Q: Please briefly explain your role, involvement, and experience with regards to safety and risk management
Pete Stewart (PS): I am the Professional Head of Discipline for the Safe Practice within the defence related business for Atkins in the UK. I have over 30 years' experience in the high hazards and regulated industries in the UK and globally and have been supporting the IMechE Safety and Reliability Group (SRG) for almost half of that time as the Chair of Working Group 2 (Engineering for Safety) and the SRG Board of which I am the past Chair. I am also a Trustee for the Hazards Forum here in the UK.
Keith Miller (KM): I have 30 years’ experience as a safety engineer in the oil and gas industry and I have been with the IMechE Safety and Reliability Group for the last five. I am the primary author of our document ‘ALARP for Engineers: A Technical Safety Guide’. I will be presenting this and sitting on the discussion panel.
Benedikt Koning (BK): My role requires maintaining oversight of the relevance and quality of the TfL Bus Vehicle Specification (and the Bus Safety Standard within it), the document that dictates all areas of the buses that TfL allows into service in London. Achieving this requires liaison with various internal and external stakeholders, instigating reviews and underlying gap-analysis research into areas of safety concern regarding those who interact with TfL buses, whether they are Vulnerable Road Users or passengers. Along with this, in-service monitoring of vehicles and safety systems to confirm real-world benefits realisation.
Ray Forster (RF): My role is to design, maintain and facilitate use of the Civil Aviation Authority’s regulatory safety risk management system – which is based on industry risks. I have been doing this for four and a half years. Before that I ran the risk management system for the whole of the Royal Navy ATC sector for a few years, with other experience in ATC organisational level risk management.
Steve Corner (SC): SHEQ manager in the compressed gases industry, responsible for Product Stewardship and many other aspects of facility and transport safety. I chair a number of cross-industry safety committees, producing best practice publications and aiming to thoroughly manage risk throughout the supply chain.
Q: What is the top challenge facing engineers and risk managers when applying and demonstrating ALARP?
PS: Demonstrating that their approach and methodology has been robust, that their outcome is indeed the optimum solution and that there are no further risk reduction and safety measures available that pass the gross disproportionate test. The ALARP Principle is a powerful tool but it must be used appropriately and understood.
KM: I think it is seeing the big picture. Many safety engineers have learned the ropes in one industry, which may utilise specific methodologies, limiting the potential to find all types of hazards. That is why these seminars, which bring together engineers from many industries, are so valuable.
BK: Facilitating and achieving early involvement along with balancing and managing conflicting stakeholder desires and customer perceptions continues to be a challenging area for engineers.
RF: The CAA has moved away from ALARP as we don’t ‘own’ the safety risks - so we are unable to determine what industry may deem ‘reasonably practicable’. That said, it is that determination of what IS ALARP that we found most challenging. Working out what is the risk appetite, and where does it diverge from the cost appetite was impossible, except at organisational level. Hence, we have moved to seeking Acceptable Levels of Safety, which we can agree with industry.
SC: I think there are a number of challenges, but especially where additional and separate resources are required to apply ALARP techniques and then to demonstrate that application. It is not always possible to do both simultaneously, resulting in frustrations and inefficiencies. Levels of knowledge of risk and ALARP also seem to be an increasing challenge, due to personnel retention and turnover.
Q: How has your approach to risk management changed in recent years?
PS: It has been influenced by my experience across various industry sectors and the ability to take and reuse good practice from various high hazard domains – experience allows intelligent challenge to accepted norms and the improvement in the quality of argument for the justification of safe operation.
KM: I have learned a great deal about probabilistic methods, their technical pitfalls, and the psychological aspects that drive the way we approach risk management. This has led to fundamental changes in my thinking, and I am keen to generate a debate around these issues.
BK: As a Public Transport Authority, we have drastically increased the funding, resource and research into determining very specific risk profiles affecting those who use and interact with our network and how to best address them.
RF: We have evolved from a specific, organisational focused safety risk management methodology, to one that uses these to inform a thematic, holistic risk management approach. The aim being to maximise the use of limited CAA resource and increase collaborative effort across the regulator, industry, and international partners, on the recognised Key Risk Areas.
SC: In general terms, it has become more exacting, and more involved. I don’t think there has ever been a period where I have spent more time on risk management than now.
Q: What developments are going on in your industry which will change your approach in the future?
PS: There is a great deal of interest in making safety analysis and justification more appropriate and certainly operation driven. There is also a deal of interest in how the outcomes might be presented in a more effective manner and there is much work ongoing in developing a digital representation of the more traditional safety reports. The digital safety justification is coming.
KM: The changes relate to risk prediction and greater awareness of its limitations. ‘ALARP for Engineers’ encourages a more deterministic, systematic, and rigorous approach, and has generated much debate. It will be interesting to see where this ends up.
