Maintain your safety management plan

A safety management plan (SMP) is a documented plan that sets out how you will identify hazards and manage safety risks for your road-based public passenger service. After developing your SMP, you must ensure it is implemented, accessible to duty holders, regularly reviewed and kept up to date.

Consultation for SMPs

When creating or reviewing an SMP, you must, so far as reasonably practicable, consult with all duty holders for your service.

There are no specific requirements about how you should run your consultation. Choose an approach that suits your business and keep a record of your consultation process. The best way to consult will depend on:

  • the size and structure of your business
  • when duty holders work and where they are located
  • the needs and preferences of duty holders.

Ways to consult with duty holders

Make sure your consultation process provides opportunities for duty holders to share their views, questions and concerns. To do this, you could:

  • give duty holders a draft copy of the risk assessment before consultation so they have time to think about it and form their feedback
  • hold consultation at different times to cover duty holders working different shifts
  • hold consultation through different formats (e.g. over video call) to cover duty holders with different work arrangements
  • provide an opportunity for duty holders to provide anonymous feedback through surveys
  • hold special meetings with staff who undertake specific tasks
  • make translation or interpretation services available for culturally or linguistically diverse duty holders.

For smaller services, your consultation could be as simple as holding a meeting where you ask duty holders about new hazards or changes in risks, inform them of proposed changes and ask them to provide feedback.

Make sure you consider all feedback received and communicate the outcomes of the consultation in a timely manner.

Your consultation does not require you to provide:

  • personal or medical information about a person, without consent
  • confidential commercial information
  • information that is privileged or subject to a duty to maintain confidentiality under an Act.

Sole traders

For sole traders, where the responsible duty holder preparing the SMP is the only duty holder of the service, no formal consultation will be required, and your SMP should note that there is only 1 duty holder.

More than 1 responsible duty holder for the service

If there is more than 1 responsible duty holder, the consultation should clarify which SMP must be followed for the service.

Accessing SMPs

Your SMP and any related documents must be easy for all duty holders in the service to access, whether in hard copy or electronic form. Make sure the duty holders know how to access the SMP and ensure it's always available to them.

If requested by the Department of Transport and Main Roads, you must provide your SMP and related documents (in either hard copy or electronic form), or allow them to inspect the documents, as soon as reasonably practicable.

Reviewing and updating your SMP

As a responsible duty holder, you must fully review your SMP at least once every 3 years to keep it up to date and to manage new hazards or changing risks. Reviews may be conducted internally or by an external provider and should be proportionate to the size and complexity of your business.

You must also review your SMP, to the extent needed:

  • following a material change to the service, such as a new route, service, or vehicle
  • if the operator has completed an incident report—for an operator of a service requiring operator accreditation
  • when a duty holder has reported a notifiable incident about a vehicle, driver or passenger to the regulator under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011
  • when a duty holder reports a hazard in writing that isn't already included in your plan, or hasn't been adequately addressed (you must keep this report on record)
  • when a responsible duty holder becomes aware, or should be aware, that the SMP may not comply with the requirements for an SMP.

After each review, you must revise or replace your plan as soon as practicable.

The reason for each review and the outcome must be recorded in writing. If you don't need to make changes, you can record this on your plan and note why.

SMP record keeping

Records must be kept for at least 5 years. This includes:

  • each superseded version of the SMP
  • documentation about reviews, including the reason for each review and outcomes
  • the most recent SMP after the responsible duty holder stops providing services in Queensland.

Keep your SMP and supporting documents in a secure location and ensure electronic copies are backed up.

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