Challenging Safety Regulation – a Wake-up Call

In presenting a framework for tackling these issues, the paper examines current safety practices. In particular it challenges, from a theoretical perspective, and by reference to recent research, two common misconceptions that safety is largely a matter of equipment reliability and that process-based assurance can provide adequate evidence of system safety. It argues that failure to address these two weaknesses can lead to, wasted effort, inadequate safety assurance and, at worst, unsafe systems.