Corrosive

We live in times where attention to health and safety regulations have removed commonsense from many areas of our lives.

Think of schools that have banned conkers unless the contestants wear goggles or the council that banned cheese-rolling because the hill was too steep. There are hundreds of such examples, including the one I mentioned earlier this morning about Network Rail making it virtually impossible for a Women’s Institute to carry on with a railway garden they have tended for 26 years.

We also live in times where terrorists attack us or attempt to attack us in various deadly ways. In times when deranged men kill innocent people in senseless random attacks. These are times when incidents such as these need to be reacted to with great speed. And, generally speaking, our emergency forces do a wonderful job in responding to major incidents.

The coalition government have promised to do away with unnecessary health and safety regulations and I for one wish they’d hurry up and get on with it.

For a start, they could do away with the RA1 form that needs to be filled in by the Metropolitan police before they can commence conducting any sort of operation. The Risk Assessment Form contains 238 potential hazards that officers must consider before embarking on, say, attendance at a football match or, at the other extreme, reacting to a terrorist attack.

Once filled in, the form has to be accompanied by Form RA2 (an inventory of risk activities), Form RA3 (a calculation of levels of risk) and Form RA4 (the resulting recommendations). Then a Commander or Chief Constable has to sign off the recommendations.

A former Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner has said that a ‘self-serving risk assessment culture’ blights police operations. ‘A generation of senior police, fire and ambulance officers have grown up in an environment where avoidance of risk and the fear of being sued by an ‘ambulance-chasing’ solicitor is more important than public duty.’ He added, ‘This corrosive culture of caution and risk-avoidance is why the Aldgate firefighters were ordered to stay at the gates rather than help the grievously wounded.’

Corrosive indeed. Given that the risk of terrorist activity is now rated as severe, now is the time for the government to crack down on this sort of nonsense that serves only the ambulance-chasers and not the public.
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A Farce

I suppose we often say that things were simpler long ago and sometimes that is right as two reports this morning remind me.

In the ‘old days’ when trains broke down within sight of a station, you waited patiently for a little while and then opened the doors, climbed out if you could and hoofed it along the track to the station. I’ve done that myself at least a couple of times. But you can’t do that easily these days as there are few ‘slam-door’ trains left. Most of them now have electrically-operated doors controlled by the driver.

So when a rush-hour train from Kings Cross to Cambridge conked out on Friday evening, around fifteen passengers got fed-up with waiting more than thirty minutes, forced open a door, climbed out and walked 500 metres along the track to Foxton station. You’d have thought ‘Good luck to them!’ but the driver thought otherwise, locked the other 360 passengers in with a warning that they could be arrested if they tried to leave the train, and then called the police.

The first set of trapped passengers were released from the blacked-out train ninety minutes after it broke down and ferried, not to Foxton nearby, but back to Royston. Nearly three hours after the train broke down, the others were ferried back to Royston again where a fleet of 28 buses took them all to Cambridge.

I suppose that in the case of this train, there might have been a risk that some dimwit escaping from the trapped train might have fallen over and injured himself so, possibly, First Capital Connect were right to lock the other passengers in.

On the other hand, contrast the 32 ladies of the Bucknell Women’s Institute who for the last quarter of a century have tended a garden alongside their local railway station, even winning a Wales in Bloom award in 1992.

But no longer. For Network Rail has told them that they need to complete a detailed risk assessment, arrange insurance, sign a five-page licence that would restrict their activities, undergo safety training and fence off their garden. And all this for a station that has eight trains a day travelling at two miles an hour because of a level crossing nearby.

What a farce!
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Bonkers!

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At this time of the year when we walk our two dogs in the local woods, we occasionally get struck on the head by falling acorns. Over the years it’s quite possible we have been hit by a falling conker but, to be truthful, I can’t remember this happening.

It’s no big deal and the only problem we encounter is Ollie’s nervousness when he hears acorns and conkers hitting the undergrowth because he cannot understand the source of the noise these make.

