The Application of Risk Control Concepts and Experience to Sustainable Development

0957±5820/00/$10.00+0.00 q Institution of Chemical Engineers Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

THE APPLICATION OF RISK CONTROL CONCEPTS AND EXPERIENCE TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT² J. McQUAID* Health and Safety Executive, London, UK *now Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Engineering Design for Sustainable Development, University of Ulster, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland

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he theme of this paper is that there are lessons to be learned for the promotion of sustainable development from experience gained in the application of risk control concepts to health and safety at work. The starting point was the enactment of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act of 1974. The fundamental change introduced by the Act was to place primary responsibility for risk control with those who create the risks. It promoted the development of improvements through an informed dialogue between the regulator and the regulated. Such a dialogue is essential where uncertainties prevail so that professional judgements are necessary as to the level of risk. Furthermore, a wider consultation is necessary where it is felt that the choice of control option needs to re¯ect stakeholder values. These features are evidently applicable also to decision-making on sustainable development. This paper reviews the developments in arrangements for risk control and expands on their relevance to promoting the concept of sustainable development. Keywords: risk; safety; sustainability; decision-making.

INTRODUCTION

making a company safe is all about order, control and good behaviour. That is not only a plus point for safety. You recoup the costs doubly because the company becomes more productive. So now we say that safeguarding employees safeguards the future of the company. We are now at a point of environmental awareness raising where companies are recognizing that it makes them more competitive’.

The many de®nitions of sustainable development focus on the goals to be achieved but are stated in terms that are of little help to those faced with making decisions. How can one judge the sustainability of a proposed course of action or form of behaviour or which of several courses of action is the one that is optimally sustainable? Up to the 1970s, a similar predicament applied to decision-making on measures to improve performance in health and safety from work activities. Since then, much has changed towards getting a proper balance between the roles of the state and of those who create the risks and to ensuring participation in decision-making by those with an interest. In particular, both sides of industry have an active role in setting standards and developing guidance on good practice and, most importantly, health and safety is seen as a normal part of the management function and of systematic approaches to loss control. The lessons from experience in the area of health and safety have been advocated as relevant to the question posed above concerning sustainable development. For example, Ruud Lubbers, ex-Prime Minister of the Netherlands and Chairman of the Amsterdam Conference on Sustainable Development, said in 1996 in relation to progress towards sustainable development1:

On the same theme, a discussion document issued in 1998 by the CBI2 recommended that environmental regulation should move towards a risk-based approach, based on the health and safety model. Of course, sustainable development is about much more than environmental regulation, as is made clear in the London Communique of 1997 to which this special issue is a response and also more recently in the Government’s 1999 White Paper3. Furthermore, the Communique explicitly refers to the achievement of the highest standards of safety in making and using products of all kinds as a component of chemical engineers’ response to the challenge of sustainable development. Although many of the measures required for good health and safety performance have statutory backing which is absent for sustainable development, nonetheless the essentials of the system of risk control, stripped of the legalities, are simple to express and of wider application: clear de®nition of responsibilities, awareness and sharing of information, and methodical assessment of the nature of a problem. It is therefore appropriate to review the experience gained in the health and safety ®eld on the application of risk control concepts and to draw out features relevant to sustainable development, as a contribution to the response to the challenges in the London CommuniqueÂ.

`Just look back 35 years. I can remember the debate on safety at work. Companies said: Take it easy, aren’t you exaggerating. There came a point when they found that

² Crown Copyright 2000. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Of®ce.

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APPLICATION OF RISK CONTROL CONCEPTS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE 1970sÐ THE ROBENS COMMITTEE The early 1970s was a watershed for health and safety in Great Britain. The prescriptive approach adopted during 150 years of industrial development had resulted in a situation where there was simply too much law. The burden of having to cope with the law was becoming insupportable on both the regulators and the regulated. The law attempted to prescribe how every detail of industrial activity should be conducted. The attempt to do so in detail was proving unable to cope with the rate of advance of industrial technologies. The Robens Committee was appointed in 1970 to carry out a fundamental review of the whole system. The Committee concluded4 that the existence of the great mass of law had an unfortunate psychological effect. People were heavily conditioned to think of health and safety at work as a matter of detailed rules imposed by external agencies. The resulting apathy was the greatest single contributing factor to accidents and ill-health at work. The Robens Committee concluded that this attitude would not be cured so long as people were encouraged to think that safety and health at work could be ensured by an ever-expanding body of legal regulations enforced by an ever-increasing army of inspectors. They made the fundamental recommendation that the primary responsibility should lie with those who create the risks and those who work with them. As a consequence, they recommended that the basis of the law should be changed. This recommendation led to the passing of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act (HSWA) in 1974. There are obvious parallels with the situation that has prevailed on sustainable development over the past few years. As far as the vast bulk of industry and the public is concerned, it is not too much to say that apathy reigns. sustainable development is obviously a good thing but achieving it is someone else’s problemÐbe it other industries, other consumers, other countries and, above all, other generations yet to be born. The way to progress is through organizing incentives, engaging stakeholders and generally creating a framework of methodologies, information and indicators of sustainability of actions to enable and encourage society to respond to the exhortations.

