In high-hazard industries leadership plays a pivotal role in ensuring safety. Recognising this, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) launched the Leading from the Top programme in 2010, an initiative aimed at embedding process safety as a core organisational value driven by senior leaders.
Leading from the top
This programme underscored a powerful truth: safety starts at the top. Leaders who actively champion safety culture can profoundly influence organisational behaviour, bridging gaps in communication, accountability, and engagement.
For years, process safety was often seen as the domain of engineers or operational teams. However, Leading from the Top flipped this narrative, highlighting that leadership commitment is essential to drive systemic improvements. By taking ownership of safety, senior leaders can:
- Set the tone for organisational values and priorities.
- Create a culture where employees feel empowered to report risks and suggest improvements.
- Ensure process safety becomes an integral part of strategic decisions, not just a compliance checkbox.
Process safety is more than technical systems—it’s about people, culture, and shared responsibility. Without visible and engaged leadership, even the best-designed safety systems can fall short. When senior leaders actively prioritise safety:
- Incident rates drop.
- Employees are more engaged in risk management.
- Organisations move from reactive compliance to proactive safety innovation.
So has it worked?
Despite the work done over a decade or more, a recent look at the number of enforcement notices issued by the HSE under COMAH shows a three-fold rise over the last 3 years. When the detail of these notices is considered, they show that weak risk assessment practices predominate.
Risk assessment is a cornerstone for good process safety management as it identifies potential hazards, evaluates risks, and importantly, informs controls to prevent incidents.
Poor risk assessment will naturally lead to poor practices and procedures, if the attendant hazards and risks have not been properly understood. Equally, for asset integrity management – essential for maintaining containment – if employees don’t understand which items of plant and equipment are critical to safe operation and why, they may miss essential inspection, testing and preventative maintenance activities.
What can be done?
When considering risk assessment, operators might ask themselves these 5 simple questions:
- Is there a written policy or procedure governing hazard identification and risk assessment and does it address all loss types?
- Does the procedure specify the type of hazard identification and risk assessment to be used at each stage of the life cycle?
- Are qualified leaders that have been trained in risk analysis techniques used for each type of study?
- Is there a formal process for notifying management of the risks identified and the measures recommended to reduce the risks?
- Are risk control measures clearly defined, documented, and consistently maintained through regular review, inspection, testing, and appropriate maintenance?
The way forward
The Leading from the Top programme laid the foundation for a leadership-driven approach to process safety, but the journey continues. As enforcement actions have highlighted, there are ongoing challenges and organisations must recommit to robust risk assessment practices, proactive leadership, and continuous improvement.
Posing critical questions enables businesses to reflect on what they have in place and why, pinpoint weaknesses, and collaborate with stakeholders to improve practices, enhance compliance, and build a positive culture. It ensures resources are utilised effectively, minimises incidents, and integrates safety into strategic objectives.
The overriding objective is to leverage process safety as a driver of operational excellence and sustainable growth, by ensuring the protection of people, assets, and the environment.
OpenPSM includes a comprehensive set of over 840 pre-loaded questions, designed to help businesses assess their practices and procedures against best practice guidelines and evaluate their position within an established maturity model.
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