The Evidence Gap in Safety Governance: Why Certified Systems Fail to Prove Safety at the Moment It Matters

AbstractAcross safety-critical domains—building safety, fire protection, healthcare, infrastructure, and connected systems—governance relies heavily on certification, inspection, and documented compliance. These mechanisms demonstrate that systems were designed, installed, and approved according to recognised standards. However, repeated post-incident inquiries reveal a persistent structural weakness: the inability to prove the operational state of safety systems at the moment they were relied upon.This paper defines the Evidence Gap in Safety Governance: the gap between certified design intent and provable operational reality. It explains how static assurance models, while necessary, are temporally misaligned with modern risk, and why post-incident reconstruction cannot satisfy governance, legal, or insurance tests of contemporaneous proof. The paper does not propose solutions. Its purpose is to formally define the gap, explain why it recurs across sectors, and outline its implications for regulators, insurers, courts, and duty-holders.