THE CORRIDOR GAP
- DSRM-1
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Why employee exposure to street-level risk has no owner
DSRM Risk & Crisis Management
The question nobody has been asking
Every organisation with staff in a major city now operates, in effect, two duty-of-care perimeters.
One is the building: well-resourced, well-understood, covered by decades of health and safety practice.
The other is everything a person walks through to reach it; the platform, the underpass, the last few hundred metres of pavement.
That second perimeter is almost never named, let alone owned, and yet it is where a growing share of what unsettles employees actually happens.
This piece sets out what I found when I went looking for an answer to a simple question: when an employee arrives at their desk visibly affected by something they witnessed on the way in; a person injecting in a doorway, a robbery attempt, someone in acute distress on a platform, who in the organisation is responsible for that?
What the existing frameworks actually cover
The absence of an answer is not because organisations have ignored employee trauma exposure. Quite the opposite in fact, trauma leave provisions, critical incident policies, and employee assistance programmes are now well established across most medium and large employers, and the language used to define them is instructive. Trauma leave and critical-incident clauses are consistently scoped to events occurring “in the course of employment” or “while performing job duties.”
I also found case law and duty-of-care guidance follow the same pattern; an employer's obligations attach to the workplace and to work-related travel, not to the ordinary commute.
That boundary was reasonable when it was drawn. It has simply never been revisited against what a daily commute through a major transit hub now involves. The frameworks are mature; the scope decision underneath them is decades old and was never designed with the current exposure levels in mind.
The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) has gone some way toward acknowledging the gap. Its guidance on civil unrest advises that where employees are concerned about getting to and from work safely, employers should consider remote working as part of their duty of care. That is a genuine, useful step, but it is scoped to acute, exceptional events. It does not extend to the routine, low-level, daily exposure that a growing number of commuters now experience as a matter of course, and we have not found it asked or answered anywhere else in the sector.
A gap with two distinct dimensions
Our review of this issue, built on the same analytical architecture behind DSRM's Environmental Reviews at Moorgate (London), Mission Bay (San Francisco) and Gangnam (Seoul), treats the commute as two related but separate problems.
The psychological dimension. Witnessing something distressing does not require a clinical diagnosis to measurably affect a person's concentration and functioning for a period afterward. The research literature on acute stress response is consistent on this point, even where the triggering incident is far less severe than the events that literature was originally built to study. Left unaddressed, this becomes a low-grade, unattributed source of workplace anxiety, not because the event itself was unmanageable, but because no one has ever explained to the employee why it affected them, or given them anywhere to take it.
The physical dimension. Separately, there is a substantial and long-established body of research, beginning with Grayson and Stein's 1981 study of convicted violent offenders rating pedestrians' vulnerability from gait alone, showing that perceived vulnerability to targeting is read from how a person moves, not from their size, age or gender. Organisations that brief staff extensively on cyber hygiene and physical premises security very rarely brief anyone on this, despite it being directly actionable and well evidenced.
Both dimensions share the same underlying structure: risk that accumulates in the corridor between two environments an organisation does control, and is therefore assumed, by default, not by decision, to belong to no one.
Why this matters now
Rough sleeping and visible street-level distress in London have reached record levels, with several boroughs recording year-on-year increases above 20 per cent. Independent research already indicates that a majority of commuters feel unsafe travelling during unsociable hours, and roughly half report concern about commuting alone. None of this is a prediction, it is the present, daily operating environment for staff in most UK city-centre roles.
In every organisation we have discussed this with, there is broad agreement that this represents avoidable risk. What is consistently missing is agreement on who addresses it; not because the question is unanswerable, but because it has rarely been asked directly enough for anyone to have to answer it.
What DSRM is offering
This is not a call for organisations to take on new legal liability for the commute, the legal position is settled, and we are not arguing to unsettle it. It is a case for treating the corridor as a genuine, named part of organisational risk and wellbeing planning: identifying who within an organisation is best placed to hold it, what a reporting line for psychological impact should look like, and equipping staff with the same understanding of offender behaviour and target selection that informs DSRM's monthly HR Intelligence Briefs.
If you are responsible for the safety or wellbeing of staff who move through environments your organisation does not control, before or after they reach your door, we would welcome the conversation.
Anthony Hegarty MSc (Criminal Psychology & Criminology)
Founder & Principal, DSRM Risk & Crisis Management
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