Health and safety gone mad

When he told the driver that he had never heard of such a ridiculous thing, the driver telephoned headquarters for a ruling. It turned out that he was right and the man was ordered off the bus. All this took quite a while as you would imagine, while the other passengers fumed at the delay.

The poor man had to get off the bus and walk all the way home in freezing rain, carrying his tin of paint and the rest of his shopping. So on what grounds was he, apparently legally, prevented from travelling on the bus? Well, he was just one more victim among the growing number of people who are falling foul of health and safety regulations.

According to these regulations (and it seems that there are health and safety regulations for everything we do), there was a risk of the paint tin accidentally opening and overwhelming the passengers with fumes. No amount of pleading by the man that the paint he had with him was of a type that emitted no harmful fumes was to any avail.

And what about this other story? For almost 300 years, parishioners in Norfolk have climbed a stepladder to light the 24 candles on the chandelier hanging from the ceiling of Wymondham Abbey. Now, they have been forced to spend 6,000 pounds on an electric pulley that lowers the chandelier so that the candles can be lit from floor level.

You guessed it. Health and Safety was at work again. Bruce Wilson, a churchwarden, said that as far as he knew, no one had ever been hurt while lighting the candles over the past 300 years. But the parishioners had little choice. They either had to stop using the chandelier or comply with the regulations.

Leo McKinstry, writing in the Daily Mail, has spoken of what he called the health and safety gestapo actually damaging the lives of the people of Britain. He pointed out that a stroll in the countryside would be regarded by most people as a harmless, pleasurable activity. But to health and safety officials in Leicestershire, it is fraught with danger.

Under county council guidelines, anyone organising countryside walks is required to undertake a full “risk assessment” beforehand. This assessment must address such questions as: “Are there likely to be overhanging branches or rabbit holes?” and “Does your walk pass near a river, stream or canal?” If so, participants should wear lifejackets.

In another case in point, a council knocked hundreds of cemetery headstones flat because it considered them “dangerously” unstable And a report by a local government ombudsman actually recommended that gravestones should also undergo risk assessments.

School pupils in another area have been banned from using leftover cardboard egg boxes in craft lessons for fear that they may be contaminated. The fact that there has never been a single recorded case of any child contracting salmonella poisoning in this way did not matter.

In Wales, the traditional Llani festival in Powys, where loads of fabulous fancy dress is the highlight of the show, was cancelled after the organisers were told they would have to pay for a series of risk assessments and employ at least 60 stewards. This is a festival that has been running for 30 years, attracting more than 5,000 visitors each year.

Hanging baskets have been banned in Bury St Edmunds as have bonfires in the West Midlands and fireworks displays in North Yorkshire. In the name of protecting children, schools have cancelled outings in warm weather for fear of sunstroke.

In Liverpool, a shopkeeeper was ordered by the city council to remove a number of St George’s flags (flown by the English as distinct from the British) from his shop or face a fine of 1,000 pounds. The council claimed that the flags could distract drivers or fall off and hit people.

Officials in Woodbridge, Suffolk, ruled that the Union Jack could no longer be flown from the local police station on state occasions because it is too risky for a police officer to open the first floor window, lean out and hoist the flag up the pole.

But according to critics of ‘the health and safety police’, there has been no greater symbol of the ludicrousness of this risk-fixated culture than the requirement that, during an event on the Thames to mark the bi-centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the actor playing Nelson had, quite embarrassingly, to wear a lifejacket over his 19th-century admiral’s costume.

Of course, the original aim of the 1974 Health and Safety Act was to reduce casualties in the workplace. This is laudable. In fact, the Act has had some success. In 1974, there were 651 fatal accidents in the work-place. In 2003, the number had fallen to 235, a reduction of some 64 per cent.

But the problem is that health and safety officials have not remained content to focus on combating real dangers. Instead, they have vastly expanded their scope of operations. Unasked for by the public, they have taken upon themselves the duty of trying to eliminate risk everywhere, failing to recognise that accidents are just a normal part of human existence.

The virtue of the 1974 Act was that it essentially allowed a common-sense approach to danger. But in recent years, health and safety officials have become far more rigid, regularly flexing their bureaucratic muscles. Instead of erring on the side of freedom, they continually seek to ban any activity which does not meet their approval.

I have no idea whether the paint carried onto the bus by the pensioner really posed a danger to the passengers or whether any of the hundreds of other seemingly-stupid actions taken by health and safety experts each year is really necessary. Many of them do not appear to be. But what to do? Maybe there is a case for limiting the powers of these “little Hitlers.”