Volume 1

Government policy on the management of risk / House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affaris.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Select Committee on Economic Affairs
Date:
2006
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Government policy on the management of risk / House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affaris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    level of risk. Precise values for this multiplier have never been defined by the courts””®. Recently, the HSE has acknowledged that in relation to the concept of gross disproportion: “...there is no authoritative case law which considers the question... HSE has not formulated an algorithm which can be used to determine the proportion factor for a given level of risk. The extent of bias [on the side of safety] must be argued in the light of all the circumstances””’. In spite of all this uncertainty, there are indications in the HSE 1992 document that at least for risks that fall roughly in the middle of its Tolerability Region (between 1 death in a million per annum and | death in ten thousand per annum) then broadly speaking standard cost-benefit criteria should apply. This would be on condition that the benefits of safety improvements are appropriately defined and estimated (which, according to the HSE, should be along Willingness-to-Pay based lines), but also that they are sufficiently comprehensively specified to include all other costs of the occurrence of accidents involving death or injury. Societal Concerns and the Precautionary Principle There are two other important concepts applied by the HSE and other agencies that are subject to a potentially problematic degree of imprecision and uncertainty. These are what the HSE refers to as “Societal Concerns” and the so-called “Precautionary Principle”. Turning to the former first, in R2P2 the HSE states that: “Societal concerns or the risks or threats from hazards which impact on society and which, if realised, could have adverse repercussions for the Institutions responsible for putting in place the provisions and arrangements for protecting people, e.g. Parliament or the government of the day. This type of concern is often associated with hazards that give rise to risks which, were they to materialise, could provoke a socio-political response, e.g. risk of events causing widespread or large scale detriment or the occurrence of multiple fatalities in a single event. Typical examples relate to nuclear power generation, railway travel, or the genetic modification of organisms. Societal concerns due to the occurrence of multiple fatalities in a single event are known as societal risk. Societal risk is therefore a subset of societal concerns””’. While it is undoubtedly the case that events such as Chernobyl or the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US have social and political ramifications that extend far beyond the loss of life and injury that result from such tragedies, it is not so clear that similar considerations apply in the case of, for example, a large- scale rail accident such as that which occurred at Ladbroke Grove in 1999. Certainly, for some time it was widely believed that the public are inherently