Beyond the call
Director of Railway Safety and HM Chief Inspector of Railways IAN PROSSER and Network Rail’s IAN STEVENS introduce the Million Hour Challenge and delve into the campaign’s origins
HM Chief Inspector of Railways IAN PROSSER and IAN STEVENS from Network Rail introduce the Million Hour Challenge and delve into its origins.
The rail industry is no stranger to volunteering or fundraising. Many organisations celebrate close relationships with their chosen causes, while also encouraging their staff to partake in other charity and community activities.
Companies are also increasingly offering more formal employee volunteer leave during working hours to support these efforts, and to encourage greater numbers of workers to participate.
Network Rail, for example, allows its staff five days of volunteer leave each year, which resulted in more than 6,700 days being taken in total in 2017-18.
Meanwhile, NR estimates that its employees donate an average of £45,000 to charity per month with a further £1.1 million raised from passengers at stations through bucket collections.
In particular, £123,000 was raised by NR staff for its corporate charity Barnardo’s, and further support was given to its Employment, Training and Skills services in the form of career advice and pre-employment training.
Since volunteer leave was introduced by NR in 2012, take-up has increased by 73% so that more than 3,800 of its employees now use their allowance, but this still represents less than 10% of its total headcount.
This relatively low uptake did not escape the attentions of either HM Chief Inspector of Railways Ian Prosser or former NR Chief Executive Mark Carne, who both arrived at the same conclusion ( before the latter’s departure in August 2018) that much more could be done.
Prosser explains: “Lots of companies have volunteer days but they just don’t use them, so Mark Carne and I came up with the idea of the Million Hour Challenge in CP6 to support Samaritans, with which we, as an industry, have been successfully working on suicide prevention for several years.
“This has been a very powerful and successful collaboration but they could always do with more help not just for ‘listeners’, but in fundraising, support services and other areas. We have 300,000 people in this industry, if not more, so this should be quite easy.”
For Prosser, Samaritans is a cause that’s close to his heart, given his own experience of dealing with the suicide of a loved one. But the decision seemed a natural one for the industry as a whole, because of the number of fatalities that occur on the railways, and the long
There are so many ways in which people in the rail industry are well-placed to help Angela Zair, MHC Project Leader, NR
standing relationship that is already in place with the charity.
There was also another important factor at play as rates of mental ill-health and suicide within the rail industry continue to exceed the national average. It is difficult to determine the exact reasons for this, but factors are believed to include employees’ potential exposure to stress and trauma from incidents, and the underrepresentation of women (who are statistically much less likely to take their own lives than men).
It is also widely accepted that maledominated environments such as rail are likely to perpetuate the outdated belief that expressing feelings and demonstrating emotion is a sign of weakness, making it much harder for those in distress to speak up and seek help.
Prosser adds: “The main benefit here is that companies start to get to grips with the idea that mental health is as important as physical health. This sort of volunteering is proven to improve mental health by making us feel better about ourselves and encouraging us to talk more openly about the issue.
“We have a big incentive to go for as an industry that is not good at dealing with this, and it will have a big cultural impact; the less ‘macho’ we can make railways the better. Absenteeism from mental health costs this industry over £ 300 million a year, so this should help to reduce that.
“We hope it will also spread out from the railways through our links with big contractors that work in wider construction, and this might therefore permeate out to their supply chains.”
The pan-industry Rail Industry Suicide Stakeholder Group provided the perfect forum for initial discussions where a strong appetite for turning the MHC into reality was established among its members, including Network Rail, the Rail Delivery Group and British Transport Police.
NR’s programme manager for suicide prevention Ian Stevens says: “I knew that Ian [Prosser] had already been in touch with Mark Carne, while everyone else I spoke to had also said ‘yes, this is something the industry would like to take forward’. We therefore took the concept and tried to shape it because it is a big task to take on for a large and disparate industry.
“We had to ask ourselves how we could galvanise an industry of 300,000 people and manage this in a structured way, which is
exactly what we’ll be doing over the next few years.”
