Indicators for Assessing the Quantitative Effects of External Safety Policy

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The fireworks disaster at the Dutch city of Enschede in the year 2000 has stimulated activities in the area of external safety at the national, regional and local level in the Netherlands. New legislation was developed, and adequately implementing this new legislation as well as increasing the quality of carrying out existing legislation became an important issue. This concerned in particular the provinces and municipalities, being the competent authorities for environmental regulation, and also the so-called safety regions as the competent authorities for disaster and fire brigade regulation. In order to facilitate the necessary activities at the regional and local level, the national government has provided the provinces with substantial resources since 2004, which were to be spent through provincial programs and distributed over all parties involved on the basis of well-defined projects. Over the years, indicators have been developed for assessing the effectiveness of these programs at regional and local level (IPO, 2009). The indicators in question, however, are focused primarily on the processes of implementing legislation, as opposed to being focused on actual safety. Although there were some parallel activities which concentrated on actual safety, by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) for the Ministry of the Environment and by a number of individual provinces for their own purposes, a structured and nationally agreed-upon set of indicators for assessing the quantitative effects of external safety policy was lacking. The RIVM was willing to coordinate a joint effort in order to develop such a set of indicators, but was faced with a lack of sufficient resources to actually carry it out. Subsequently, the Interprovincial working group on external safety took initiative and established a small project team for addressing this task. The paper discusses the development process and describes its results. It starts with summarizing Dutch external safety policy (section 1). The process of developing a structured set of indicators is discussed in section 2. Next, section 3 presents a summary description of the resulting set of indicators (version 1), after which some indicative calculations, which were performed by way of example, are presented in section 4. Concluding remarks are given in section 5.