ABSTRACT
National laws are often created as a result of some situation or occurrence that is deemed, or has become, societally unacceptable. In the UK, the situation is slightly different in that there has been a predominance of common law for almost 1000 years. Much of this common law has, since the assertion of Parliament during the Industrial Revolution as a single source of new law, become formalized as statute law. With one great exception then, safety-related law is almost always reactionary: post-event; reactive. In 2014 for his PhD thesis, Dr Andy Painting chose to study ten catastrophic events in such industries as oil, gas, nuclear, rail, air, and space exploration. His intention was to find common linkages in the causality of the events and, by doing so, examine if it was at all possible to predict failures that lead to substantial harmful outcomes.
