidents a year involve children and young people. That’s around 77 children a week putting themselves in a position of danger. In 2023/24, there were 276 suspected suicides recorded by the BTP. 

Suicide rates are driven by factors outside of our control. However, the rail industry has a part to play in preventing suicides across the network and in our wider communities. The most effective way of doing that is through the promotion of help-seeking behaviour amongst the vulnerable and also by intervening in suicide attempts. So, for example, 2,242 life-saving interventions were made in 2023/24 across the rail network. In recent years, we’ve seen a sharp increase in presentations by those who are in crisis or distress through mental health but not necessarily suicidal. That is in line with wider societal trends. 

These are still high-impact events and often can be quite complex and lengthy to resolve, and they can result in extensive delays and significant costs to the industry. They also present risks to our staff who respond to them. But it is important for us to address this because it’s not only the disruption that it causes to our passengers—who could be key workers on their way to work, people can miss vital medical appointments, flights, collecting their children from school and clubs—but the incidents also impact vital freight traffic carrying supplies across the country, in and out of ports, but it’s also the human impact and the risk. 

So, our aims are obviously to keep our passengers and the public safe where we can, to keep our staff safe, and obviously to keep the infrastructure moving. Trespass and suicide prevention are highlighted in national strategy as a key risk area for collaboration for the industry. So, it presents a challenge to us in terms of funding and resources, trying to deal with the impact of those events. There are, however, opportunities for closer alignment and collaboration across the industry to tackle these issues. 

Host [03.29]: Thanks for that, Rich. And how would you say that things are trending over time? Are rates of these events increasing? Are they stable? Or are they on the decrease? 

Rich [03.37]: Yeah, so, trespassing numbers have been pretty static. They aren’t showing any significance reducing trends. So, numbers increased post-COVID in around 2021/22 by around 15%, and they’ve remained at those levels. 

Suspected suicides on the rail network saw a slight increase last year, but that was only in line with an increase in national rates as well. So, rail suicides, it’s important to note, only account for around 4–4.5% of all suicides nationally. That number has remained fairly static, which means more people aren’t choosing the railway as a method to end their life.

Host [04.12]: And why do you think things are trending that way?

Rich [04.15]: So, in terms of suicides, obviously each is an individual choice based on their own set of circumstances, however sort of tragic and sad they are. We know socioeconomic factors play a large part. People living in the most disadvantaged communities face the highest risk of dying by suicide. There has been a direct impact of the coronavirus pandemic on people’s well-being. So, we’re seeing that in mental health across the country. 

With trespass, we need to understand more around the behaviours and the motivation behind them, which I can touch on later. However, there are a large number of reported incidents that are not people actually on the tracks. So, the threat of trespass and people who are dangling legs on platforms, all of those are categorised as trespass. So, it’s really important for us to do downstream analysis of those motivations and behaviours of people within that data to actually drive some of the mitigation work that we’re looking at. 

Host [05.09]: Thanks, Rich. And what kind of approach do you think industry needs to take to address this? 

Rich [05.13]: Yeah, so responding to these challenges is not something that the rail industry can do alone. They’re part of a wider complex health and social problem. Occurrences can vary between sort of genders, age groups, geographical distribution. They can be influenced by sociological, environmental, political, and a wide range of other sort of personal risk factors, such as drug and alcohol abuse, financial issues, bereavement, domestic abuse, and illness. So, there needs to be a whole-industry approach, as the risk can’t really be managed by one organisation on its own. So, the Rail Health and Safety Strategy for 2024–29 was developed with rail leaders with the aim of bringing about greater cohesion across the industry. 

The Trespass and Suicide Prevention Strategy Group is an industry body committed to reducing trespass and suicide across the rail network. The group provides a strategic oversight on the industry’s collaborative approach to both trespass and suicide prevention. It also ensures the safety of the public and railway staff by trying to minimise that disruption caused by those incidents across the network. So, we’re developing a framework for suicide prevention. This will ultimately help us to drive a more standardised approach to our work. 

We already have a comprehensive toolkit at our disposal with charity partners such as Samaritans, Chasing the Stigma, who operate the Hub of Hope, and also Shout, who provide a really good tech service for people who need some help and support. We have embedded Samaritans’ regional development leads, embedded in our five Network Rail regions. We also have numerous guidance documents at our disposal as well. 

So, we continue to use research to sort of develop that richer learning. Two examples of this relate to trespass, such as the Network Rail research project—who is behaving unsafely around the railway and why? And that study identified that those most likely to engage in unsafe behaviours are often frequent rail users, such as commuters, level crossing users, as well as younger individuals. Familiarity with the railway often leads to unsafe behaviour, with users becoming overconfident in many aspects. So, many believe that they understand the risks when they don’t. Additionally, many people only perceive the presence of a train as a danger, remaining unaware of other hazards, such as electricity. The research also highlighted that people don’t recognise their actions as trespass, and it was suggested that clearer, more relevant language is needed to effectively communicate the risks to that audience. The other research is the RSSB-led trespass signage project, and that aims to define the requirements for trespass signage with a standardised approach for placing clear, well-designed signage to help mitigate that risk of trespass. 

Host [07.58]: Thank you for that. It’s clear that lots of really important work is happening, so that’s wonderful. I’d like to now talk about the Trespass and Suicide One-Stop Shop in particular. So, first of all, can you tell us what this is and what it aims to do? 

