Outdoor Education Advisers' Panel

We believe that risk management should be about practical steps to protect people from real harm and suffering – not bureaucratic back covering

Principles of Sensible Risk Management

• Read the press release
• Statement by Bill Callaghan, Chair of the Health and Safety Commission
• Read and comment on the Principles of sensible risk management

We believe that risk management should be about practical steps to protect people from real harm and suffering – not bureaucratic back covering. If you believe some of the stories you hear, health and safety is all about stopping any activity that might possibly lead to harm. This is not our vision of sensible health and safety - we want to save lives, not stop them. Our approach is to seek a balance between the unachievable aim of absolute safety and the kind of poor management of risk that damages lives and the economy.

We have worked with a very wide range of organisations to identify some principles of sensible risk management that set out what we believe it should – and should not be about. We are intent on driving forward sensible risk management. We have already launched revised guidance on risk assessment to make clearer what is - and is not expected.

We would like your comments on the principles before we finalize them. Have we got them right? Have we missed something vital, or included something irrelevant? We would also like to hear your thoughts on actions to put sensible risk management into practice. What more should we be doing? What would you like to see others doing? What could you do?

Let us know your thoughts and we will use the to produce a definitive set of principles. Comments should reach us by 30th November 2006.