I Would like to emphasise at the outset that the title of this short paper is “Some thoughts on contracting for reliability”, and that what I say does not necessarily represent the official policy of my Company, if indeed a company can have any very firm official policy on a subject which is amenable to so many and varied methods of treatment. For this same reason I am not attempting to recommend any particular treatment of the problem, but rather to talk around some aspects of the matter, and to try to consider how some equitable incentive method of contracting to produce a defined standard of reliability might be applied.