The legal framework for taking decisions about risk

As we said above, 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’. However, other states have adopted different criteria for taking safety decisions, including duties to:

• ensure that overall risk on the railway is not increased; and

• ensure that the risk experienced by a regular railway passenger is a small fraction of the risk that they experience in the rest of their life. Moreover, to some degree or other, most legal frameworks rely on compliance with standards as a necessary, and in some cases sufficient, basis for controlling risk.

We expand on this in the next section. There are a few aspects of the guidance in this volume which are only relevant to people who have a legal obligation to reduce risk ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’. We have made this restriction clear in the sections concerned. We have retained this guidance because we believe that it will be of value to some of our readers. However, you should not take this to imply that this obligation applies to you, whether you are working in the UK or elsewhere. You will always need to establish the legal framework or frameworks which apply to you and then adapt the guidance in this book accordingly.

The approvals regime

We consider that, before something is done that might affect railway safety, such as bringing a new system into service or starting work on the operational railway, someone should review the evidence that risk has been controlled and take an explicit decision as to whether it has been controlled to an acceptable level or not. Sometimes this evidence will include the results of a professional review by someone independent of the work (see Chapter 13). In this book we refer to this decisionmaking process as Safety Approval and to anyone who takes such a decision as a Safety Approver. In some cases you may have to seek approval from someone outside your organisation such as a government agency, the organisation that manages the infrastructure or the organisation that operates the trains.

However, this is not necessarily the case: your organisation may approve its own work, in which case the Safety Approver or Approvers will be within your own organisation. It is possible that you will require approval from more than one party. Note that, if you do not require Safety Approval from outside your organisation, it does not follow that other parties cannot hold you to account later if you do not properly control risk. In some cases you may obtain approval for specific procedures that you use to carry out the work. In such cases the Safety Approver for the work may be an authorised and competent person, such as a supervisor, who will grant Safety Approval on the basis of evidence that the procedures have been correctly followed. You should find out who will act as Safety Approvers for your work, what they must approve, the basis on which they will grant approval, and the evidence that they will require.