Risk assessment: subjective or objective?

Identified are many common problems/misunderstandings that engineers involved in risk assessment have raised in dealing with the concepts of risk assessment (RA, as defined in the management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992). In particular concerns, reservations and confusion about the use of subjective risk estimation and the development of procedures for risk estimation appear to be causing undue difficulties in dealing with the regulations. This article suggests that risk estimation by itself has, in fact, little direct value to safety improvement and that a more tentative approach to RA can be formulated wherein risk estimation becomes an occasional rather than pivotal element of the risk assessment process.