Effectively Managing the Case for Safety (ePub)

Andy Painting began his working career in the Royal Navy serving 23 years as a submariner. As a weapons engineer, his job involved tracing and rectifying faults with various components of submarines, as well as helping to design and test new and modified weapon systems. It was during one repair task, whilst hanging upside down trying to reach a valve that needed replacement, he began to wonder if the design of critical components could be improved. Endeavouring to find an answer, he took degrees in engineering and health and safety, which led to achieving a doctorate in 2015. The thesis for this doctorate was catastrophic failure in complex systems, which led to the creation of an administrative early warning system which can predict the early failure of virtually any type of engineering installation or system.

After the Navy, he became the Chief Engineer for Her Majesty's Naval Base at Portsmouth, where he was in charge of all the infrastructure supporting the Royal Navy's home dockyard. This included manoeuvring out of shipbuilding halls a component part of the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier. This brought the 600-year-old tradition of shipbuilding at Portsmouth to a close. In 2015, he left the dockyard to set up his own company providing engineering and health and safety advice to a range of clients including government, local authority, and military organizations. This advice is inherently based on an understanding of how to implement engineering solutions that reflect best practice with cost efficiency, balanced always with the safety of the end user in mind. He is a Fellow of the Safety and Reliability Society and a Chartered Engineer.

David England joined the civil service after leaving school, quickly learning administrative and management techniques as well as discovering a passion for the law. In the late 1980s he was involved in the supply and development of fibre optics which, at the time, was a nascent industry