Posted By Heather Aston
Sally

HSE usually breaks down its industry stats by type of industry - see http://www.hse.gov.uk/st...stics/industry/index.htm

Which documents have you seen that refer to the term "high risk" and we might be able to shed more light on it?

Heather

Posted By Heather Aston
Sally

I looked in the 2002/03 document. I can only see the phrase used twice - once in the sentence "the high-risk industries of construction and agriculture" where it's just being used to describe those two. Second under figure five - a graph showing the industries with the highest fatal accident rates, as derived from HSE statistics, where I take the phrase "the top ten high-risk industries" to mean as defined by the figures in that graph.

So I don't think the phrase defines any particular set of industries, it's just used in the report to describe ad-hoc groupings, in much the same way as you might call some of your processes "high risk processes" without it having any legal meaning.

Hope that helps

Heather

Posted By Ian Waldram
If the HSE realy do use the phrase in that context, then they are completely ignoring the important difference between hazard and risk. Safety Cases were invented for high HAZARD industries, as an extra societal safeguard to prevent 'just anyone' setting up such a business, as they can do for other sectors. The duty holder has to submit their initial Safety Case several months before they plan to begin operations, thus allowing the Regulator to satisfy themselves that suitable controls are in place to ensure the risks (= actual danger, often to the public as well as employees) from the Major Hazards (= potential danger) are acceptably low.

And of course the HSE data shows that the risks in Permissioning Regimes are indeed lower than several others where Safety Cases are not required - except in the very few years when there is a really dreadful failure, such as Piper Alpha (which of course occurred before a Safety Case was required, as did Flixbrough).

One reason why 'Revitalising' selected Agriculture, Contruction and Health Services as priory action areas is because the injury/illness records for these sectors are indeed much higher than UK average - so if there is to be national improvement as per the 2010 targets, it makes sense to put extra effort into those sectors which start well above the average. Another area where 'high risk' used to be used was in relation to the difference between OSH NVQ 3 and 4, where the former was said to be the right qualification for those in 'low risk' workplaces - when what they meant was 'low hazard'. Fortunately that silly distinction proved unsustainable, so OSH NVQ 3 disappeared.

I therefore suggest that, whatever HSE may do, 'High Risk' is used by IOSH members only in relation to outcomes, not potential.