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ALARP stands for “as low as reasonably practicable“, and is a term often used in
health and safety to represent that adequate consideration shall be taken in regard to
risk, risk control and risk reduction. The core is the concept of “reasonably
practicable”; this involves weighing a risk against the trouble, time and money needed
to control it. Thus, ALARP describes the level to which you would expect to see
workplace risk controlled. ALARP is not prescriptive and consequently can be
challenging because it requires employers to exercise judgement. It is therefore for
employers to ensure that their chosen design or design concept reduce risks “as low as
reasonably practicable”.
The “ALARP region” lies between unacceptably high and negligible risk levels. Even if a
level of risk for a “baseline case” has been judged to be in this ALARP region it is still
necessary to consider introducing further risk reduction measures to drive the
remaining, or “residual”, risk downwards.
The ALARP level is reached when the time, trouble and cost of further reduction
measures become unreasonably disproportionate to the additional risk reduction
obtained.
Factors
In this context, a risk is the combination of the frequency and the consequence of a
specified hazardous event. The following factors are likely to be considered when
deciding whether or not a risk is tolerable.
Another factor that comes into the ALARP principle, is the cost of assessing the
improvement gained in an attempted risk reduction. In extremely complex systems, this
can be very high, and could be the limiting factor in the practicability of risk reduction.
Determining that a risk has been reduced to ALARP involves an assessment of the risk
to be avoided, of the sacrifice (in money, time and trouble) involved in taking measures
to avoid that risk, and a comparison of the two. This is a cost-benefit analysis. (Text
Source: en.wikipedia)