Gas Pressure Reduction Stations (GPRS) play a critical role in natural gas transmission and distribution systems by ensuring safe and reliable pressure regulation at the interface between high-pressure pipelines and downstream networks. Failures in these stations can lead to supply disruptions, equipment damage, safety hazards, and broader societal and environmental impacts. While existing research predominantly addresses GPRS safety and reliability through technical and quantitative approaches, the underlying policy assumptions, boundary judgments, and stakeholder considerations often remain implicit. This study applies Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) to systematically analyze safety and reliability policies in GPRS as socio-technical systems. The research adopts a qualitative design combining a systematic literature review with semi-structured interviews conducted with experts from operational, maintenance, safety, and regulatory domains. The twelve CSH boundary questions are used within an “is/ought” framework to contrast current policy framings with expert-informed normative expectations. The analysis reveals that prevailing GPRS safety and reliability policies are largely characterized by instrumental purposes focused on operational continuity and regulatory compliance, organization-centered beneficiary definitions, reliance on lagging and compliance-based performance indicators, centralized decision-making structures, and limited mechanisms for learning, challenge, and stakeholder representation. In contrast, experts emphasized that effective safety governance should explicitly prioritize system resilience, public and environmental protection, prevention and learning, transparent governance of trade-offs, and inclusive decision-making. Based on these findings, the study proposes a CSH-informed conceptual framework that synthesizes key boundary gaps and identifies policy enhancement directions aimed at strengthening adaptive capacity and social legitimacy. The results highlight the value of integrating CSH with conventional technical approaches to improve safety and reliability governance in complex and uncertain GPRS contexts.