CHANGES RESULTING FROM THE ROBENS REPORT The new law was based on the proposition that safety could only be effectively ensured in an era of rapidly changing industrial practices by compelling the risk creators to think constructively and systematically about minimizing threats of harm. This process of thinking ahead has acquired the label of risk assessment. Up to the time of the Robens Committee’s work, the approach to regulation had been based largely, though not entirely, on the need to respond to experience. Legislation and its enforcement reacted to the occurrence of actual catastrophic events and to the experience of harm as indicated by statistics of frequent events. The Robens Committee recognized the need for anticipatory action and observed: `The safety system must look to future possibilities as well as to past experience’. Their recommendations rested on creating conditions for a more self-regulatory system in the sense of Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

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putting more responsibility back with the risk-creators in industry and also in the sense of continuously adjusting solutions to match problems. The anticipatory approach underpinning the Robens philosophy is even more relevant to sustainable development where anticipatory action today is needed to avoid the problems of tomorrow. The experience of the necessary thinking process gained in the health and safety ®eldÐand the dif®culties and inevitable constraints in practiceÐwill undoubtedly have a read-across to sustainable development, even though the instruments and incentives available will differ. The Report recommended that the law should provide a statement of principles and de®nition of duties of general application, with regulations setting more speci®c goals and standards. Codes of practice and guidance drawn up by or with industry should set out good practice on processes and means of achieving the goals. The HSWA created new bodies to implement the new framework. The Health and Safety Commission (HSC), subject to parliamentary accountability via Secretaries of State, is the prime mover in relation to the regulation of industrial health and safety. The Commission is representative of both sides of industry, the local authorities and the public interest. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is the Commission’s operational arm and is separate from it with its own statutory functions. The Commission takes advice from the Executive and proposes and sets the standards which HSE will enforce. The remit of HSC extends to all work activities except marine transport and civil aviation. Enforcement of the law is shared between HSE and the local authorities, with the local authorities concentrating on lower risk activities such as the retail sector, catering and nursing homes. HSE includes within its organization substantial resources for work on the science and technology of health and safety, including the Health and Safety Laboratory at Shef®eld and Buxton. The other fundamental change recommended by the Robens CommitteeÐand also highly relevant to the sustainable development themeÐwas the institution of an extensive process of consultation. The ®nal stage involves public consultation on all new regulatory proposalsÐ made statutory in HSWAÐprior to ®nalizing recommendations to Ministers. But the process was to begin at an earlier stage through the gathering of advice as to practicability, scienti®c soundness and proportionality to risk. An important part of the machinery for doing so was in the form of advisory committees, initially focused on particular industries and later extended to particular cross-industry subjects. Their work was backed up by a statutory obligation to arrange for the conduct of research and the dissemination of information. The whole process of consultation was intended as a means of quality assurance so that the ®nal productÐthe legislation itselfÐ would be ®t for purpose. The system was designed to draw upon the abilities of those most concerned with the application of the law to devise solutions that would command support and commitment. In effect, it empowered the key players in health and safety much more than had previously been the case. It reserved a ®nal quality control function to the Commission itself but at a minimum level if the machinery operated as intended. It is not just those who are at work who are at risk from work activities. The Robens Report recognized that the potential for industry to impact upon people who live near