BK: The rapid progression of autonomous and semi-autonomous Advanced Driver Assistance Systems as well as the increasing prevalence and granularity of available telematics platforms are both areas we are looking to take advantage of.
RF: The rapidly changing landscape – in terms of environment, operations, and humans - including sustainability, growth, innovation, and other state objectives. The state and industry approaches to the pandemic, and the consequential fallouts we are seeing, have emphasised the need for more holistic and flexible approaches to how safety risk is identified and controlled – with many known risks becoming more or less likely as the situation changed. Increasingly we are going to see innovation driving new versions of known safety risks and challenging how they are controlled and how we gain assurance on that activity.
SC: One difficulty which is already appearing is that of new market entrants trying to move into the field of clean energy and renewable fuels – managing and educating some of these people in terms of safety and risk can be very time consuming.
Q: What will you be presenting at the ALARP seminar and how will this benefit participants?
PS: I have the pleasure of chairing the event again as Chair of the organising Working Group within the IMechE and I most look forward to sharing experience and understanding what other organisations are doing in the field and in establishing or recognising best practice.
KM: I will talk about ‘ALARP for Engineers’ and the key messages in that document. The lessons from my research could be quite challenging for some attendees, but they are guaranteed to be interesting!
BK: I will be presenting on the Transport for London Bus Vehicle Specification, specifically the Bus Safety Standard (BSS) within it. The BSS is a world leading specification for the introduction of safety features onto the buses being delivered into service in London, targeting the reduction and mitigation of Killed and Serious Injuries (KSIs) of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and bus passengers, which is now being adopted in other cities around the world. The presentation will cover the research, development and implementation process of the BSS, and may be of interest to participants who are interested in implementing a similar specification. It will highlight the benefits of using a robust evidence-based approach to mitigating risk, in order to ensure the buy in of relevant stakeholders and a successful benefits realisation.
RF: I will be presenting on how the CAA regulatory approach has changed, both due to the need to accommodate the changing environmental, operational, and human landscapes, and to maximise the benefit of regulatory activity to the consumer, the public, the industry, and the state.
SC: Hopefully our panel Q&As and discussions will be of benefit to the seminar.
Q: Which other speakers and presentations are you looking forward to hearing at the forthcoming seminar?
PS: I’m not allowed to have a favourite but this year I am looking forward to the panel discussions and actually being back in the room with a face-to-face event having hosted the last few virtually.
KM: I’m looking for surprises, so I can’t say who will deliver on that front. It’s a bit like risk prediction, you can’t predict what you don’t know!
BK: I am very interested to hear the presentations on hydrogen and human factors as both are very relevant topics in the current landscape.
SC: Any sessions that specifically mention fuel gases, especially hydrogen, are of great interest and relevance to me. The Human Factors aspects of ALARP are always interesting, too, and tend to throw up some challenges – I will be keenly interested to learn from other’s expertise.
Q: Why is it important for engineers and safety practitioners to come together and share best practice?
PS: The correct application and approach to the ALARP Principle is so important and no one industry sector has the complete picture. We can all learn from other applications of the same basic methodologies in order to learn and enrich our own analysis and assessments. The sharing of good and best practice and healthy challenge of historical norms is vital to the high hazard industries and those who work within them.
KM: We need to keep challenging our beliefs and attitudes, or we stagnate. Safety engineering is a relatively under-developed discipline, with huge potential for development, so we need to think more like scientists and always seek to improve our processes. We need inspiration from others who have pushed the limits and explored new ground to give ourselves the courage to do the same.
BK: If we exist in a silo or bubble, we can lose sight of where our strengths and weaknesses lie, therefore it is so important to share knowledge and experiences with as wide a pool of industries and contemporaries to ensure continuous improvement.
RF: There are almost always lessons that can be learned from the experiences of other regulators that can be brought to bear on other industries.
SC: The skillsets needed to appropriately manage risks are complex and broad – it is difficult to manage to ALARP principles (perhaps impossible) in a technical context without expertise from both the engineering and safety fields. It is feasible to cross-educate engineers and safety practitioners, but anything we can do to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas is undoubtedly a good thing.
The ALARP: Risk Management for Engineering seminar will be taking place on 28 February 2023 in Manchester, UK.
Join this in-person seminar to:
- Gain in-depth insights into ALARP methodologies employed in a range of safety-critical sectors – allowing the transfer of best practice
- Understand developments around the interpretation and application of ALARP
- Develop the knowledge and skills needed to successfully apply the ALARP principle to 21st century engineering challenges
- Mitigate and manage risks effectively to eliminate safety-critical events
- Reduce your exposure to regulatory and legal penalties by understanding expectations and meeting them fully
To book your place, please visit the event website.