Oversight and Influencing of Licensee Leadership and Management for Safety, Including Safety Culture - Regulatory Approaches and Methods. Proceedings of an NEA/IAEA Workshop, Chester, United Kingdom, 26-28 September 2011

Both regulators and the nuclear industry recognise the need for licensees to develop a strong, positive safety culture to support successful and sustainable nuclear safety performance. A number of reports have been issued by the IAEA and the NEA on the role of the regulator in relation to oversight of safety culture (References 1 to 5). There has been less clarity on how this should be achieved - in particular, with regard to strategies and practical approaches for maintaining oversight of, and influencing, those facets of licensee leadership and management which have a profound influence on safety culture. In recognition of this, the CSNI Working Group on Human and Organisational Factors (WGHOF), together with the CNRA Working Group on Inspection Practices (WGIP) and the IAEA, organised a workshop in Chester, United Kingdom, in May 2007 to provide a forum for gathering and sharing international experience, including good practices and learning points. The results of the workshop are reported in Reference 6. Workshop participants agreed that, in view of the rapidly developing approaches in this area, it would be sensible to hold a further workshop ('Chester 2') in 3-5 years in order to discuss how regulatory approaches have moved on and to share lessons learned from their application. In 2010, the WGIP hosted a workshop which included regulatory approaches for the assessment of licensee safety culture as a discussion topic. The outputs of the workshop included a list of commendable practices for monitoring and evaluating licensee safety culture (Reference 7). The 'Chester 2' workshop took place in September 2011. This report sets out the findings of the workshop, organised by the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) on behalf of the CSNI/WGHOF and the IAEA. The workshop was attended by over 40 representatives of nuclear regulatory bodies and licensees from 15 countries plus IAEA and NEA. The workshop featured keynote papers on learning from major events, and from the inquiry into the Nimrod air crash. There were also presentations by regulatory bodies on developments in their approaches to oversight of leadership and management for safety/safety culture (LMfS/SC) since the previous workshop, and by industry representatives on perceptions of regulatory approaches. The workshop programme also included structured discussion sessions, in which a set of issues were explored by small groups and then discussed in a plenary session. A pre-workshop survey of participating regulatory bodies was also conducted to obtain information on current approaches and areas for discussion. The discussions during the workshop and results of the pre-workshop survey confirmed that most regulators have further developed their approaches to LMfS/SC oversight since Chester. Key developments include: - Use of a structured framework for LMfS/SC interventions is now common. - Training for regulatory staff in LMfS/SC and intervention strategies/approaches is more prevalent. - There is increasing dialogue on LMfS/SC between regulators and licensees. - There is widespread recognition of the need to use multiple data sources and processes to build a meaningful picture of strengths and areas for improvement. - Increasing engagement is taking place at corporate levels of the licensee organisation, recognising the importance of focusing on key decision makers