Taking decisions about safety Engineering

Safety Management contributes to increased safety by supporting better decisions about the system being built or the work being done – decisions which decrease risk compared with the alternatives. If you are faced with a decision that involves risk, you will generally have to do four things: 1 Establish the facts on which you have to take a decision – what the hazards and risks are. 2 Establish and apply decision criteria to the facts and seek endorsement of your decisions from whoever will eventually approve the system or work. 3 Follow through on these decisions so that you can satisfy yourself and others that they have been fully carried out. 4 Seek approval before doing something that will affect risk on the railway such as starting work on the operating railway or bringing a new system into service.

Earlier versions of this book were aligned to:

• the UK legal framework for taking decisions about safety at the time: the duty to reduce risk ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’, recognising that this could sometimes be discharged by following good practice; and

• some aspects of the arrangements for approving work on UK railways. During the lifetime of this book, the UK legal framework and the arrangements for approving work have both changed and they may change again. Moreover, this book is now being used by people outside the UK. In order to provide the most useful and enduring guidance, we have now modified the volume so that it no longer assumes any particular legal framework or approvals regime. This means that, before you can use the guidance, you will have to establish:

• who will approve your work;

• what legal framework you are working within; and

• the role of standards in the legal framework and approval regimes.

When you have established these things, you will need to adapt the guidance to your specific situation. Our experience is that this guidance is applicable with limited and localised adaptation to a wide range of different legal frameworks and approvals regimes.