Fork vs. Spoon

Section 83 of the Building Safety Act 2022 requires the accountable person for a Higher-risk Building (HRB) to assess the building safety risks. 

This is a ‘fork vs spoon’ debate. HAZID / Bow Tie are different, albeit overlapping tools, that have varying utility in different scenarios.

If you are dealing with a new system, or a major change to an existing system, then something like HAZID can be very useful to explore the unknowns. If you already have a good understanding of what can go wrong, then Bow Tie can be extremely useful in building on that by illustrating the pathways and, most importantly, understanding the nature of the barriers.

However, we’ve found that most organisations managing HRB safety cases prefer a tabular form of understanding of risk, so use a developed form of HAZID, which is very similar to a conventional risk register.

Thankfully in the soon to be released RiskFlag version 4.8, clients will be able to choose to use the current Bow Tie module or use the customised assessment tools to do HAZID.

In RiskFlag you can already generate tabular data automatically from your Bow Tie diagram, or answer questions like “where are all the places I use this barrier?”. So, you shouldn’t necessarily reject Bow Tie as an option, as the sometimes complicated graphic can be deconstructed into tabular data.

The HAZID tables and / or Bow Tie can then be automatically exported in the Safety Case Report on demand. Or use RiskFlag presentation mode to directly present to the Senior Leadership, there’s no need to waste time creating a power point.

So… HAZID and Bow Tie are different and complementary. HRB clients seem to prefer their risk data in tabular format, hence using a developed HAZID technique. RiskFlag clients already generate tabular data from their Bow Ties. Version 4.8 of RiskFlag to be released in coming weeks will allow you to choose between HAZID or Bow Tie.