Competent Authority procedures and delivery guides

General guidance for COMAH establishment operators

These guides have been produced with Industry to provide general information for COMAH establishment operators.

Understanding COMAH: A guide for new entrants
This guidance is aimed at businesses that are considering expanding their operations and may consequently become subject to COMAH as:
- new lower-tier COMAH establishments, or
- new upper-tier COMAH establishments (including lower-tier establishments that become upper-tier)
Understanding COMAH: What to expect from the Competent Authority - A guide for COMAH operators
This document aims to:
- describe the basic arrangements for the COMAH competent authority's (CA's) regulatory activities;
- clear describe what activities CA regulators recover the costs for.
COMAH Intervention Managers – User Manual
This is for CA inspectors who are COMAH Intervention Managers (CIMs) and COMAH establishment operators. It aims to help COMAH operators and CIMs work together to ensure the risks from major accident hazards are being managed appropriately.
Understanding COMAH: The Performance and Recognition Framework
This describes how the CA takes account of operator performance in controlling major accident risks when planning inspections.
Examples of operator activities in scope of the Performance and Recognition Framework
Industry representatives, who helped develop the framework, have also provided some useful examples of the type of activities operators may wish to highlight during these discussions
Understanding COMAH: How Operators can challenge regulatory decisions made by the Competent Authority - A guide for COMAH Operators
This explains how COMAH establishment Operators can seek clarification on – and where they disagree challenge – CA regulatory decisions aimed at bringing them into compliance with the law. This challenge mechanism was developed jointly by the CA and Industry.
Guidance on the interpretation of major accident to the Environment for the purposes of the COMAH Regulations
This publication is now out of date and is due to be replaced. Meanwhile it still contains useful guidance on what constitutes a major accident to the environment.
As low as reasonably practicable (ALARP)
Reasonably practicable involves weighing a risk against the trouble, time and money needed to control it. ALARP describes the level to which we expect to see workplace risks controlled.

CA internal guidance - COMAH safety report assessment

The following have been developed by the CA for internal use. and describe the arrangements for receiving, handling and assessing COMAH safety reports. Together they form what are known as the:

safety report assessment manual (SRAM),
safety report assessment guides (SRAGs) and
safety report assessment technical criteria.

The safety report content that CA assessors will look for has not changed but SRAM has been updated to reflect improvements in CA procedures and to bring together guidance that was previously contained elsewhere.

The content and format of the SRAM and SRAGs will be kept under review.

COMAH 2015 safety report assessment manual (SRAM)

The SRAM document is the COMAH Competent Authority's internally-targeted guidance on the assessment of COMAH safety reports. It describes the framework within which the CA undertakes the assessment of safety reports and the processes its staff should follow in assessing safety reports submitted to them by operators of upper-tier COMAH establishments, pursuant to regulations 9 and 10 of the Control of Major Accident Hazards Regulations 2015 (COMAH).

COMAH 1999 safety report assessment guides (SRAGs)

Safety report assessment guidance (Technical aspects)

Key relevant case studies

This chapter describes all the case studies that have been identified as illustrating the importance of the technical assessment criteria in preventing, controlling or mitigating major accidents.

Each of the case studies provides:

a brief description of the accident;
a summary of the technical measures that were missing or not implemented properly;
the source reference(s).

A table of case studies and technical measures provides a cross index of which technical measures were found to be inadequate in each case study.

Case studies

The case studies included are:

Technical Measures

This chapter provides guidance on the technical measures for the prevention, control and mitigation of major accidents.

For each type of system/unit operation, all the main failure modes are identified. For each failure mode, the relevant technical measures are identified, and links are provided to Technical Measures documents which describe the measures in more detail. Alternatively, the Technical Measures documents may be accessed directly.

Systems/unit operations

The following types of system or unit operation are covered:

Measures documents

The following types of system or unit operation are covered:

Assessment and inspection

Strategic topic delivery guides

Mechanical Integrity Delivery Guide

Investigation and enforcement

Investigation procedure
Enforcement Management Model (EMM): application to hazardous substances (Archived by the UK Government Web Archive)
HSE Enforcement Management Model