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to industrial sites handling large quantities of hazardous materials was increasing. There are many other ways in which work can impact upon the public. The Mission Statement of HSE exposes the breadth of the organization’s responsibilities: `To ensure that risks to people’s health and safety from work activities are properly controlled.’ Anyone who comes into contact with a work activity is now protected under the same legal umbrella: the householder living close to a nuclear reactor or to a factory processing hazardous materials, the person passing a building site in the street, the visitor to a fairground or the passenger on a train. Such a diverse range of responsibilities gives the HSC/E a perspectiveÐunique in the worldÐ across the whole ®eld of industrial activity. And it confers immense power over that activity which has to be exercised with considerable judgement and subject to intense scrutiny. THE LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORK The way in which the legislation operates is based on a well-de®ned framework. The bedrock is provided by the Health and Safety at Work etc Act. This sets out what are, in effect, general duties of care with no discrimination by level of hazard or risk. But all these general duties are subject to a key quali®cation: that the end-result is to be achieved `so far as is reasonably practicable’. The recognized interpretation of this quali®cation is that safety comes ®rst, but there must be a computation of risk and expenditureÐof time, effort and money. The onus is on the risk-creator to show that the residual risk is insigni®cant in relation to the overall costs of averting it. So risk assessment and cost-bene®t analysis come in on the ground ¯oor of the legislative framework. The general duties are supported by regulations. They set standards to be achieved. They may prescribe what has to be done or prohibit what must not be done. They deal with incontrovertible risks where control measures are unlikely to change, or where a step-change in behaviour is needed. They ensure consistency of approach. Some impose absolute duties; others are quali®ed by the idea of `reasonable practicability’. Modern regulations are ®rmly based on risk assessment: in the standards they set which re¯ect scienti®c evidence and evaluation of risks; in decisions about whether to impose absolute duties, bans or proscriptions, etc; and in the choice of how to controlÐby licences, approvals, safety case regimes, noti®cation systems or other `permissioning’ of higher-hazard activities, or by straightforward duties on those responsible without recourse to permissioning. An aspect of goal-setting regulations which is increasingly being adopted, particularly for higher hazard industries and for dealing with hazards to health, is a requirement for the main duty-holder to identify hazards and assess risks in his or her operations. He or she may also be required to prepare a safety case demonstrating how the risks will be prevented or otherwise controlled, and to set out a safety management system showing how the safety case will be implemented and maintained. Amplifying the general duties and regulations are Approved Codes of Practice (ACoPs), authoritative guidance and

advice. These deal with ways, means and processes rather than end-goals. They aim to re¯ect goodÐsometimes bestÐpractice in industry in control of risks. They can be relatively easily updated to adjust for changes in knowledge of hazards and in technologies to deal with them. They offer clarity and certainty to those regulated while allowing for different approaches by the more enterprising. Thus the legislative frameworkÐgeneral duties, regulations, ACoPs, guidance, adviceÐis interconnected by processes of common intellectual originÐadoption of standards of good practice based on evaluation of risk, risk assessment where standards have not been developed, preparation of safety cases demonstrating effective control of risks. The extent to which any one of these processes is applicable depends on the nature of the hazard. DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE 1970s The HSWA came into force in 1974 and since then a great deal of the old prescriptive law has been removed from the statute book. It has been replaced with modern goalsetting regulations backed up by many publications giving guidance on good practice. During this time the world has not stood still. Features of the industrial landscape have shifted dramatically. The structure of industry has altered in deep and sharp ways. There are fewer of what were once regarded as Britain’s traditional heavy industries. Three million jobs in manufacturing were lost between 1973 and 1993. More people are self-employed, work in the service sector or work as subcontractors. But the ®rms themselves are predominantly small in size. At the turn of the millennium, 95% of private sector companies employ fewer than 10 employees although they account for only 28% of the workforce. However, 37% of employees still work in companies employing more than 500. The pattern of ownership of some traditional industriesÐthe utilities, mines and the railway industryÐhas changed. Alongside the changes in the industrial background, there has been an underlying change in the social context in which the regulator operates. Technological developments lay at the heart of many of the industrial changes. Such developments may bring considerable risksÐor perceptions of riskÐas well as bene®ts. The attention of the public has been increasingly engaged by greater media interest, with demands for instant remedies. Additionally, `green’ or environmentally related issues, often owing their origins to industrial activities, are more actively pursued by pressure groups. The combined result is that there are now higher expectations of the regulator who has to seek to assuage public concern without denying the gain of the economic bene®ts of technological change and enterprise. This is an intensely political mediating act to which the structure and style of the HSC has demonstrated enduring resilience. The degree to which risks to workers or to the public ought to be controlled by regulation is ultimately a question about values and public reassurance. A world where there is zero risk, however appealing to some, is an impossibility. Nor is there any simple and convenient taxonomy that can be assembled to rank risks in a straightforward way. People’s responses to risks mirror an absence of a general agreement on the nature of harm itself. The topic is Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

