Organisation profile
Organisation profile
The Thomas Ashton Institute for Risk and Regulatory Research (TAI) was established in 2017 by HSE and the University of Manchester. We enable the co-production of world-leading research in regulatory science by encouraging genuinely cross-disciplinary research. We tackle complex research questions that lie at the intersections of the physical, engineering, medical and social sciences and use our technical strengths, expertise and reputation to support transformational change in policy making through active engagement across our networks in government, industry, and academia.
Working with the TAI gives you access to a unique combination of skills, knowledge, and talent with a wide range of experiences (including Great Britian's national regulator), enabling us to see across the whole occupational health and safety landscape and bringing our combined expertise and lived experience to bear when delivering our work. All of this is based on a fundamental ambition to help you frame questions that will identify and fix real-world occupational safety and health problems and challenges.
We access the research capability and experience of the UK’s National H&S lab and the full resources of the University of Manchester including their people and their world class equipment and facilities. Therefore, we are equipped to pull an effective team together at pace, and partner with you to deliver world class solutions that balance theory and practice. This approach is innovative and therefore creates solutions that others may find difficult to develop. Unlike conventional research institutes, we actively co-produce research in ways that deliver distinctive insights into challenging and complex problems with academic depth and rigour.
Supported by our unique view of incidents (small and large) we can see the patterns in causal and contributory factors to help understand emerging risks and risks that have not been controlled in existing industries. We build and use the extensive range of networks available to us to provide new perspectives, and to see the whole picture from different angles. This means that we can understand problems at a systems level. We work with organisations to co-create solutions which are evidence based, achievable and consider issues from a regulatory, academic, industrial and Government perspective.
We can show our approach works through the impact we deliver, which is immediate, direct, and tailored to the needs of the sector we are working with. We use the best available evidence and the right mix of skills to address the whole problem, not just bits of it, and by linking our extensive range of networks we can also accelerate routes to impact. Our solutions come in a format that does not require translation, and our knowledge, experience and skill mix mean that we can recommend the right things to do in the right order to make a measurable and sustainable difference in creating a safer and healthier society.
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