Rich [08.10]: Yeah, so the One-Stop Shop is a dedicated, centralised hub where you can find resources to help reduce trespass and suicide risk. It’s a cross-industry collaboration commitment. It aims to provide the rail industry with a central hub, the best practice sharing of ongoing and completed work, case studies, and examples of ideas and initiatives, services and products, such as education and awareness campaign toolkits designed for young people, industry data, research, guidance documents for risk management, and also delivery strategies, so it can provide links also to the Rail Suicide Prevention website. 

Host [08.48]: And how will it bring about that sustained reduction in trespass and suicide that of course we’re all striving for? 

Rich [08.54]: So, the hope and aim is that it will help provide one version of the truth in terms of the data. There are a number of workstreams ongoing nationally to improve the quality of data through better reporting at source and also information gathering through safety reporting mechanisms. And this will allow a standardised delivery approach through the routes and also the regions by providing the toolkit and the guidance to them by implementing effective best practice guidance and strategies based on research and case studies. We do believe that we can reduce the occurrence of these incidents happening. Case studies and evaluated initiatives are often not shared across the industry, so the One-Stop Shop definitely provides that platform, and it enables confidence in risk management by using that shared learning.

Host [09.40]: That’s brilliant, thanks Rich. And what else is happening in this space? Are there any other initiatives or activities that you’d like to showcase?

Rich [09.47]: Yeah, so I mentioned the creation of a suicide prevention framework and how important that is in terms of a standardised approach to such a complex issue of suicide. We’re updating our Switched-On campaign for youngsters, with additional station content for 3- to 6-year-olds, and also enhanced resource for 12- to 16-year-olds, to tackle unsafe behaviours related to social media content. 

Small Talk Saves Lives phase 8 launches in March. Small Talk Saves Lives as a campaign to empower the public to act and prevent suicide on the railways and in other settings away from the railway. The campaign has been running since 2017. It is our industry flagship campaign delivered in partnership with Samaritans and the British Transport Police. And the message with that is really simple. It’s that we all have the ability to save a life by simple conversation. If you think somebody needs help, trust your instincts. If you feel comfortable, approach them. Just a simple question can be all it needs. A little bit of small talk can interrupt their thinking and start that journey to recovery. So, really looking forward to launching phase 8 of that. 

We’re looking at a risk model development for trespass and suicide prevention. That will help us standardise our approach to risk by having a sort of a model that identifies them in the first place and allows us to be a little bit more sort of proactive and upstream of incidents occurring. It will support a proactive risk management approach. It’s based on National Highways’ risk that they use around sort of bridges, but also learnings that we’ve come across within the industry through the level crossing risk model as well. So, by combining learning from both of those, we hope to create that sort of risk model for us to use. 

One of the interesting things that we do in the suicide prevention field, but it can relate itself to trespass and mental health presentations, is to go out to academia and have ethnography reports produced for us. So, these are going to be provided to us nationally around nominated priority locations. We’ve got 12 of those across the five regions per year. It looks at protective factors, work that’s done locally to prevent suicides, and any new mitigation measures that should be considered leading to sort of meaningful conversations around suicide prevention on the railway between not only ourselves as Network Rail, but train operators, local councils, support services, community organisations, and third sector charity organisations. So, it’s a qualitative method of collecting data and information using sort of interviews with people, service users, services, public health teams, but also the public as well. So, it gives us really good insights into a local community and potentially how we can move some of our learnings and some of our work away from the industry and provide mitigations throughout our wider communities.

Host [12.36]: Brilliant, thank you, Rich. And finally then, what advice would you share with our listeners who would like to get involved in this trespass and suicide reduction work but aren’t really sure how to start?

Rich [12.46]: Yeah, so first off, I’d probably encourage people to find out more about this subject matter through the RSSB’s dedicated Trespass and Suicide resource page. We’ll link the description of that in the episode later. From there, you can access the One-Stop Shop, which we’ve talked about, and the Rail Health and Safety Strategy, which we’ve also talked about. It also has annual reports regarding health and safety, and lots more as well. If you sign in as an RSSB member, you can also access RSSB’s guidance for those who conduct trespass risk assessments. 

To find out more about suicide prevention, then again, we’ll put the link at the end of this recording, but people can go to the Rail Suicide Prevention website. It’s a public-facing website with different layers depending on access rights and whether you’ve got an industry email address. So, if you log on with an industry email address, that gives you access to the online learning tool. That’s a digital platform that’s designed to help colleagues make sort of effective and potential life-saving interventions. It’s available on the desktop, it’s available on the mobile, so it’s a really useful tool. That only takes about 30 minutes to complete. And we know that intervening in a suicide attempt is one of the most direct and effective ways of preventing suicides across the railway. 

In terms of that training, then people can look out for Samaritans and their award-winning Managing Suicidal Contacts course, which is available to industry staff for free. It’s a 3-hour online course, but we also do run face-to-face courses as well.

Host [14.11]: Rich, thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you for listening. 

If you want to learn more about RSSB’s trespass and suicide reduction work, please visit our website. 

If you’ve been negatively affected by any of our discussions today, you can contact Samaritans on 116 123.

We look forward to you joining us in the next episode. And in the meantime, safe travels.