APPLICATION OF RISK CONTROL CONCEPTS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT unusually vulnerable to the uncertainties, fears, phobias and concerns of those exposed to risk. In the absence of common ground, the rationale which determines the extent of state intervention has to be robust and defensible, seeking to balance the pressureÐsometimes even from the political system itself in the wake of public inquiriesÐfor ever more regulation against the burden that ill-judged regulation imposes on business. The position of the regulator of industrial harm rests ®nally upon the authority and trust which the organization commands, the quality of its scienti®c and technical work in developing and applying common standards and its proper exercise of discretion in applying the law. An unfortunate developmentÐunintended by RobensÐ is the widespread belief that decisions should be based solely on the results of quantitative risk assessment and that this is a job for experts. The ®rst Director General of HSE presented the counterview as long ago as 19815. He argued that: `Decision making based solely upon the judgement of a group of experts or on a quasi-judicial process is to assume that there is a single right answer: that any differences of opinion as to what should be done arise from ignorance or misunderstandings or a failure correctly to interpret the facts, and will be resolved by the logic of the expert. The real situation is quite different. Decision taking in health and safety should be a two-stage operation: ®rstly, by making an analysis of the nature and scale of the potential hazard and the means and cost of reducing the chances of anyone being hurt and reducing the number of people at riskÐa task for the experts, and secondly, deciding whether the risk is one to be taken, or whether resources should be used to reduce the hazard or whether, in extreme cases, the operation should be abandoned altogether. Unless the experts have concluded that, to a high degree of certainty, there is no risk at all involved, then this second stage must be gone through. These decisions too can be left to the expertsÐand often are. The experts may well have a special contribution to make because of their understanding of the nature of the hazard. But, in my view, they should not take such decisions alone. One way or another the people involved in the operation, those who bear the risks, and those who share the bene®ts, must also be involved. The differences in `interest’ must be identi®ed, acknowledged and reconciled. That process is the real politics of health and safety.’ As with controlling risk, decisions about the effort to be expended in achieving sustainability involve questions of fairness as well as economic ef®ciency and depend on the context of the decision. Just as identifying the `right’ risks to tackle is not straightforward, so also is that of deciding what is sustainably `right’. The two decision-making processesÐinvolving the integration of expert input and societal valuesÐhave many features in common which will be drawn out in subsequent paragraphs. MANAGEMENT OF HEALTH AND SAFETY The Robens Report laid great stress on the importance to risk control of commitment by management. A fundamental precept of the Robens philosophy was that health Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

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and safety should be a normal part of the management functionÐmirroring the thinking of Ruud Lubbers quoted earlier. HSE has studied the characteristics of organizations with good health and safety performance and has distilled the results into a key document Successful Health and Safety Management6. The publication re¯ects the accumulated experience of committed managers in industry on what is needed and presents the general conclusions in the form of a practical guide. The advice it contains is used by HSE as a basis for testing the performance of organizations against the general duties of HSWA. The guide presents a framework which identi®es the steps for successful health and safety management as: · having an effective policy; · organizing to promote a positive culture; · planning for effective implementation; · measuring performance to secure improvement; · learning from experience through audits and performance reviews. The guide sets out the issues to be addressed under each step. It can be used for self audit and assessment and for developing programmes for improvement. Although the principles it describes are applicable to all organizations, the extent of action required will vary with the size of the organization, the hazards presented by its activities, products or services and the adequacy of its existing arrangements. In the light of current pressures to engage stakeholders in decision-making, it is apposite to refer here to a recent exposition from a senior industrial manager7 in which he remarks, `We . . . too often discussed the output from these processes with the workforce in a way that was unsympathetic and over-academic. Communications were also a critical factor and one which, with hindsight, we admit we gave insuf®cient attention to.’ Such realization is as relevant to sustainable development as to risk control. The approach adopted by HSE in codifying good management for risk control can be regarded as a model for preparing a guide oriented to sustainability. It is in fact being applied by The Royal Academy of Engineering in the context of engineering design for sustainable development. The process involves: · examining design practice as developed by experienced and motivated practitioners; · correlating successful achievement of sustainability objectives with identi®ed common features of the developed practice; · de®ning a structure for `good’ practice in different contexts; · exposing the judgements about what is `good’ to the review of peers; and · presenting the good practice in the form of general principles. This process has been adopted in The Academy’s scheme for Visiting Professors in Engineering Design for Sustainable Development. The scheme, which currently has Visiting Professors in place in ten universities, will use case studies illustrating the incorporation of sustainability considerations into engineering decisions across a wide range of applications. The intention is that the material from

