The environment, sustainable development and rail

Our role as the independent health and safety regulator is to encourage and oversee compliance with health and safety law. 

The requirements on the industry in terms of how health and safety and the environment interface includes how the industry responds to the challenges of:

• climate change impacts on the safety and operation of the rail network;
• reducing harmful emissions such as diesel exhaust emissions, which also links to the drive to decarbonise the railway; and
• the risks presented by lineside vegetation and how management of this is balanced against legislative requirements to show no net loss in biodiversity on the railway estate.

The industry has to manage this balance while ensuring that it does all that is reasonably practicable to reduce health and safety and other day-to-day operational risks.

• We are holding Network Rail to account to ensure that it delivers what it has promised to for the five years from 2024 to 2029 (control period 7 or CP7). Through our periodic review 2023 (PR23) we have set a range of success measures that it must deliver, including for environment:
  • Carbon emissions scope 1 and 2
  • Biodiversity Units
• We also monitor Network Rail using supporting measures and a range of additional assurance data and information which enable us to track its progress in the areas of sustainability and environment. Our key supporting measures are:
  • Whole life infrastructure carbon emissions
  • Carbon emissions scope 3 (Scotland only)
  • Air quality at stations
• Network Rail’s business plan for CP7 sets out how it expects to deliver in all of the above areas.
• In terms of resilience and adaptation, we ensure that Network Rail is effectively managing weather and climate risk through the monitoring of safety and operational performance. For CP7 we have also identified the delivery of the actions in its  Weather Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation (WRCCA) Plans  as a supporting measure.  
• We require Network Rail to publish a wider range of environmental statistics in its Annual Return and report on its delivery against the success measures in our Annual Assessment.

• Railway operators are licenced by ORR. As a condition of their licence, all rail operators must produce and submit to ORR their environmental arrangements within six months of their licence or statement of national regulatory provisions coming into effect. 
• We provide environmental guidance to licence holders on the content of their environmental arrangements.
• In July 2023 we commenced a review of licence holders’ environmental arrangements (EAs). The review was completed in March 2024. 

• ORR is the recognised primary provider of railway industry official statistics. We publish an Annual Rail Emissions statistical release on the ORR data portal. This covers  consumption of electricity and diesel and provides estimates of total and normalised carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions from traction energy for passenger and freight operators at the national level. 
• In our Official Statistics role we intend to work collaboratively with licence holders and industry partners, to enable us to publish a wider range of whole-industry environmental data. This will be relevant to rail industry environmental targets such as those set out in DfT’s Rail Environmental Policy Statement and the Scottish Government’s Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan. As Official Statistics this data should meet the pillars of trustworthiness, quality and value of the Office for Statistics Regulation Code of Practice for Statistics.
• Similarly, Welsh legislation also impacts on rail, for example, specific biodiversity requirements and the Future Generations Act. We are required to produce a report on our performance in relation to the biodiversity duty under the Environment (Wales) Act 2016. The report focuses on our approach to biodiversity and the exercise of the ORR’s statutory functions in relation to Wales. Our next report is due in 2025.

• We have specific roles on consumer protection and accessible transport. We publish an annual rail consumer report that focuses on how the rail industry supports accessible travel, as well as other services such as complaints handling, passenger information, ticket retailing and passenger rights.

• We engage with industry stakeholders in the delivery of our duties including on environment and sustainability for example through projects run by RSSB.
• Our Consumer Expert Panel provides independent advice and challenge, and plays a key role in bringing a consumer perspective to our policy and regulatory decisions. The Panel advises on our work including our duties in relation to sustainability and the environment. 
• We also have regular engagement with environmental regulators across Great Britain.

• We have a role in relation to authorisations of new, upgraded or renewed infrastructure or rolling stock. Authorisation is in the main about compliance to technical specifications set out in EU Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSIs) and UK notified national technical rules. The specifications include parameters associated with certain essential requirements including Environmental Protection.