Health and Safety.. Do We Need It?

I can hear the collective shuddering groan, and picture the eye rolling at these 3 dreaded words.. but what exactly is it about the concept of health and or safety that triggers this antagonism?

In fact what is “health & safety” in this day and age?

Is it a UK wide ban on playing conkers unless every kid is issued with goggles?
Is it the banning of pancake races?
or is it bans on cheese rolling competitions, knitting in hospitals and even toothpicks?!

To read certain newspapers or watch certain tv personalities, anyone might be caught up and enjoy the humour aimed at this frequent butt of jokes and popular derision. But perhaps we should ask ourselves what the newspapers and Jeremy Carp-stun’s of this world get out of their hilarious attacks. Might it be a somewhat raised profile, more exposure, more readers, more sales, more MONEY?

Shame on them for their selfishness and completely callous disregard for the real pain and distress caused to victims and families when health and safety standards are abandoned. To encourage this moronic bandwagon jumping is to be complicit in that agony, because by telling such half truths and lies, they undermine the effective safeguards which make the UK a safe place to live and work.

Is it the mass awareness of all the horrors in the world (bad news is so much more newsworthy than good news), that causes fear and at the same time encourages the few who might be dishonest and purely greedy to make cynical claims? And does this have a knock on effect to authorities and companies who seek to eliminate any possible chink in their armour where someone could find their precautions wanting? Then blame everybody’s enemy “health and safety” for their own flawed decisions. And is money-saving tight fistedness dressed up in the guise of health and safety to disguise the reality that no one can be bothered? – So just impose a ban and blame health and safety. Faced with stringent budget cuts, do such authorities take informed advice or isn’t it just quicker and cheaper to impose the blanket ban / make the kids wear goggles?

There are certainly many foolish examples out there to provide fodder for endless ridicule, I am sure I’m not the only practitioner to have cringed over channel four’s “The Fun Police” presented as a “day in the life” of a H&S consultant who amongst other daft things, wittered on eccentrically to cameramen about the dangerous “acorns on the drive” whilst zealously sweeping them up, but in reality, should we really scrap the whole idea and the laws that go with it because of a few misguided individuals?

To answer that perhaps we should some of the ghosts hidden in the health and safety mists so rarely exposed to the media spotlight….the victims maimed or permanently disabled by negligent and dangerous workplace situations, or the wives and children of people killed in the workplace due to appalling health or safety standards, or maybe we should look at the good old days before all these silly regulations came along to stifle business enterprise and school sports days..

or perhaps we could find some enlightenment by looking at examples from abroad where there are no such costly impediments?

So does health and safety matter?

Anyway you look at it the answer should be YES, because if you’re in business, you have reponsibilities to operate the business in accordance with the law of the land, and, part of that involves fulfilling health and safety responsibilities. In this country we should be very proud of our health and safety – after all as Lord Young pointed out in his ‘Common Sense, Common Safety’ Report: Today we have the lowest number of non-fatal accidents and the second lowest number of fatal accidents in Europe.

Most of us ARE doing it right, sure there are some who seem to have lost their way, but doesn’t every profession have a few of those? So let’s stop whinging, read the papers, don’t get mad, just take what they print with a huge pinch of salt (but not too much – it’s bad for your heart!), and keep on trying to save people in this country from the pain and loss associated with workplace accidents. It might be unsung but that doesn’t make less worthwhile.

And let’s remember this thought from the HSE: “health and safety is about saving lives, not stopping them.”