"Playing It Safe": The Crazy World of Britain’s Health And Safety Regulations

By Jayne Warren - 05/12/2007

 This is a great light-hearted, off-beat book to make everyone laugh over Christmas. If you are one of the many people whose life has been affected by the ever-burgeoning rules of Health and Safety, this book is essential reading. Author Alan Pearce has trawled through the British media to collect bizarre (and unfortunately true) regulations that will make readers cringe - whilst crying with laughter.

 

From council workmen legally vandalising graves and swings that were removed from a playground in case children were blinded by the sun, to the elderly heart patient who was kicked off a bus in the rain for carrying a tin of paint - even the most innocuous events appear to require risk assessment. And as society becomes increasingly wrapped up in ‘compensation culture’, "Playing it Safe" lets readers laugh at themselves and the daft predicament that we have placed ourselves in.

 

Jayne Warren spoke to Alan Pearce, who has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and author for thirty years. He has covered conflicts all over the world for a variety of international news organisations, and was seriously injured covering the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996 whilst working as the BBC Afghanistan correspondent.

 

Why this book? "Well, actually I'd wanted to do a funny sort of documentary about the London Blitz in the 1940s - but applying current Health and Safety regulations. I wanted to call it The Blitz - our finest hour? and in collecting Health and Safety stories for it, I realised I'd got something very different. So I just shared it on a website blog for a laugh. It got picked up by a publisher, we filtered out the really sad ones from the more bonkers ones - and well, here is that book!"

 

A lot of mature people are furious about the whole issue of Health and Safety rules, and wonder how it's all got so mad? "Well, in 1998 the Lord Chancellor ended legal aid for personal inury - and so it opened the floodgates for the 'no win no fee lawyers' to wipe the board. Even if people weren't really at risk of getting sued for something, the perception that anyone could be sued at the drop of a hat if they fell off their chair at work, for example, just opened the flood gates for rules and regulations. And now it's so bad that people have got scared of anything - village fetes and even mince pies!"

 

Health and Safety feel that they are being unfairly vilified in the public eyes, don't they? "Yes they do - and they are absolutely right. They are blamed when it often isn't them at all - it's management hiding behind Health and Safety. Health and Safety in my view, do excellent work. For example, just look at the very low rates of accidents in UK industry compared to other countries. And it's been thanks to them. They have also become the victim of compensation culture, and it's all smoke and mirrors in my view. People pretend they care - but actually, they just stick up a sign to avoid responsibility. Take councils who send people on 'ladder awareness courses', or the London Underground that doesn't have any First Aid kits.

 

Has the famous 'Risk Assessment" mentality been our downfall? "Yes, it really has! One story illustrates this very well - a terrible story in my view. A fireman wanted to help rescue someone who had fallen in a river, and went to pull him out with his hands. But he couldn't do it, for danger of being 'pulled in', and he couldn't throw a lifeline until a risk assessment had been done that he would not be at risk from the moving water. He was advised to call a coastguard instead. Great - in the middle of the Midlands."

 

Has Health and Safety killed off our ability to use basic common sense? "Totally. We are breeding common sense and self-initiative out of people. So what's going to happen? What are we doing to our kids - who are being prevented from playing contact games or competition sports? Where would our Rugby hero Johnnie Wilkinson be now if he'd been confined to playing musical statues at school? It's horribly sad. But with this book I'm inviting people to laugh out loud as well."

 

And Health and Safety themselves also spoke to the Mature Times - bless 'em. Encouragingly, not only had they a bought a copy of Alan's book to give to a colleague who was leaving, but totally reinforced his comments about the change in law and employers hiding behind so-called'health and safety' regulations - rather than taking responsibility for basic safety:

 

"Basically, Parliament make the laws - not us. We offer advice and information to make sure the law is complied with. Our primary concern is industry, from nuclear power stations, gas pipelines and agriculture to mining and public utilities. However, this 'prosecute or sue' mentality has really fudged the boundaries between civil and criminal law.

 

"So much is blamed on Health and Safety rules -which is totally unfair. Take fireworks, for example. Its not us - its the insurers that won't pay out for injury, so the signs go up. I took my son to a swimming pool in London recently, and there was this new sign saying that children under eight need accompanying adult. Health and Safety, they said. It wasn't. I challenged it - because this was pure management. The sign quietly came down!

 

"So we say to people - challenge the rules! "

 

Health and Safety regularly publish 'De-Bunking Myths' on their website. Here is an especially festive one!

"Workers are banned from putting up Christmas decorations in the office". Bah Humbug!  Each year we hear of companies banning their workers from putting up Christmas decorations in their offices for ‘health and safety’ reasons, or requiring the work to be done by a ‘qualified’ person.

 

Rubbish! Most organisations including HSE and local councils manage to put up their decorations, celebrating the spirit of Christmas without a fuss. They just sensibly provide their staff with suitable step ladders to put up decorations rather than expecting staff to balance on wheelie chairs."

 

"Playing It Safe: The Crazy World of Britain’s Health And Safety Regulations" by Alan Pearce is published by The Friday Project, priced £9.99 in hardback.