What emerged was a shared recognition: to truly improve safety outcomes, we must go beyond compliance and start designing organisations that learn.

In this blog, the Chamber's Policy Manager (Safety), Eleanor Chadwick-Higgins, provides an engaging and comprehensive summary of the day and a half event.

A Sector Reflecting

The conference opened with stark insights from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch and P&I Club representatives, who examined persistent trends in accidents, near misses, and behavioural repetition. Despite years of guidance and regulation, the same issues continue to surface.

The challenge? Lessons are often captured, but not embedded. Many fixes are reactive, not systemic. As one speaker put it: “We don’t have an incident problem. We have a learning problem.”

Human Factors, Human Systems

Gareth Lock’s interactive session set the tone for a more introspective approach. Through a (literally) hands-on activity with bricks (and plenty of laughter and learning) he illustrated the fragility of complex systems and the invisible adaptations people make daily to keep operations going. These workarounds may keep the system upright, but they also mask its vulnerabilities. “When the tower is still standing,” he asked, “do you stop to ask what kept it up?”

Jo Stokes followed with a compelling session on competency-based learning, drawing links between continual development and incident prevention. She encouraged attendees to think about how organisational habits form and how quickly they can degrade without reinforcement and reflection.

Safety as a Collaborative Practice

A panel session spotlighted the UK Chamber of Shipping’s active safety workstreams, each responding to longstanding or emerging risks across the sector.

• Vehicle Deck Safety: Stuart Reid outlined the development of a new Code of Practice for ro-ro operations, a direct response to the MAIB’s Clipper Pennant fatality. The group is tackling persistent gaps between written procedures and real-world practices, particularly around ship/shore interface and human factors under time pressure.
• Safety Familiarisation: I then shared the Chamber's efforts to fill a long-acknowledged but largely unaddressed gap - providing clear, consistent safety familiarisation for new joiners. This workstream is pre-emptive, aiming to prevent disengagement and confusion before it leads to incidents.
• Safety Committees and Representation: Jonathan Havard highlighted the rollout of new NMOHSC-endorsed guidance on shipboard safety reps and committees. The initiative strengthens bottom-up safety communication and offers formal routes for seafarers’ concerns to reach senior management.
• Enclosed Spaces: Tim Springett emphasised the need to reframe the industry's understanding of enclosed spaces. Despite decades of attention, fatalities continue, often outside tanker environments. The Chamber is working with OCIMF and others to promote broader awareness, terminology, and cross-sector learning.
• Lithium-Ion Battery Safety: Barry Smith discussed the group’s focus on evolving risks posed by lithium-ion batteries onboard, especially in EVs and personal devices. The group is analysing survey results to benchmark current practices around detection, charging, and emergency response.
• Domestic Ferry Safety Group: Tom Weise outlined progress made in tackling disruptive passenger behaviour, an issue that escalated post-pandemic. The group has published guidance and is pushing for greater consistency in reporting and response, while creating a trusted space for operators to share sensitive issues.

Across all groups, the themes were clear: shared responsibility, proactive learning, and collaboration across roles and companies. Several speakers noted how willing stakeholders are to share data and experience when given a structured, open forum to do so.

Learning that Lasts

Day two honed in on reflective practice, with sessions from Green & Jakobsen, Baines Simmonds, and Shell.

Erik Green of Green & Jakobsen explored frameworks for embedding learning loops that stick, while Ian Holder (Baines Simmons) mapped out the link between investigation quality and organisational memory. Shell’s Sarah Waite and Cerian Mellor then closed the event with a reflective learning exercise that grounded theory in day to day safety realities.

A recurring theme was psychological safety. How vital it is to foster environments where people can speak openly, question decisions, and report concerns without fear of blame.

Where We Go From Here

The conference didn’t offer simple fixes - because there aren’t any. But it did offer a challenge to the sector: to think differently about culture. Not as a policy, not as a campaign, but as something lived and practised every day.

Culture is the accumulated result of what people do, feel, and say every day. This year’s Safety Culture Conference called on all of us to embrace that mindset and shift from reacting to learning, from rules to reflection, and from silence to shared stories.

As one speaker put it: “You’re always designing the system, even when you think you’re just getting the job done.”

Let’s build one that learns and lasts.