Inspection

The use of an authorised and competent staff member of the safety certification body or relevant national safety authority, as appropriate, to examine a particular and limited aspect of the activity of a railway undertaking. Inspection should be for the purpose of establishing compliance with the SMS requirements and the notified national rules, or for verifying that what has been said or recorded in documents supporting the safety management system actually happens in practice. An inspection in the sense intended here both verifies that the process is in place and examines how well it works. It does not mean the ‘tick–box’ verification of the presence of certain documents or equipment, because this can only tell the Inspector that something is present not that it is being used in practice