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the case studies will be transformed into teaching material for use in engineering undergraduate education. The framework for decision-making based on general principles will be relevant to practising engineers in their professional development. More speci®cally, in the advice given on planning for health and safety, the HSE guide is itself highly oriented towards good design. It refers to the preferred hierarchy of control which has been incorporated in new regulations. The preferred hierarchy of risk control principles is, in summary: Firstly, eliminating risks by substituting the dangerous by the less dangerous, for example: · by using a less hazardous substance; · by substituting a type of machine which is better guarded to achieve the same product; · by avoiding the use of certain processes. Secondly, combating risk at source by engineering controls and giving collective protective measures priority. Thirdly, minimizing risks by the design of suitable systems of working. Fourthly, minimizing risks by the use of personal protective clothing and equipment as a last resort. In setting out minimum objectives for performance standards, the guide says, in relation to design and selection of plant and substances, that performance standards should ensure that: · all relevant health and safety aspects, including technical standards and human factors issues, relating to installation, use, maintenance, decommissioning and disposal are considered at the design stage and incorporated into design speci®cations; and · all design speci®cations refer to health and safety requirements and that these are speci®ed in all contract documents. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to foresee an analogous hierarchy emerging in the future in relation to sustainability. To lend further weight to the argument, reference may be made to the important concept in the risk control hierarchy of inherently healthier and safer design, sometimes shortened to inherent safety. It deserves a special mention given the resonance it must have with any concept of inherently sustainable design. INHERENTLY HEALTHIER AND SAFER DESIGN The concept can be described as seeking to encourage the elimination or minimization of hazards at source by good design, avoiding the need for expensive and complex safeguards or procedures to manage the risks. Despite its obvious bene®ts, it is a fact that inherent safety is not well-grounded in the consciousness of management and designers. There are constraints which inhibit this and which need to be and are being addressed by HSE in various ways. These constraints include: · the rapidity of technological advance can result in health, safety and environmental issues having to be taken up as an afterthought; · the development of inherently safer solutions is long

term and extends beyond the time window for investment decisions; · the fact that inherent safety is undoubtedly demanding on people’s thinking time. It is so much easier to keep bolting on extras; and · the assumption that decision-makers are well informed, in particular that they know about the costs of accidents and ill-health and the costs of preventive measures. However, many of the costs of poor health and safety performance are hidden because they are dif®cult to observe or estimate or because they are borne by some party other than the risk creator. This can make the inherently safer solution look expensive. Similar constraints would apply to the incorporation of any concepts of sustainability in design. There is a great deal of accumulated experience on inherent safety, sometimes not labelled as such. What is needed is a connected account of the subject spanning the different ®elds of engineering. HSE intends to publish guidance which will ®ll that gap, drawing from the range of experience to frame across-the-board principles. This might provide a model for a similar publication oriented to sustainability in design. RISK ASSESSMENT The aim of risk control is essentially to achieve a balance between the bene®ts of industrial activity and the risks of harm that might result. In order to strike that balance, it is necessary to make judgements about the degree and nature of the risks. The process of risk assessment is central to informing those judgements. Basing action on assessed risk is not a new invention. The approach to regulation for many years took the statistics of past experience as indicative of future risks on the basis of no change or justi®ed extrapolation of statistical trends, as the case may be. However, in many areas of industrial safetyÐand in other areas of importance to society, e.g. the environment, food safety, techniques for medical intervention, etc.Ðthe reliance on statistical experience is no longer suf®cient, as foreseen by Robens. The need to anticipate detriment has brought a need for scienti®c information on actual and potential sources of harm. This information is then used to construct mathematical, physical, human response, etc. models for relating postulated events and activities to the eventual harm that might result to people and the environment. Procedures are needed for the validation of those models and for the expression of the probability of occurrence of de®ned consequences in terms of common measures of risk. The outcome provides a systematic basis for informing the exercise of choice in the face of uncertainty. RiskÐas the combination of probability and consequencesÐis the natural parameter for the expression of the uncertain outcomes of events or activities. Risk assessment may be qualitative or quantitative. In the qualitative approach, the model for assessing the signi®cance of a risk is a qualitative comparison with other risks in terms of the consequences to those who could be harmed, the numbers so exposed and the chances that harms could occur. The decision on the degree to which the risk should be controlled will be in¯uenced by established good practice in the same or closely related ®elds, with a bias towards Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

