Planning application tool—a risk assessment tool for non-specialists

This paper presents means by which risk assessment can be made available as a tool to people who are not specialists in risk analysis but who, in such roles as assessing and approving planning applications in the neighbourhood of hazardous installations, need the information available from a risk assessment in order to make balanced decisions. The method assumes that a risk assessment of the area has already been carried out for the existing situation and that the data from this analysis are available to the user. A comparison is made between `manual' and computerised approaches. The methodology described has particular relevance to the situation in the Netherlands, but is capable of more general application.