Rail Safety Week 2026: The Importance of Close Calls

Our Head of HSQE, Kevin Griffiths, reflects on the importance of Close Calls (aka Near Misses), and their related positive counterpart – Good Practices – in Lowery’s sending everyone home safely every day for this year’s Rail Safety Week.

“Learning from a nearly avoided accident and preventing it from becoming real is one thing”, reflects Kevin, “the established practice of regular near miss reporting helps keep safety and safe behaviours front-of-mind in delivery. The ability to use modern data analytics and learning to observe trends and act more broadly on accident prevention is critical to a business operating at scale too. We communicate improvements regularly to our workforce to show we listen and reward their vigilance and reporting”.

“Good practices, the other side of the coin”, Kevin continues, “are very helpful in their own way too. In being able to more rapidly disseminate improved safety behaviours and practices across our organisation and partners, we proactively help our organisation, supply chain and people to be ever more safe in all that we do”.