APPLICATION OF RISK CONTROL CONCEPTS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT implementing improvements offered by technological advance. The quantitative approach can vary considerably in the extent to which predictive analysis as opposed to judgement and experience provides the quantitative basis. Prediction is often stated to be `objective’ and judgement to be `subjective’, though prediction invariably involves an element of subjective judgement about data and modelling. In the assessment, a numerical estimate is made of the probability that a de®ned harm will ensue from the occurrence of a particular event. The estimate should desirably be accompanied by some statement or opinion about the con®dence of the estimate, given that such estimates will have an uncertainty associated with them, depending on the quality of the information on which they are based. The decision on the degree to which the risk should be controlled will then be informed by a comparison of the estimate of the risk against numerical criteria and taking account of the costs of achieving a reduction in risk. Where good practice exists and is applicable, that will also be relevant to the question of control. However, the absence of guidance on what is good practice is often the driving force for preparing a quantitative estimate in the ®rst place. Moreover, the growth in the complexity of technological systems is bringing with it a greater need for formal quantitative methods of assessment. With such systems, the attempted identi®cation of failure pathways by means of intuitive, non-formal methods is likely to result in failure pathways remaining undiscovered until after the failures have occurred. Even when informal methods reveal failure paths, their relative signi®cance may be dif®cult to assess qualitatively. Whatever approach is used, the conduct of a risk assessment consists of ®ve distinct steps. These in outline are as follows: · Identi®cation of the hazards. At one extreme, this consists of the application of simple common sense to what can readily be observed, backed by existing information on accidents, ill-health records and manufacturers’ instructions. At the other extreme, formal methods applied by multi-disciplinary teams will be necessary for complex operations. · Identi®cation of who might be harmed, and how. Elaboration of the `how’ will vary from the application of common sense at one extreme to complex modelling of the ways in which a hazard can be realized and people harmed at the other. The identi®cation of how harm occurs often provides a stimulus to revise the design to achieve an inherently safer solution, i.e. to move the control regime up the hierarchy described earlier. · Evaluation of the risks arising from the hazards and deciding whether existing precautions are adequate or more should be done. The ®rst requirement is obviously to ensure that all the things that the law says have to be done are done. It is then necessary to ensure that generally accepted industry standards are in place. But that may not be enough since the law also says that any steps that are reasonably practicable should be taken. The test of reasonable practicability of a precaution rests on the balance between the costs and the reduction in risk achieved, with improved safety being given the bene®t of any doubt. · Record of the ®ndings of the assessment. Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

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· Review of the assessment from time to time and revision if necessary. This is particularly important if there are any signi®cant changes but it is good practice to review the assessment periodically. In the decision-making process on risks, many criteria have been developed for integrating scienti®c, economic, cultural, ethical considerations, etc. with varying degrees of success. A decision about whether to accept a risk will be governed by the degree to which the declared criteria are met, taking account of the importance attached to each criterion. The inclusiveness of the criteria and the assignment of importance will re¯ect the engagement of the decision-maker with the stakeholders affected by the decision. In this regard, the decision-making framework for health and safety will have a direct analogy with that for questions of sustainability. The publication in 19998 by HSE of a discussion document on its decision-making framework thus provides many pointers relevant to the development of an analogous framework for sustainable development decisions. The document is an exposition of how HSE approaches the making of decisions as a regulator and is a generalization of the framework published by HSE in 1988 and revised in 19929. The framework, known as the Tolerability of Risk (ToR), has gained considerable acceptance by other regulators and industry. Its strength lies in its ability to apply tests very similar to those we all apply in everyday life for reaching decisions on whether a risk is so great as to be unacceptable; whether the risk is so small that no further precautions are necessary; or, if the risk falls between these two states, whether the risk should be incurred, taking account of the bene®ts or the need to avoid some greater risk and with the assurance that efforts will continue to be made to reduce the risk as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). Risks in this latter category are termed tolerable in the sense, not of being acceptable, but re¯ecting a willingness to live with the risk and in the knowledge that the risk is one that is worth taking and that it is being properly controlled. In simple language, a tolerable risk connotes with being `safe enough’. The essence of the philosophy is that things are not con®ned to being `safe’ or `not safe’ but that they can also be `safe enough’Ða distinction mirroring commonsense conclusions of the public in relation to the everyday risks they willingly take. It seems logical to suppose that questions of sustainability may eventually be similarly classi®ed. The challenge will be to determine when an activity is `sustainable enough’. By an analogous process of reasoning, this will depend on a proper balance between the bene®ts provided now and the disbene®ts incurred by future generations and with the assurance that `reasonably practicable’ steps are being implemented for reducing those disbene®ts by action now. The problem becomes one of de®ning what is reasonably practicable and here the vast wealth of experience accumulated on the health and safety interpretation of that concept will undoubtedly help to inform the corresponding question in the sustainable development context. This is not to say that it will happen overnight if the health and safety experience over the past 25 years is a guide, since the concept of `reasonable practicability’ is still elusive to many. The philosophy for sustainability will, of course, also recognize that activities can be `unsustainable’. This will need to be de®ned

