Reliability, responsibility and reality in structural engineering

For a person to be described as reliable or for a service to be regarded as something that can be relied upon is an easily recognised and highly desirable description. Yet when reliability is mentioned within the structural engineering community, it provokes decidedly mixed reactions. For the enthusiasts—found almost entirely within the academic community—it is a key tool in the quest to understand and describe ever more challenging aspects of structural behaviour, but to the practitioner it is largely an irrelevance: something that belongs elsewhere with no real place in their everyday activities. They may have read something about ‘the improved levels of reliability’ assured by newly introduced codes of practice, recall that it is somehow related to risk or note increased use of the word in project specification documents. Why this difference in attitude? What are the reasons? Can the divide be bridged? Does it matter? This paper presents a largely personal view on these issues.