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This thesis considers the subject of crowd safety and investigates how the application of risk assessment can provide support for decision making in crowd safety management and planning. The focus is on major public venues and events where large crowds arc a normal part of the operation. Conventional methods of assessment tend to be ad hoc, reactive and rely on individual experiences. The risk assessment approach, which is comprehensive, systematic and pro-active, can help to overcome these shortfalls. Risk assessments have already been successfully applied in many workplaces, ranging from high hazard industrial plants to the office environment. However, this thesis argues that for it to be of benefit, the risk assessment must be appropriate to the nature of the operation and the nature and the extent of the hazards involved. The existing risk assessments are inappropriate to crowd safety in this respect and a more suitable methodology is required. In order to identify the methods and tools that could provide the potential solutions to the problems of assessing crowd and behaviour related hazards, a review of other risk assessments was conducted. It has highlighted a number of techniques and tools that could be applied to assess crowd safety risks. Based on the criteria mentioned above and the findings of this review, a prototype crowd safety risk assessment methodology was developed. A series of trials were conducted to evaluate the validity and usability of the prototype. Revisions were made accordingly to produce the final draft. Experiments and a questionnaire survey were then carried out on the final draft to test and verify the methodology. In general, they show that the methodology has led to an improvement in most aspects of crowd safety risk assessment. In the experiments that compared the methodology against methods representing the existing risk assessments and the conventional way of assessing crowd safety, subjects using the methodology tend to perform better in most areas. More hazards were identified. In the evaluation of risks, better consistency was achieved between individuals using the methodology. However, their judgements appeared to be less consistent over time. The use of a larger rating scheme with more choices available in the methodology could have an impact on consistency in risk evaluation. Another key factor could be that the subjects who took part in the experiments were all novice assessors. Possible learning effect may have occurred in between experiments, which could have resulted in a change of mind over time. If this is the case, this result could be an indication that the methodology is more sensitive to changes in risks or risk perception. It will be interesting to find out if experienced assessors can achieve better consistency. By and large, the experiments and questionnaire survey have served to verify, at least in part, the arguments that risk assessment is better than the conventional assessment method and that there are more benefits to be gained when the risk assessment is more appropriate to the nature and the extent of the crowd safety hazards that could arise in major public venues. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that the research work presented in this thesis is merely the first step towards a crowd safety risk assessment methodology. There are outstanding issues yet to be resolved, not least the issue of the apparent lack of consistency over time in risk evaluation. This thesis has identified the research and development work that is required to resolve these issues and to further the benefits that risk assessment could bring to crowd safety.

This thesis examines the changing role of housing authorities within the wider context of the restructuring of the British welfare state. Between the years 1979 and 1997, four successive Conservative administrations attempted to eliminate the municipal ownership and management of the social housing sector. Central to this restructuring was the notion of 'enabling' and this crystallised the Conservatives' vision for the future role of housing authorities as non-providers. Instead, local authorities were expected to facilitate housing provision through the private or voluntary sectors. At the time this research began, it was clear that, whilst the magnitude of this reorientation of local government's traditional role generated significant discussion at the conceptual level, there remained a paucity of empirical research examining the actual practice of enabling at the local level. The research on which this thesis draws, therefore, helps to address the imbalance between the theorisation of enabling and detailed empirical work. It explores the way in which housing authorities have responded to the enabling challenge and the resultant implications this has for the delivery of housing services. In the UK, the conceptual discussion of enabling was most clearly articulated in the enabling typology developed by Leach et al. (1992) and this formed the theoretical underpinnings of the present study. A two-part research strategy was adopted in which, first, a postal survey was administered to 100 housing authorities. This provided a scientific sampling framework from which three case-study housing authorities were selected for the second part of the data collection. Here, qualitative interviews were undertaken with senior policy-makers from the housing departments and their housing association and voluntary sector 'partners'. There was variation between the three case-study authorities in their transition to the enabling role and, in this context, the prominent research findings are as follows. The analysis of the data gathered from the first case-study authority highlights the way in which resistance to change and institutional inertia prevented the housing department from shifting to the enabling role. Hence, it continued to operate according to the traditional role. In the other two case-study authorities, the research findings show: (a) the variation between central and local government in their interpretation of enabling, particularly in the context of the compulsory competitive tendering of housing management functions; (b) the shift towards partnership working and the way in which the housing authorities retained a dominant role amongst the plethora of agencies that are now involved in policy formation and service delivery; (c) the decline in direct provision was precipitating the 'reinvention' of new roles centred around 'community governance'; (d) the implications that all these developments had in relation to the internal organisational structure and management processes of the two authorities. In examining the practice of enabling housing authorities, this thesis contributes to an understanding of the way in which the wider role and function of local government has been restructured from its position under the post-war consensus.