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Our safety approach

Commercial Passenger Vehicles Victoria, formerly the Taxi Services Commission, is changing its approach to regulating the commercial passenger vehicle industry. It is shifting to a priority-focused approach on regulating to promote a safety culture in the industry.

About safety culture

Safety culture is defined as the attitude, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to safety in the workplace. 1 It guides the way people behave in the workplace and shapes decisions people make, their priorities and actions.

Safety culture embodies the value placed on safety and the extent to which people take personal responsibility for safety in an organisation. Safety culture is often described as the 'personality' of an organisation, as it’s a shared value of safety.

A poor safety culture has been clearly implicated as a contributing factor in several large-scale organisational accidents in Australia and overseas. As a significant system component safety culture can, and should, be managed in practical, proactive ways to promote safety outcomes.

Our safety approach

At Commercial Passenger Vehicles Victoria, we partner with industry, stakeholders and the public to promote safe outcomes. The responsibility is with industry participants and others, with obligations under the Commercial Passenger Vehicle Industry (CPVI) Act 2017, to demonstrate that they have ensured safety to the required standard. This is because we assume that industry participants are in the best position to know how to manage their safety risks, depending on the nature of their activities, context and the controls available to them.

Our role is to work collaboratively with industry participants to ensure they comply—without prescribing the details, methods or processes by which they choose to comply. We promote a model of shared responsibility for safety outcomes in the commercial passenger vehicle industry.

We allocate our resources to the highest risks and to areas where our capacity to reduce risk can have the largest impact. This change will maximise the safety benefits we deliver to the community.

Our commitment to safety

Our commitment to the model of shared responsibility means that we will use a more diverse range of regulatory tools to achieve safety outcomes in partnership with others. Managing risks associated with the provision of commercial passenger vehicle services is the responsibility of the person best able to control the risk.

We will take the minimum action necessary to achieve a regulatory outcome. Compliance and enforcement actions are most effective when used to raise safety awareness and encourage behaviour change. This means that our actions reflect the level of risk to safety and the potential benefits to the community.

We support this approach by increasing our use of evidence, monitoring and evaluation to effectively target safety risks. We assess the costs and benefits of safety initiatives to measure and improve our performance over time.

Guiding principles

The principles that guide how we regulate safety day-to-day are accountability and transparency, independence, consistency, proportionality and fairness. Some elements within our safety culture may be new concepts to the commercial passenger vehicle industry. Our aim is to enhance industry participants’ awareness of the facets of a good safety culture and enable them to adopt a process of continuous improvement.

The principle of shared responsibility for safety is at the heart of the legislation that shapes the commercial passenger vehicle industry. So far as reasonable practicable, each industry participant has a role to play to provide safe services. This includes:

  • owners
  • drivers
  • Booking Service Providers
  • persons who have control over provision of commercial passenger vehicle services
  • suppliers of services and equipment to the commercial passenger vehicle industry
  • Commercial Passenger Vehicles Victoria
  • members of the public.

[1] Cox, S. & Cox, T. (1991). The structure of employee attitudes to safety—a European example.  Work and Stress, 5, 93–106.