Only an employment tribunal can decide whether or not the relevant failure is exceptionally serious.

The challenge for new reliability assessment and qualification systems is determining the relevant failure mechanisms to optimize sample size.

If the relevant failure is exceptionally serious, any qualifying disclosure made externally will be protected if the worker:

Relevant failures can be:

This method shall ages all IC's building blocks to allow relevant failure modes to be triggered and implemented in a short reliability experiment.

These are where the worker reasonably believes at least one 'relevant failure' is currently happening, took place in the past or is likely to happen in the future.

An employee will be protected if he "makes a disclosure in good faith" to one of these people, and "reasonably believes that the relevant failure...is a matter in respect of which the person is prescribed and the information is substantially true".