Sep 06

John Stuart Mill and the cream-buns theory of liberty

Britain’s Liberal Democrat History Group provoked a mid-summer controversy with its search for the greatest British Liberal of all time. Its short list, to be voted on at the party’s annual conference in September, consisted of William Ewart Gladstone, David Lloyd George, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. The front runner for most of the summer has been Mill. Roy Hattersley disputed Mill’s pre-eminence in an article in the Guardian . His article persuaded me that Mill did indeed deserve to win the competition. Below my reply to the Guardian in which I conclude that Mill’s policies on seat belts and drugs are ones with which I would have agreed.

John Stuart Mill and the cream-bun theory of liberty
Saturday August 11, 2007

Roy Hattersley (Liberty is not what it was, 6 August ) argues that Gladstone, not John Stuart Mill, was the most important Liberal in British history. He quotes Mill’s famous dictum – “all errors which [a citizen] is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good” – and proclaims it out of date. He could not have chosen two better examples, compulsory seat belts and the prohibition of recreational drugs, to make the case for Mill…
Full letter here [PDF]
More on drugs here>

Mar 19

“Ensure you can see where you are putting your feet before walking”: Governance and Compliance

Keynote address to OpRisk Europe Conference, 21 March, London:

  • All risk is subjective. Risk is a word that refers to the future, and that exists only in the imagination.
  • Risk management involves speculating about this future, about things that could go wrong, and about ways of preventing them.
  • In recent years, in the public sector and throughout the worlds of commerce and industry there has been an explosion in the numbers of risk assessments undertaken and a remarkable increase in the thoroughness and comprehensiveness that they attempt.

View full PowerPoint notes presentation

Feb 22

Risk and Freedom: the record of road safety regulation: by yours truly

Now on sale. Ive discovered a box with 20 copies, which I am offering through Amazon.co.uk at the original 1985 price of £10.

I reproduce the sole Amazon review (*****) below.

Risk and Freedom is a book of historic significance. Published in 1985 and out of print for many years it continues to have a profound influence on road safety policy. It provides the first coherent application of the concept of “risk compensation” to the management of risk on the road. Risk compensation is a term coined by Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde in the 1970s to describe the behavioural adjustments of people to perceived changes in safety or danger. In Risk and Freedom Adams applies the idea to a wide variety of road safety measures – seat belts, helmets, speed limits, alcohol limits, highway improvements, crumple zones and other crash protection measures, improved brakes and tires, and accident blackspot treatments, to name the main ones.

The idea that risk compensation could explain the failure of such measures to achieve their promised benefits was, at the time, unanimously dismissed out of hand by highway engineers, vehicle designers, and regulators. Today it is widely accepted as mere common sense, and serves as the basis for the new, and increasingly popular, shared space schemes. The most obvious explanation for the success of these schemes is Adams’ argument that road users are not obedient automatons, but alert and responsive participants in what Adams calls in his last book, Risk, “the dance of the risk thermostats”. Also, unlike most books on this subject it is well-written and entertaining.

Feb 14

Road pricing not the answer

Letter to the Guardian published 14 February, 2007
Published version at http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2012301,00.html
Sir

When Labour came to power 10 years ago John Prescott proclaimed I will have failed if in five years time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. Its a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.

He has failed. Since that proclamation the nations motor vehicle population has increased by 7.5 million. At parking meter distances (264 cars per mile parked nose to tail) these extra vehicles could be accommodated in a new car park stretching from London to Edinburgh 85 lanes wide. The owners of these extra vehicles expect not just somewhere to park at home but also the ends of their journeys, and roads on which to get there. Huge amounts of space are required to meet these expectations.

Congestion pricing is not the answer. It is symptom treatment that will make the problem worse. It will simply disperse the problem into those parts of the country currently least congested. It will encourage yet more sprawl and low-density, car-dependent land use patterns, hostile to pedestrians and cyclists and unserviceable by public transport.

The on-street car park in older urban areas has been full for some time. Overwhelmingly the extra cars added to the nations car population each year must find parking spaces out of town. Their new owners are choosing to live in areas where they have no choice but to depend on their cars.

You note (The Price of Pricing, 12 February) that motoring is now cheaper than it was 25 years ago. To discourage sprawl and increasing dependence on the car motoring costs should be increased most in the areas where the growth is fastest the opposite of the congestion charging currently proposed.

