Continue reading »]]> Abstract

The introduction to the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2006 seminar on The Economics and Morality of Safety concluded with a list of issues that were “worthy of further exploration”. I have  reduced them to the following questions:

• Why do moral arguments about ‘rights’ persist unresolved?

• Why can risk managers not agree on a common value for preventing a fatality?

• Why do governments and the media react differently to different causes of death?

• Why do some institutions profess to be pursuing zero risk, knowing that achieving it is impossible?

• Why do some institutions pretend that their risk management problems can be reduced to a calculation in which all significant variables can be represented by a common metric?

• Why are societal attitudes and risk communication still seen as problematic after many years investigation?

• Why are certain accident investigations, criminal or civil, seen as ‘over zealous’ by some and justifiable by others?

These questions are addressed with the help of a set of risk framing devices. For some my conclusion will be discouraging: all of these issues are likely to remain unresolved. Risk is a word that refers to the future. It has no objective existence. The future exists only in the imagination, and a societal consensus about what the future holds does not exist. … PDF of full paper

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Martin Parkinson raises an interesting question (comment on previous post): what should be the reaction to an accident that, a priori, was an extremely low probability event? He suggests that “any attempt to reverse the counterproductive aspects of ‘health and safety culture’ is doomed to failure”. After an accident he argues that most people will say, “well that tragic accident which just occurred could have been easily avoided – it would be unthinkable not to make the obvious small change which would avoid a repetition”. Further, he adds, “the accident might have been freakish and unforeseen, but if there is a seemingly easy and cheap “fix”, then no responsibly-minded person would fail to make that fix …there is no logical point at which you can say your environment has “just the right amount of apparent danger”.

This is an issue that I probed in a recent essay “Dangerous trees?”. See the section entitled “Fault trees, event trees and trees”.

Britain’s Health and Safety Executive declares risks of death of less than 1:1,000,000 to be “acceptable” – defined as “generally regarded as insignificant and adequately controlled”. But how should such risks be calculated? If one divides the number of people killed by trees in Britain every year by the population, the risk works out at about 1:10,000,000. Acceptable? Only until someone is killed.

After the event it is usually possible to identify the cause and the person(s) responsible. A risk worth taking becomes culpable negligence. Hindsight transforms an “acceptable” risk with a probability of 1:10,000,000 into one with a probability of 1:1.

The fear of becoming the legally-liable victim of such a transformation, assisted by no-win-no-fee lawyers, is perhaps the main driver of the excessive risk aversion that bans hanging flower baskets and forbids conkers without goggles. For most institutional risk managers, outside hedge funds, there are no rewards for taking risks, only costs for failure. For them, one accident is one too many. No set of circumstances for which they might be held responsible can be too safe.

Escape from the suffocating safety culture that such reasoning produces can be sought in a “blame-free” culture. After a low-probability “freakish” accident, emphasis should be placed not on establishing guilt and punishment, but on lessons to be learned. Judges, juries and the Health and Safety Executive have important roles to play. Reconstructed foresight, not 20/20 hindsight, should be the standard against which culpability for freakish accidents should be judged.

Thanks Martin for your highly pertinent comments.

Continue reading »]]> (Published in abbreviated form in The Times Higher on 24 August 2007, as “Tide of paranoia swells safety fears needlessly”)
“We are in danger of having a wholly disproportionate attitude to the risks we should expect to run as a normal part of life.” So said the Prime Minister in May 2005. At the highest level those concerned with our Health and Safety are worried that we are getting things out of proportion. Bill Callaghan, chair of the Health and Safety Commission is “sick and tired of hearing that ‘health and safety’ is stopping people doing worthwhile and enjoyable things.” He urges people to “stop concentrating effort on trivial risks and petty health and safety.” This is a sentiment shared by Rick Haythornthwaite, head of the Better Regulation Commission who declares “Enough is enough – It is time to turn the tide”.
“Field work perils mount”, the main front-page story in The Times Higher on 3 August shows that the tide of risk aversion is still running strongly in the world of higher education…
Full article here [PDF]

Continue reading »]]> Keynote address to OpRisk Europe Conference, 21 March, London:

• All risk is subjective. “Risk” is a word that refers to the future, and that exists only in the imagination.
• Risk management involves speculating about this future, about things that could go wrong, and about ways of preventing them.
• In recent years, in the public sector and throughout the worlds of commerce and industry there has been an explosion in the numbers of risk assessments undertaken and a remarkable increase in the thoroughness and comprehensiveness that they attempt.