However, we know what an oak tree looks like and we know also what a horse chestnut tree is and, of course, look out for the missiles coming from them in the autumn.

But it seems that some folk in Bury St. Edmunds do not, for the local council has posted a notice on one horse chestnut tree warning them ‘BEWARE Falling Conkers’.

Bonkers is what I say!
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Health & Safety Gone Mad!

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Bored with newspapers full of budget details, criticisms and political wrangling, I looked for something else to have a whinge about. I didn’t have to search for long.

A mischievous five-year old schoolboy climbed a 20 ft tree in the playground during the morning break and refused to come down.

But instead of helping him, teachers at the primary school in Melksham, Wiltshire, followed health and safety guidelines and retreated into the school building to ‘observe from a distance’ so that the child would not get ‘distracted and fall’.

Suppose he had not been distracted and still fallen was my first thought?

Forty-five minutes later, a passer-by saw the boy’s predicament and helped him down. You’d have thought that someone in the school would have thanked her for her actions. But no, she was reported to the police for trespass!

The Headteacher later confirmed that the school’s policy prevents staff going to the aid of children who have climbed trees and said, ‘The safety of our pupils is our priority ...’ It doesn’t seem like it to me!

Wiltshire Council then wrote to the rescuer: ‘You may well have acted initially out of concern for the safety of the child but any such concerns should have been raised with a member of staff.’ ‘You subsequently behaved in a verbally aggressive manner to a member of staff.’

There is no word from the parents of this active child, but if he were mine, I think I would become extremely aggressive to staff members who hid behind utterly stupid health and safety rules and did nothing to help a child who might well have fallen out of the tree and hurt himself.

Sometimes, it seems to me that commonsense eludes some people!
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Barmy!

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Last year Northamptonshire Police issued a 93-page guide on how to ride a bicycle which gave officers advice, among other things, on how to balance, brake and avoid the kerb.

Now, it seems, they have got round to issuing some mountain bikes to some of their coppers. But they can’t ride them until the summer, for they have yet to complete a ten-hour training course on how to use them.

Cautious? Possibly.

Health and safety conscious? Yes probably.

Barmy? Absolutely!
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Hard Cheese!

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The English are well-known for their eccentricities which often shows up in the type of sports they play.

Cricket, in my view at any rate, is possibly the most boring activity in the world next to watching a goldfish swimming round its bowl, though I accept, of course, that many would disagree with me.

Notwithstanding, I incline to the more interesting of sports, one with a bit of excitement. Cheese rolling, for example.

The Annual Cheese Rolling Race & Wake on Coopers Hill in Gloucester is a race that has been run for two hundred years and has attracted thousands of followers. Just last year, over fifteen thousand people turned up to watch competitors chase 7lb Double Gloucester cheeses down an impossibly dangerous 1:2 gradient sustaining many injuries in the process. What fun!

But no more. The health & safety police have stepped in to say that there are issues about the number of people attending and, as a result, this year’s race has been cancelled. Crowd control, inadequate parking, overcrowding and emergency access have been cited as reasons for the cancellation.

Curiously, not a word has been said about the health and safety of the would-be competitors. That’s eccentricity for you!
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Bonkers!

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A demonstration of how how hidebound with regulations Britain has become, along with a fear of breaking them, can be found with the redundancy notice sent to a 13-year old paperboy in Bedfordshire.

The lad was sent a redundancy notice along with a cheque for ‘one week's pay in lieu of notice, which equates to £6.53 (subject to tax and NI)’. The boy said when asked by reporters, ‘I felt annoyed and upset.’ I can understand his feelings.

What surprises me is, not the redundancy notice or the apparant lack of prior consultatation, but the absence of confirmation that the lad had a Criminal Records Check before he was allowed to put newspapers into people’s letterboxes, or that he wore the correct headgear when riding his cycle which had also been checked over for Health & Safety breaches and that he only went out with a dozen newspapers at a time to prevent him from getting a hernia lifting them or ...

See what I mean? I’m at it now!
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