An extended version of the argument can be found in Darling, meet the 800 pound gorilla!  and Hypermobility: too much of a good thing

Jan 18

Complexity & Uncertainty in a Risk Averse Society

Summary of presentation to Omega Centre Conference on Planning and decision-making amidst complexity, risk and uncertainty, Royal Institute of British Architects, London, 22 January 2007.

The Omega Centre project aims to contribute to the advancement of the art and science of planning, appraising and evaluating the impacts of mega land-based transport projects in major urban and metropolitan regions of the Developed World. A key assumption of the project is that many of the poorly-understood impacts of such projects are characterized by complexity, risk and uncertainty. My presentation seeks to make connections between these themes and fields outside the transport sector where they are routinely encountered.

Read the full summary – download PDF.

Jan 04

Seat belt legislation and the Isles Report

In most countries arguments about seat belt legislation are dead. But it remains a live issue in the United States where such laws are a matter for individual states. As a consequence there exists in the United States a variety of laws and levels of enforcement, and considerable debate about their effectiveness and moral legitimacy.

A recent article on the subject in Time Magazine (The Hidden Danger of Seat Belts, 30 November 2006) cited research of mine done many years ago that concluded that seat belt laws had been ineffective in all jurisdictions that had implemented them. It provoked a number of hits on my blog and inquiring emails hence this blog which attempts to answer some of them.

Why, if I was right, did so few people know that seat belt laws were ineffective? And why had so many legislators ignored this evidence?

Before Britains seat belt law was passed there had been eight debates in Parliament about it over the previous ten years. The main debate that resulted in the passing of Britains law was held on 28 July 1981. In this debate, a research report of mine, published earlier in the year, was much discussed, and much derided. It had a few eloquent libertarian supporters who liked its conclusions, but they were outnumbered by paternalistic health and safety enthusiasts who didnt. Most of the parliamentarians queuing up to praise me or denounce me appeared not to have read my report only my conclusions, which they liked or disliked. All of those who praised me, and my denouncers, were already established opponents or supporters of a seat belt law no minds were changed by my evidence.

However within the Department of Transport, the promoters of the seat belt bill, my study had raised concerns. The Department commissioned a critique of my report by J E Isles. His report examined evidence from eight European countries (a subset of the 18 examined in my report) that had passed seat belt laws. He concluded that a law making the wearing of seat belts compulsory has not led to a detectable change in road death rates. For promoters of the bill this was an inconvenient truth. The Isles report was dated April 1981, more than three months before the parliamentary debate that led to the passage of the legislation. But it was suppressed. It was not published, and was not allowed to inform that debate. The Isles Report did not see the light of day until its existence was disclosed by New Scientist in an article published on 7 February 1985 more than three years too late.

In the 1981 Parliamentary debate opponents of the law described my report variously as bogus, riddled with inaccuracies, eccentric, preposterous, spurious, and wrong. One supporter of the law (Austin Mitchell MP) described my report as the only one that the hon. and learned Gentleman [Ivan Lawrence MP] can dredge up. The Secretary of State for Transport in his contribution to the debate described my risk compensation hypothesis as dubious and not proven, but made no mention of his own departments study whose conclusions supported mine. And my principal champion (Ivan Lawrence) described my findings as astonishing and unexpected. Such, at the time was the response to explanations of road accident statistics that invoked the risk compensation hypothesis.

A year later, too late for the parliamentary debate, I was invited to present my report to a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Detroit. It subsequently achieved peer-review status and was published as an SAE publication. To date, 25 years later, I am aware of no critique that has refuted its evidence, or conclusion no country that has passed a seat belt law can demonstrate that it has saved lives. And risk compensation – is now widely accepted, and at the time of posting this blog registered 93,000 Google hits.

Since interest in the subject has revived, at least in the United States, and for historians of the role of statistical skulduggery in the formation of policy, I have scanned my scribbled-over copy of the Isles Report and put it on my website as a PDF file.

Dec 16

Britain’s seat belt law should be repealed

The BBCs Today Programme is running a competition called Christmas Repeal in which listeners are invited to nominate an existing law that should be repealed.

I nominate Britains seat belt law.

[Update 23 December. Despite my high hopes and much encouragement, my Immodest Proposal did not succeed. It did not pass through the Today Programmes editorial filter. It did not make it on to the long list from which the programmes panel of experts was asked to choose a short list of six to be put to the vote of the listeners. It would appear that the myth of the efficacy of seat belt legislation is so deeply entrenched that it is not considered a fit subject for discussion in sensible company.]

