What concerns me is the number of BoI reports that present causal factors as revelations, despite them having been identified early on, formally notified and staff instructed to ignore the risk when there was an opportunity to mitigate it long before the aircraft entered service. Nimrod, Hercules XV179, Tornado ZG710, Sea King ASaCs are some of the well known ones.
If permitted to get on with the job and implement regulations, risks are generally reduced to ALARP. The prevailing ethos I describe is what must change.
Yes, some UORs are delivered quicker but the safety obligation is not allowed to be ignored. It is the foreshortening of the approvals process that makes it seem quicker. If a Project Manager ignores instructions from above and simply follows the mandated regulations, he is just as likely to meet the UOR timescales we see.
And senior staffs don't like the concept of "standing risks" but the sensible PM knows what they are. Typically, Build Standards, and hence Safety Cases, will not have been maintained (for example, all the above cases). Some because it has never been contracted in the first place; others (e.g. ASaC) where it was contracted but then cancelled by a non-engineer who deemed it unnecessary. It is the very first question a PM asks of the Design Authority. His answer determines your workload and risk mitigation for the entire Concept, Assessment and Development Phases; and to a great extent helps establish an accurate cost. The problem is MoD has too few who know how to do this, even if they were allowed to, which is why so many projects are "over budget" but do not exceed a fair and reasonable cost.