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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    e Arange between the upper and lower bounds in which risks are regarded as being “tolerable” provided that they have been reduced to levels that are “as low as reasonably practicable” (ALARP)”. In applying this so-called ALARP criterion, the HSE employs the concept of “gross disproportion”. This concept originated in a 1949 Court of Appeal decision which concluded that: ““Reasonably practicable’ is a narrower term than ‘physically possible’ and seems to me to imply that a computation must be made by the owner, in which the quantum of risk is placed on one scale and the sacrifice involved in the measures necessary for averting the risk (whether in money, time or trouble) is placed on the other; and that if it be shown that there is a gross disproportion between them—the risk being insignificant in relation to the sacrifice—the Defendants discharge the onus on them””®. In addition, the issue of reasonable practicability was considered by the House of Lords in a 1954 case, the head-note of which states: “The test of what is (reasonably practicable) is not simply what is practicable as a matter of engineering, but depends on the consideration, in the light of the whole circumstances at the time of the accident, whether the time, trouble and expense of the precautions suggested are or are not disproportionate to the risk involved, and also an assessment of the degree of security which the measures may be expected to afford””’’. We should note that while the first of these legal judgments refers to “gross disproportion” the second requires only that costs should not be “disproportionate” to the risk reduction concerned. Nonetheless, the HSE has continued to refer to gross disproportion. Not surprisingly, this has led to considerable confusion as to what precisely is meant by the term “gross disproportion”. Thus, while it seems reasonable to interpret the requirement that costs should not be disproportionate to benefits as entailing that the former should not exceed the latter (as required by the standard cost-benefit analysis criterion), the question of what “gross disproportion” means is decidedly ambiguous. More specifically, the HSE notes that: “The process of determining whether a benefit is sufficient to justify a cost depends on a judgement as to what constitutes ‘gross disproportion’. This in turn depends on the prior level of risk. Where this is above the ‘broadly acceptable level’, ‘gross disproportion’ essentially takes the form of a multiplier applied to the value of the health and safety benefits and increasing with the