Health and safety - conkers!

(Written 8/10/2010.)

Thanks to my friend Sue for the link - http://tinyurl.com/39x8dzu

In short, a council has placed a health and safety notice on a conker tree, warning that the fruit of the horse chestnut may fall at this time of year, and that members of the public may be struck by them. And when they placed the sign, I daresay they were feeling pretty silly, but they had little choice in the matter. Why? Because some sharp-eyed and dim-witted people had reported the hazard to them, and if they had done nothing and someone, however improbably, had been injured after a potential hazard was reported, the council might be liable. So someone in Environmental Health banged out a quick notice on MS Word, laminated it, then got someone else who passed the tree on their way home to pin it up. Total cost to council tax payers, time included, about tuppece.

Expect this one to hit the Daily Mail quite soon, with the cost "estimated" at hundreds of pounds, the usual jibes about H&S being out of control, likewise accusations (by association) that all council employees lack common sense and throw "our" money away on spendthrift schemes like this, while a photo will show a disabled pensioner pointing to a pothole in the road, with the caption "'Here's the real safety problem!' says 80 year-old Doris Bonkers."

There are many things the dim don't understand, yet think they do - quite a lot of science, University Challenge, art, the law, how to drive a car (this is not an exhaustive list) - but Health and Safety is high on that list. "It means not being able to take risks, dunnit! Like using a stapler, I heard about this council where..." It is by pandering to the dim that Michael Gove was able to gain a huge ovation at the Conservative Party conference by announcing the repeal of the "no touch" rule for teachers - a rule that didn't exist! Next, he'll probably announce comprehensive legislation to allow children to play conkers in school playgrounds, thereby repealing... um... well, nothing, really, because kids play conkers in playgrounds, just like they have done for decades.

Let's talk proper Health and Safety, though. A couple of weeks ago, I read a report of a man who was inside an industrial mixer, cleaning it. Yes, you already know that this won't end well. A colleague, not knowing of the cleaning operation, switched the mixer on, and was quite surprised at the screams and pink goo that emerged from different ends of the machine.

The company was fined many thousands of pounds, and the person whose job it was to ensure that the mixer couldn't be operated when someone was inside was also fined quite a lot of thousands of pounds. Yet, despite strong criticism from the judge, no director of that company went to prison.

This may be controversial, but I have argued for many years that top directors of companies that have seriously breached H&S legislation ought to serve a little gaol time, and by "seriously breached", I mean loss of arms, legs, or vital signs. My goodness, we wouldn't need H&S inspectors then, would we? If the boss thought there was a chance that they'd end up in chokey, they'd learn the law forwards, backwards and sideways, and they'd make sure that it was applied rigorously - which might reduce the industrial accident statistics.

What's more, if someone came to them complaining that their chestnut tree might be a bit dangerous, what with the risk of two ounces of spiky nut falling on them and that, they'd probably be able to come up with an appropriate response.

Like - "So don't walk under it, you useless tosser."