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and the de®nition will hinge on whether present day indulgence will deny future generations the ability to enjoy qualities of life which we now expect as of right. The classi®cation is completed by activities that are `sustainable’ in the sense that the effects on future generations are negligible by comparison with the ¯uctuations that inevitably occur through natural processes. AWARENESS AND INFORMATION SHARING Success in achieving sustainable development will depend crucially on raising awareness across society and providing access to reliable information and methodologies with which people can make sound decisions. This has a distinct resonance with the fundamental precept of HSE’s risk control approach that health and safety performance relies on awareness of hazards and risks and the sharing of information between the different players in the health and safety system. These players, in addition to government, are: · industry itself, in developing solutions to the risks which it creates; · safety representatives and safety committees in the workplace, in bringing practical knowledge and experience to bear; · science and technology organizations such as research establishments and universities, in de®ning the nature of hazards and risks and methods for their control; · psychologists and sociologists, in clarifying the factors which in¯uence human behaviour and public response; · standards-making bodies, in codifying good practice; · voluntary organizations in facilitating and encouraging the adoption of good practice. The provision of information and advice is in fact a statutory duty on HSE under Section 11 of HSWA. There are three main strands to raising awareness amongst the various players. These are openness of scienti®c information, sharing of projections of future operating states and transparency of decision-making. In relation to scienti®c information, HSE is required to implement the Chief Scienti®c Adviser’s guidelines on The Use of Scienti®c Advice in Policy Making10. As part of this implementation, HSE publishes annually a document11 describing research intentions and identifying particular subject areas of future research action. In addition to providing current information the publication meets three forward-looking needs: · to give early indication to research contractors of the research issues on which HSE will be seeking proposals through the normal process of research commissioning; · to invite the research community to generate their own ideas for research to meet health and safety needs. This is an explicit recognition that HSE is not the only source of ideas on the lines of research to pursue; · to expose HSE’s thinking to other research funding organizations, including industry, the government funding bodies for strategic and basic research in the universities and government laboratories, and the international network of organizations involved in health and safety research, including in particular the programmes supported by the European Union. This early exposure of intentions allows opportunities for collaboration to be developed and helps to avoid unnecessary duplication.

Responsiveness to technological change was identi®ed earlier as an essential characteristic of effective risk control arrangements. Shared visions of future technological changes and of their implications for health and safety are a prerequisite to the achievement of that responsiveness. An important initiative towards this end was taken in 1998 with the publication of a document12 setting out HSE’s views on the implications for health and safety of identi®ed trends in technology. The document draws together the views of HSE specialists and has been published for discussion and review. The aim of the document is to provide a living database useful to all involved in health and safety decisions. The database is accessible on the worldwide web and feedback from experts outside HSE is explicitly invited. It is recognized that the database entries need to be subjected to full and frequent scrutiny and to be regularly updated. The intention is that the collective views of experts in particular technologies will provide a powerful underpinning rationale for the assignment of future priorities. It should also provide scope for productive collaboration across national boundaries and will enable all those with an interest, whether expert or not, to share in HSE’s views on future development. SOME LESSONS With 25 years’ experience behind us, the key question is: does it work? In terms of health and safety performance, the British overall rate of workplace fatal and non-fatal injury is lower than in other EU Member States and lower than in the USA. In recent years, the fatal injury rate in Britain has been less than half of that in Germany and the USA and around one quarter of that in Spain. Among EU Member States, only The Netherlands has a lower rate of workplace fatalities than Britain. Overall, the picture is thus seen to be good but in the operation of the system there are some downsides which could read across to the sustainable development agenda. Those that are particularly relevant include: · the goal-setting approach is relatively time-consuming for the regulator in terms of the complexity of decisionmaking by comparison with legal prescription and proscription coupled with check-list inspection; · the approach is also time-consuming and perhaps too sophisticated for small ®rms who prefer the certainties of prescription to attempting to cope with the apparent mystique of risk assessment. A major effort continues to be needed to convey the common-sense nature of judging risks and taking action proportionate to the risks; · the emphasis on senior management involvement may result in the understanding and ownership of health and safety being removed from the shop-¯oor, even more so if work is subcontracted. It requires a pervasive health and safety culture to overcome this. On the other hand, there are advantages which could equally apply to the sustainable development context and these include: · the management approaches to health and safety are fully in keeping with the procedures that are conducive to quality management; · the lack of prescription of the means to achieve goals Trans IChemE, Vol 78, Part B, July 2000