First, despite what many people believe, it hasnt worked. There is no country in the world that has passed a seat belt law that can demonstrate that it has saved lives. The reason is risk compensation; people compensate for perceived changes in the risks they face. Trapeze artists with safety nets, rock climbers with ropes, cricketers with pads and helmets all take risks that they would not take without their safety equipment. Motorists with seat belts, the road accident statistics tell us, do likewise.

Second, it is unfair. In modifying their behaviour in response to their increased sense of security, belted motorists drive in a way that puts others at greater risk. The law redistributes the burden of risk from those already best protected, in cars, to those who are most vulnerable, on foot or bicycle. Following the introduction of the law in Britain, as in most other countries, the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists who were killed increased.

Third, it has set a dangerous, liberty-threatening precedent. In criminalizing self-risk it has established a principle that licenses the state to proscribe any thing or activity of which it might disapprove because its not good for you from rock-climbing, to drinking and smoking, to eating too many cream buns.

Its a bad law. It hasnt worked. Its unfair. Its based on a dangerous principle. It should be repealed.

..
Evidence
An article supporting this nomination (pdf) has been accepted for publication by Significance, a journal of the Royal Statistical Society to be published in March 2007.

At the time most belt laws were passed the concept of risk compensation was either unknown or simply dismissed. The fashion at the time was to seek engineering solutions to road safety problems. The phenomenon is now widely accepted except, by some, in the case of seat belt laws.

Below are links presenting evidence in support of the repeal of Britains seat belt law:
The Hidden Danger of Seat Belts, Time Magazine, 30 November 2006.
The Efficacy of Seat Belt Legislation (pdf) Society of Automotive Engineers, 1982.
The Failure of Seat Belt Legislation (pdf).

Still sceptical judges and listeners are invited to visit www.John-Adams.co.uk, or to Google seat belts + John Adams for numerous other contributions to the debate

Oct 29

Prudence goes off-shore

Following an email encounter with someone involved with risk management in the Norwegian off-shore oil and gas industry, I have put on my website a paper, Prudence and the Gambler, published in 1991 by Shell World a Shell Oil company publication.

My article was followed, in the same issue, by a First Reaction from Koos Visser, Head of Health, Safety and Environment of Shell International. The editor explained It is perhaps unusual for a magazine to receive a letter before publication of the piece upon which the correspondent wishes to comment. Apparently a proof copy of my article had been pre-circulated to Shells Health and Safety people, and my argument was contrary to company policy sufficiently contrary to merit a simultaneous rebuttal.

My excuse for resurrecting this old paper is that the argument appears to have made no progress in the intervening 15 years.

My paper called attention to the problem that dangerous working environments nowadays called safety critical tend to attract risk-taking personalities. In earlier times such men were romanticised as 49ers, rough-necks and Dangerous Dans.

Visser, on behalf of Shell Health and Safety, proffered two responses:
¢ He suggested that we ought to distinguish between individual and group attitudes to risk Adams is talking about personal, not group, motivation. But what if a group consists of a collection of Dangerous Dans? The official answer is that organizational culture, training and concern for others can instil the self discipline to reject risk at work. Perhaps.

¢ He argued whatever the truth of Adams thesis it can never serve as the basis of company policy: The aim of avoiding all accidents is far from being a public relations puff. It is the only responsible policy. Turning ˜gambling man into ˜zero-risk man is just one of the challenges that has to be overcome along the way.

Whatever the truth a frequently encountered, hand-waving, dismissal of an awkward argument. The truth is that the determined pursuit of an extreme (zero-risk) version of the precautionary principle would bankrupt any imaginative government or entrepreneur.

Visser defines zero risk man as one who manages and controls risk. Here he reveals his, and Shells, failure to comprehend risk. To take a risk is to do something that carries with it a probability of an adverse outcome zero risk is an oxymoron.

The challenge that the Norwegian off-shore industry shares with other safety-critical industries is what to do about low-frequency high-impact risks they dont happen often, but when they do they are catastrophic. Like airlines, chemical plants and the nuclear industry it has difficulty insulating its workers from its zero risk propaganda. Established safety procedures are supposed to ensure that accidents cannot happen, and indeed they rarely do. A common result is that safety routines are not taken seriously, and gone through in a perfunctory manner. Why stay vigilant for the whole of your working life for something that is never supposed to happen?

For more on this theme click on In defence of bad luck.

Oct 28

When are we getting a new Mental Health Act?