Ahead of the campaign’s official launch on March 27, the MHC was first trialed by running a series of pilot projects within the first organisations to sign up to the challenge, including NR, ORR, Transport for London and MTR Crossrail.
People who already support and volunteer for Samaritans at its 201 branches nationwide have been asked to join straight away, while a more gradual rollout is now being implemented to minimise the risk of any surges that could overwhelm smaller branches.
NR’s MHC Project Leader Angela Zair says: “We want to encourage sustained support from rail employees across the next five years, and our carefully planned rollout approach during the first year will help manage that. The challenge is now open to everyone. Any organisations that want to become partners can get in touch with me and I can help them plan delivery and promotion to their employees.
“We’ve learned a lot from the pilot schemes and in this way we can share ideas and learning with other organisations. I’ll also be working closely with Samaritans and its branches to identify its resource needs over the next 12 months, for example in health and safety.
“Most branches are independently managed by volunteers who cover many of the tasks involved in the opening of their building, but the rail industry has a wealth of people trained in health and safety who can offer advice. There are so many ways in which people in the rail industry are well-placed to help.”
Stevens adds: “We haven’t gone for a ‘big bang’ launch, but in the first year we hope to bring in more of the train operating companies, and then some of the large infrastructure contractors. None of this will ever be mandatory for anyone, but there are so many wins for both Samaritans and the industry.
“It’s about achieving a critical mass of TOCs and lots of publicity, and then others will hopefully want to join. We also have a website ( which should make it much easier for people to convert their interest into action.”
As well as generating a million hours of voluntary time for Samaritans during CP6, the MHC also aims to raise £ 2.5m, which will help support the charity’s existing activities and its ability to accommodate the influx of volunteers that it’s hoping to create.
This includes a commitment made by NR to underwrite the £ 200 cost associated with training each additional Listening Volunteer to provide confidential emotional support over the phone.
But Stevens is keen to stress that there is a wide spectrum of ways to participate in MHC, including in the workplace itself, and through actions as simple as asking a colleague how they are feeling, or making them a cup of tea.
“We know that lots more people would like to volunteer for Samaritans, but prior to this there wasn’t much you could do to help as they didn’t have a structure for allowing large numbers to get involved. The ultimate aim is to get more ‘listeners’ and hopefully the MHC will act like a ladder, where you get a taste of supporting colleagues and fundraising and then think about moving up to the next level of involvement.
“But the first part of this is about self-help and looking out for colleagues, because there is a growing awareness in the industry that we need to look more at general wellbeing. I’ve been in this industry for 30 years - it’s white male-dominated which hasn’t always helped it be seen as a particularly caring industry.
“Talking about mental health will help make it more inclusive, and people can then take these things home with them to destigmatise it and make it more acceptable in society.”
Looking ahead, it seems likely that some TOCs and smaller members of the supply chain may need more persuasion than others to sign up as a partner, or to promote MHC to their staff.
That is because it is often tempting for smaller companies in particular to look at providing volunteering leave to their staff as an overhead and an additional cost to their business, when the reality could not be further from the truth.
Stevens is sympathetic to smaller companies, but reminds them that the cost
None of this will ever be mandatory for anyone, but there are so many wins for both Samaritans and the industry. Ian Stevens, NR’s programme manager for suicide prevention
of suicide to the rail industry and the lost productivity incurred by absenteeism present a much higher cost in the long run.
The value of saving lives is also impossible to quantify, which surely makes the industry’s wholehearted support for MHC a foregone conclusion.
He says: “Organisations like NR would like to think that everyone would take up their volunteering leave, but TOCs don’t always have that structure, so we’d like TOCs to take license of that. Obviously there are operational issues involved, but the cost to the industry of each suicide is, on average, £ 255,000 so it makes sense in financial terms, even if is difficult to reconcile when there’s a shortage of staff.
“As an industry we lead on suicide prevention and there is nothing else in the UK on this scale. We’d like to see a decline in suicides but we don’t set any targets, although we would expect to see an increase in interventions.
“Just one successful intervention would be enough to validate this scheme but, quite frankly, anything that broadens the message of what Samaritans does has to be good for the industry and society as a whole.”