View full PowerPoint notes presentation

Continue reading »]]> This question is posed in the title of a symposium to which I have been invited to contribute (organised by Cygnet Health Care – London, 30 November 2006). It is also highly relevant to a staff seminar I have been invited to give at Grendon Prison on 17 November.

A succinct summary of the contentious history behind the question is provided by the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s website:

“The Government announced its intention to reform the Mental Health Act (1983) in September 1998. Since then, there has been a Green Paper, a White Paper and a Draft Bill; the Government published a revised Draft Bill in September 2004. Parliament then established a twenty-four-member Scrutiny Committee of Peers and MPs to report on the proposals. In March 2006 the Government abandoned its plans to pursue a new Act and instead decided to amend the 1983 Act. A Bill to amend the old Act is expected this year.”

The political impetus behind the Government’s proclaimed intention to produce a new act or amend the old one is provided by the sensational media coverage of a few extremely rare events. The single event widely held responsible for the Government’s proclaimed determination in 1998 to reform the 1983 Act was the murder committed by Michael Stone in 1996 of Lin and Megan Russell. Stone, with the benefit of psychiatric hindsight, was apparently a known time-bomb waiting to explode. Why had he been left at liberty to commit his horrific crimes?

And why, ten years after the murders and eight years after the Government’s declaration of its intention to change the law so that such things could never happen again, has nothing happened?

The answer can be found in paragraph 10 of the Government’s response to the report of the Scrutiny Committee (PDF). The Government protests that the report misunderstands its intentions:

“First of all, the report says that the legislation should be about improving services. The Bill is not about service provision. It is about the legal processes for bringing people under compulsion.”

Amongst the “improved services” that the Scrutiny Committee considered central to a reformed Mental Health Act was protection of the civil liberties of those with mental problems. For the past eight years it has proved impossible to gain agreement about the balance to be struck between the threat to the public of dangerous psychopaths roaming free, and the threat to those with mental disorders of a law that would permit the detention of innocent people on suspicion that they might commit a crime.

This is a debate that I ventured into in a 2002 essay – “Risk and the impact of psychiatric disorder on the environment [PDF]”. Has there been any progress in the four years since?

Continue reading »]]> On 22 August 2006 Bill Callaghan, Chair of Britain’s Health and Safety Commission (HSC – overseer of the HSE, the Health and Safety Executive) issued a press release entitled: “Get a life”, says HSC”. He announced: “I’m sick and tired of hearing that ‘health and safety’ is stopping people doing worthwhile and enjoyable things when at the same time others are suffering real harm and even death as a result of mismanagement at work.” He urged people to “focus on real risks – those that cause real harm and suffering – and stop concentrating effort on trivial risks and petty health and safety.”

On 28 September Geoffrey Podger, Chief Executive of the HSE, returned to the attack in a letter to The Times (letter Sept 28) . Like his boss he decried the nation’s inability to distinguish the real from the trivial. The HSE he said was focused on risks that killed people: “we make no apology for that.”

Stung by ridicule in the popular press attaching to cancelled school trips and bureaucratic concerns about hanging flower baskets, conkers and homemade cakes at village fetes, the nation’s risk manager has launched a public relations campaign in support of “sensible risk management”. Henceforth “trivial risks” should be ignored; effort should be concentrated on “real risks”.

The HSE provides some numerical guidance to what it means by trivial; it defines a risk of death of less than one in a million per year as “tolerable”, and “insignificant and adequately controlled”.

The risk of dying as a result of an accident involving a tree (see Dangerous Trees) is about one in 10,000,000 per year, surely tolerably trivial. And yet, after an accident on New Year’s Day 2005 in which someone was killed by a tree that blew down in a storm, the police took until July 2006 to announce that they had decided not to prosecute the owner of the tree, and the HSE is still investigating and may yet prosecute. Why? It was an accident that caused, in the words of Mr Callaghan and Mr Podger, “real harm and suffering”.

The reason why the HSE’s distinction between the real and the trivial is unhelpful is that it is applied after the event. With the help of a vivid imagination almost anything – conkers, hanging flower baskets, door mats, home-made cakes at village fetes – can have the potential to cause serious harm, and invite the protracted, anxiety-generating, attentions of the police and the HSE.

Risk is a word that refers to some adverse event that might happen in the future. It exists only in the imagination. But should that event occur, however unlikely it was imagined to be, litigious hindsight can usually transform the “accident” into a case of culpable negligence.

Unless and until the HSE demonstrates, after the event, an ability to recognise genuine accidents when it sees them, it will continue to be a cause of the excessive risk aversion that it decries.