Health and Safety

The UK is going mad.

While staying with friends in the UK last year I saw an article about a local authority preventing firemen from putting up Christmas decorations. The reason cited was ‘working at height’ regulations: firemen? Up ladders? No, we couldn’t possibly have that. Did you know that a parent can’t volunteer to go on a school trip to support staff, unless they’ve been CRB checked (Criminal Records Bureau)? Schools banning parents from videoing their offspring in the nativity play, has now reached epidemic proportions … and kids can no longer play conkers in the playground because it’s dangerous ... unless they’re wearing protective goggles, possibly. Safety consciousness has gone barmy.

Life is dangerous. You could perhaps cocoon yourself in your home and abstain from the dangers inherent in the outside world, but do you not know how many accidents occur in the home? Anyway, forgive me for being obtuse, but I don’t think that’s living. If you do choose living over simply existing, the second you step outside your front door, you do have to take responsibility for what happens there. It’s always seemed insane to me that if someone trips up on a pavement, they can hold someone else accountable. How do you know if it’s your local council’s fault for dodgy pavements or the shoe manufacturer’s fault for the sole of your shoe or, heaven forbid, your own, for not picking your feet up adequately? Whatever happened to personal responsibility? We could blame the Americans for the litigious society in which we live - we know it started on their side of the pond - but actually, isn’t that just looking somewhere else to point the finger?

Anyone who remembers their school girl history lessons, in which employees were regularly maimed and killed by dangerous factory conditions, will realise the necessity of health and safety laws. People working on a machine without safety guards, for unreasonably long shifts should not have to take personal responsibility for their fingers or indeed their lives. This is where health and safety began; with legislation to make it the factory owners’ responsibility for ensuring secure practices, protective clothing and safe machinery for their workers. If there is protective clothing available and the employee chooses not to wear it, should the factory owner be held responsible for an accident? I don’t believe so. There should be balance but that’s what’s all got so out of hand.

Issues are not black and white. Take the firemen story above; suggesting that the firemen shouldn’t put up Christmas decorations because they would be ‘working at height’ is utterly ridiculous given what firemen do for a living. At some point, someone somewhere is going to suggest we don’t have firemen because the risks associated with their job are just too severe for the Health and Safety regulations.

The impact of these rules on society and the community is enormous. My friends told me about a village near them that had a thriving adult theatre group that decided to start a children’s theatre section. The children’s group was wonderfully successful and everybody agreed that the group was a valuable contribution to the children’s lives and the wider community. However, the mountains of rules and regulations that were immediately imposed on them – along with the CRB checks – very nearly precipitated the end of the group.

Before too long there will be no swimming in schools, no visits outside the school grounds, playing will be banned in the playground and beyond school there will be no life in the community. Health and Safety was, and is, an essential part of any developing country but at the rate this is going the UK will be developed into total insanity.