Reasoning about safety management policy in everyday terms

This paper reports on a pilot study in citizen engagement which formed part of a broader stakeholder engagement and consultation programme addressing safety decision-making for UK rail industry activities. In addition to developing tools to support engagement initiatives, the study was concerned specifically with investigating everyday lay notions of what is a 'reasonable' basis for establishing safety. In view of the technical complexity of this issue, the exercise therefore presented an important methodological challenge: how to 'translate' specialised technical issues in such a way that lay citizens were able to grasp, and reason about, these issue in an informed and considered way. The engagement exercise worked well, in terms of its capacity to promote such a deliberative process, and in being 'user friendly' for participants. The results allow some provisional conclusions to be drawn regarding lay sensibilities concerning certain technical aspects of rail safety management, and how such sensibilities might be investigated by means of engagement exercises.