UK explains 'enabling regulation' approach

The UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has published a guide on how it can work with dutyholders to improve safety and security activity in the nuclear industry. The document, Holding to Account and Influencing Improvements – Enabling Regulation in Practice, features a number of case studies which place enabling regulation in the context of the legal and practical obligations on ONR and industry dutyholders.

The document does not represent formal policy or guidance, but instead is intended to provide helpful information to support better understanding, discussion and development, ONR said, adding that nothing in this approach alters the obligations on industry to comply with the law.

"Enabling regulation is a term we have been using increasingly over recent years. Put simply, it means that we will take a constructive approach with dutyholders and other relevant stakeholders to enable effective delivery against clear and prioritised safety and security outcomes," Chief Nuclear Inspector Mark Foy says in the introduction to the guide. "We can adopt enabling approaches most readily where the dutyholder is compliant with the law. Enabling is not new for ONR and there are many examples of how an enabling approach has been successful in the past."

The report outlines five priorities for 'enabling regulation'. First, agreeing strategic safety and security priorities with dutyholders, at an ONR Division level, taking cognisance of dutyholders’ strategic business context. Second, being constructive in the resolution of agreed safety and nuclear security priorities. Third, efficient, proportionate and consistent approaches to safety and nuclear security - without compromise of intent to achieve the required safety performance. Fourth, maintaining public trust by targeted, transparent, risk-informed oversight of safety and nuclear security, and using its legal powers appropriately in the public interest. Fifth, actively promoting the mature self-regulation of day-to-day safety and nuclear security by dutyholders.

"To apply a consistent enabling approach, both industry and ONR recognise the behavioural attributes that support or possibly detract from effective delivery of safe and secure outcomes," it says in the report and then lists examples of effective and ineffective enabling behaviours and ways of working.

One example of effective behaviour, it says, is to establish strategic, long-term, risk-based priorities and ensure these are well founded and properly understood within the wider business context.

One of the case studies the report describes is the Sellafield G6 approach to achieving hazard and risk reduction.

"At Sellafield, we identified that an enabling regulatory approach could enable Sellafield Ltd to accelerate hazard and risk reduction for the site's legacy facilities," the report says. "ONR was one of a number of stakeholders that had, in the past, adversely affected the delivery of projects designed to reduce risk on the site due to the perception of a drive for 'gold plating' of engineered solutions and safety case submissions.

"Historically, in response to events and regulatory findings, the site and ONR had become too bureaucratic, and at times, overly conservative and risk-averse. Although all stakeholders stated individually that risk and hazard reduction was the number one priority for their organisation, this wasn't always evident from the actions or approaches taken.

"Senior representatives of the key stakeholder organisations (termed the G6) were invited to discuss 'What is getting in the way of progress at Sellafield?' Together, we identified a common goal and the barriers to achieving accelerated risk and hazard reduction. All organisations committed to consider how they could challenge the barriers identified and where appropriate, each other.

"Tangible risk and hazard reduction has begun at several of the legacy facilities, while in others, the group has significantly accelerated work programmes, in some cases by decades."

The 'G6 approach' has become a trademark used to promote and encourage innovative thinking, ONR said. This enabling regulatory approach was recognised as a 'good practice' in the International Atomic Energy Agency's review meeting for the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management in 2015, it added.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News