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Expert has been Professor of Risk Management since 1997 and Director of their Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management. Previously he was Director of the Centre for Environmental & Risk Management from 1992 until 1997. He is a qualified scientist (B.Sc. 1965 and D.Phil. 1969) and has worked on a very wide range of risk and safety issues since 1974, ranging from consumer safety, to transport, flooding, occupational, leisure and environmental safety. Much of this work is now in the form of published reports and papers of which there are over two hundred.

He has acted as a consultant for most government departments and safety regulators, and for several international agencies and the private sector on safety issues. These include the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), the Department of Health, DEFRA, the European Consumer Safety Association (ECOSA), the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1995/96 he served on an HM Treasury committee reviewing the setting of safety standards in Britain. He has been personally appointed by several UK Secretaries of State to lead risk assessment projects of national significance or participate on independent national advisory committees. A few years ago he completed a major project for the Consumer Safety Unit of the then Department of Trade and Industry on methods of gauging the appropriateness of safety measures to protect consumers. Recently, in 2008-9, he co-authored four reports for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (now BIS) on risks to the public, and two for the Department of Children, Families and Schools, and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, also on risks to the public (children in that case) resulting from non-work activities. In 2006 he wrote a book ‘Environmental health policy’ at the request of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

One area of work he has been professionally associated with for over 20 years, from a risk perspective, is outdoor sport and leisure activities. His research on this includes children's play, the safety of a wide range of popular sports including conventional sports like football, adventure sports, and countryside activities more generally.

However, his main interest and expertise is in the application of risk assessment techniques and risk management principles to essentially any kind of hazard, using a multi-disciplinary perspective grounded in science, economics, psychology, sociology, communication, and legal principles.

Expert is a Chartered Fellow of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IoSH). This is the highest grade of membership in the leading professional agency of its kind in the UK and possibly Europe. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He established and teaches a postgraduate level course at Middlesex University on Risk Management at Masters and Doctoral level.

As an off-shoot his primary work in risk assessment and risk management (decision making), Expert has had two decades of experience of health and safety law in the UK through dealing with a wide variety of liability cases, many involving personal injury and some the environment. He produces post-event expert analyses for consideration by the legal process including the courts and quite often presents evidence in court.

His work has in particular identified the importance of trade-offs between the benefits of public sector activities and the risks associated with them, such that risk minimisation is not normally the objective. He is an expert on the interpretation of the international concept of 'reasonable practicability.'


Adviser to major UK land owners under the auspices of the National Tree Safety Group regarding the conflict between the risk posed by trees and their benefitsAdviser/consultant to the UK Play Safety Forum for a decade on child safety issuesConsultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency on the risks posed by different means of electricity productionConsultant to the European Consumer Safety Association on the economic valuation of injuryConsultant to barristers on the viability of legal claims and counterclaims.