This question is posed in the title of a symposium to which I have been invited to contribute (organised by Cygnet Health Care London, 30 November 2006). It is also highly relevant to a staff seminar I have been invited to give at Grendon Prison on 17 November.

A succinct summary of the contentious history behind the question is provided by the Royal College of Psychiatrists website:

The Government announced its intention to reform the Mental Health Act (1983) in September 1998. Since then, there has been a Green Paper, a White Paper and a Draft Bill; the Government published a revised Draft Bill in September 2004. Parliament then established a twenty-four-member Scrutiny Committee of Peers and MPs to report on the proposals. In March 2006 the Government abandoned its plans to pursue a new Act and instead decided to amend the 1983 Act. A Bill to amend the old Act is expected this year.

The political impetus behind the Governments proclaimed intention to produce a new act or amend the old one is provided by the sensational media coverage of a few extremely rare events. The single event widely held responsible for the Governments proclaimed determination in 1998 to reform the 1983 Act was the murder committed by Michael Stone in 1996 of Lin and Megan Russell. Stone, with the benefit of psychiatric hindsight, was apparently a known time-bomb waiting to explode. Why had he been left at liberty to commit his horrific crimes?

And why, ten years after the murders and eight years after the Governments declaration of its intention to change the law so that such things could never happen again, has nothing happened?

The answer can be found in paragraph 10 of the Governments response to the report of the Scrutiny Committee (PDF). The Government protests that the report misunderstands its intentions:

First of all, the report says that the legislation should be about improving services. The Bill is not about service provision. It is about the legal processes for bringing people under compulsion.

Amongst the improved services that the Scrutiny Committee considered central to a reformed Mental Health Act was protection of the civil liberties of those with mental problems. For the past eight years it has proved impossible to gain agreement about the balance to be struck between the threat to the public of dangerous psychopaths roaming free, and the threat to those with mental disorders of a law that would permit the detention of innocent people on suspicion that they might commit a crime.

This is a debate that I ventured into in a 2002 essay Risk and the impact of psychiatric disorder on the environment [PDF]. Has there been any progress in the four years since?

Oct 09

HSE sick and tired – and likely to remain so

On 22 August 2006 Bill Callaghan, Chair of Britains Health and Safety Commission (HSC overseer of the HSE, the Health and Safety Executive) issued a press release entitled: Get a life, says HSC. He announced: Im sick and tired of hearing that ˜health and safety is stopping people doing worthwhile and enjoyable things when at the same time others are suffering real harm and even death as a result of mismanagement at work. He urged people to focus on real risks those that cause real harm and suffering and stop concentrating effort on trivial risks and petty health and safety.

On 28 September Geoffrey Podger, Chief Executive of the HSE, returned to the attack in a letter to The Times (letter Sept 28) . Like his boss he decried the nations inability to distinguish the real from the trivial. The HSE he said was focused on risks that killed people: we make no apology for that.

Stung by ridicule in the popular press attaching to cancelled school trips and bureaucratic concerns about hanging flower baskets, conkers and homemade cakes at village fetes, the nations risk manager has launched a public relations campaign in support of sensible risk management. Henceforth trivial risks should be ignored; effort should be concentrated on real risks.

The HSE provides some numerical guidance to what it means by trivial; it defines a risk of death of less than one in a million per year as tolerable, and insignificant and adequately controlled.

The risk of dying as a result of an accident involving a tree (see Dangerous Trees) is about one in 10,000,000 per year, surely tolerably trivial. And yet, after an accident on New Years Day 2005 in which someone was killed by a tree that blew down in a storm, the police took until July 2006 to announce that they had decided not to prosecute the owner of the tree, and the HSE is still investigating and may yet prosecute. Why? It was an accident that caused, in the words of Mr Callaghan and Mr Podger, real harm and suffering.

The reason why the HSEs distinction between the real and the trivial is unhelpful is that it is applied after the event. With the help of a vivid imagination almost anything conkers, hanging flower baskets, door mats, home-made cakes at village fetes can have the potential to cause serious harm, and invite the protracted, anxiety-generating, attentions of the police and the HSE.

Risk is a word that refers to some adverse event that might happen in the future. It exists only in the imagination. But should that event occur, however unlikely it was imagined to be, litigious hindsight can usually transform the accident into a case of culpable negligence.

Unless and until the HSE demonstrates, after the event, an ability to recognise genuine accidents when it sees them, it will continue to be a cause of the excessive risk aversion that it decries.