APPLICATION OF RISK CONTROL CONCEPTS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT fosters technological progress and design of systems that are ®t for purpose; · the regulatory regime, because of its wide coverage, allows hazards to be controlled at the design stage or at the point of supply rather than at the point of use so that management of the risk in use is rendered easier. CONCLUDING REMARKS This outline of risk control concepts in Great Britain began with the lead-up to the HSWA. Without the HSWA the onus upon the creators of risks to take effective preventive action to minimize harm to their employees would lie at common and case law, governed by insurance and subject to the advice of independent consultants and experts. The trends towards more litigation which are already noticeable would probably increase. Without the equivalent of the HSWA for sustainable development, what conclusions can be drawn? The main one is that the processes involved in arriving at decisions on health and safety have much in common with those that will ensure the achievement of sustainable development. The important processes are: · good management practices in industry to engender the right culture; · proper integration of expert analysis and societal values in deciding on actions that are proportionate to the bene®ts sought; · openness and transparency of information to enable those with an interest to be engaged in seeking solutions that command support. The core health and safety argument, though, is not very different to what Robens said so forcefully: risk creators have to take responsibility for their own destiny. The corresponding argument in the sustainable development context is that industry, as a major primary consumer of resources and contributor to environmental degradation, has to take responsibility for the future sustainability of its operations. The argument applies to all companies, not just the largest. One of the most signi®cant challenges facing HSE in the

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coming years will be to translate the high standards and safety-based cultures of the safest organizations into feasible and achievable models for the rest of industry. This challenge seems equally relevant to sustainable development. It seems likely that organizational practices which are successful in improving health and safety will ®nd equal success in promoting sustainable development. Similarly, ideas that are being actively pursued under the sustainable development umbrella, for example on participative decision-making, will undoubtedly have further application to health and safety. REFERENCES 1. Ruud Lubbers, 1996, Working on the concept of sustainable development, Env News from the Netherlands, No 3, pp 10±11. 2. CBI, 1998, Worth the Risk-Improving Environmental Regulation (CBI, London). 3. DETR, 1999, A Better Quality of Life: a Strategy for Sustainable Development for the UK (The Stationery Of®ce, London). 4. Robens Committee, 1972, Safety and Health at Work (HMSO, London). 5. Locke, J. H., 1981, The politics of health and safety, Alexander Redgrave Memorial Lecture (Institute of Occupational Safety and Health). 6. HSE, 1991, Successful Health and Safety Management, (HSE Books). 7. Brinded, M., 2000, Perception vs analysisÐhow to handle risk, The 2000 Lloyd’s Register Lecture (The Royal Academy of Engineering, London). 8. HSE, 1999, Reducing Risks, Protecting People (HSE Books). 9. HSE, 1992, The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations (HMSO, London). 10. OST, 1997, The Use of Scienti®c Advice in Policy Making (Department of Trade and Industry, London). 11. HSE, Mainstream Research Market 1999/2000 (HSE, PO Box 1064, Shef®eld S3 7YB). 12. HSE, 1998, Trends in Technology and their Implications for Health and Safety (HSE Books).

ADDRESS Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Dr J. McQuaid, 61 Pingle Road, Shef®eld S7 2LL, UK. The manuscript was received 30 March 1999 and accepted for publication after revision 4 May 2000.