The claim
“We have seen an epidemic of excuses wrongly citing health and safety as a reason to prevent people from doing pretty harmless things with only very minor risks attached.”
Chris Grayling, August 24 2011
The background
The employment minister joined in the attack on Britain’s apparently burgeoning ‘elf and safety culture this week with a strident press release listing “the top 10 most bizarre health and safety ‘bans'”.
In what looks like something of a pincer movement, Chris Grayling’s intervention comes a week after Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech that appeared to link the riots to the “obsession with health and safety that has eroded people’s willingness to act according to common sense”.
Mr Grayling has now teamed up with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which has been trying for years to distance itself from the headlines about schoolchildren banned from playing conkers and running three-legged races.
As the HSE has explained in countless press releases and letters to newspapers, its purpose is to reduce real, life-threatening risks in the workplace, and it is fed up with taking the blame for nervous companies and councils worrying about getting sued and seeing their insurance premiums soar.
The executive is so keen to shift the emphasis from its much-maligned inspectors to the nervous nellies in town halls that it has published “a top 10 of the most bizarre ‘bans’ linked to health and safety it has uncovered over the last 12 months – all of which have no basis in official regulations”.
1. Wimbledon officials citing health and safety as a reason to close Murray Mount when it was wet
2. Stopping dodgem cars from bumping into each other at Butlins in Skegness;
3. Banning Royal wedding street parties;
4. Removing an unwanted, bulky TV from a pensioner’s home for recycling;
5. Carnivals with fancy dress parades;
6. Kite flying on a popular tourist beach in east Yorkshire;
7. Stopping pupils from using playground monkey bars unsupervised in Oxfordshire;
8. Using pins to secure commemorative poppies;
9. Schoolyard football games banned – unless the ball is made of sponge;
10. Children no longer allowed to take part in a sack race at Sports Day.”
But is the HSE – which used to publish a series of cartoons debunking the great “health and safety myths” – guilty of perpetuating a few myths itself?
The analysis
The “health and safety gone mad” story has become such a newspaper favourite that it’s not a great surprise to discover that sometimes the facts haven’t been allowed to get in the way of a good headline.
Fears that town hall jobsworths would ruin people’s plans to celebrate the Royal Wedding prompted ministers to write to councils in February calling for them to smooth the way for street parties.
“I know that there have been stories about petty bureaucracy getting in the way of party planners,” Mr Cameron said.
His worst fears appeared to be confirmed when the Daily Mail reported that one party planner had been told she would have to take out a £5m insurance policy before being allowed to hang out the bunting.
The force of the story was slightly diminished by the fact that the local authority in question, Medway Council, had in fact approved all the applications for street parties it received, promised to pick up all the insurance costs, and waived fees for road closures.
Another council singled out for shame in the top ten also didn’t actually utter the magic words “health and safety”.
Colchester Borough Council do indeed tell their bin men not to go into people’s homes to collect rubbish, but it’s not because they’re worried about slipped discs.
The concern is that if the refuse collectors were to knock something over while inside someone’s home they could land the council with a lawsuit.
That may or not be a good reason for refusing to help an elderly resident with her television, but it’s got nothing to do with health and safety.
It’s certainly true that pupils at one school – Malvern Primary in Huyton, Merseyside – were told not to kick heavy footballs around in the schoolyard.
Ironically, it was widely reported, Malvern was the alma mater of Liverpool and England footballer Steven Gerrard (in fact, he went to nearby St Michael’s, now Huyton with Roby). Could health and safety be strangling the talents of the next generation of soccer stars?
Knowsley council told FactCheck that pupils were told to stick to soft balls in the schoolyard because it’s a small area where pupils as young as four play.
Some parents, perhaps not unreasonably, didn’t want the youngest children in the line of fire when the boisterous 11-year-olds started blasting free kicks with leather balls, so they asked the teachers to bring in the rule.
It’s a similar rule, for similar reasons, to the one that held sway in FactCheck’s own primary school (tennis balls only) many, many years before health and safety became a staple of news stories.
The council told us there was no football ban at the school and nothing to stop the next generation of Gerrards (or whoever) playing with the real thing out on the school fields.
Appropriately enough, the kite-flying story is mostly hot air, too.
East Riding of Yorkshire council made it clear that there is nothing to stop anyone flying a kite on any beach in the county.
The confusion appears to have arisen when the council introduced by-laws to limit the use of fast-moving kite-buggies to certain designated areas.
But there was never any intention to stop people flying ordinary kites and no such restrictions have ever been put in place.
Similarly, it’s easy to stick a pin in the poppy story, a perennial “elf and safety” favourite.
Although the British Legion is reluctant to comment on stories like this, which it feels are a distraction from its fundraising work, a source was able to confirm to FactCheck that the organisation has never made any moves to ban pins because of health and safety fears.
Pins are still dished out along with the Remembrance Day poppies every year, and they’re as sharp as they ever were.
Butlins told us it does indeed operate a “no bumping” rule at its resorts Bognor Regis, Minehead and Skegness, but the company denied there was anything new or unusual about that, and said the decision had nothing to do with either health and safety law or insurance.
A spokesman said: “There has been no change to the way we operate our dodgem rides…Like most operators of dodgems we decided long ago that a no deliberate bumping policy means that everyone – even our youngest riders – can enjoy a fun experience in a safe environment. This is not a response to legislation but ensures that all our families enjoy their time at our resort.”
Only in a handful of the stories listed in the “top ten” is there some evidence that spurious safety fears have got in the way of what many might regard as old-fashioned fun.
In all these cases, the HSE is absolutely right to say that the bans have nothing to do with health and safety legislation. They appear to be based, if anything, on worries about the cost of insurance premiums.
And only in the story about Wimbledon fans being banned from “Murray Mount” in bad weather does the authority in question actually cite “health and safety” as the reason behind the decision.
A Wimbledon spokesman was quoted as saying: “The hill has been closed because of the slippery nature of the grass while it is so wet. It is a health and safety issue. We just can’t have people slipping and sliding and falling off the thing and breaking their ankles.”
The spokesman doesn’t appear to be actually blaming health and safety law, just the concept of being concerned about whether someone might come a cropper on the wet grass.
Nevertheless, the story was enough to prompt an open letter from HSE chief executive Judith Hackitt, who told Wimbledon organisers: “People have been walking up and down wet grassy slopes for years without catastrophic consequences. If [you were] concerned about people slipping and suing for their injuries the message should have made clear the decision was ‘on insurance grounds’.”
Whether or not the danger really was enough to justify clearing Murray Mount, the response from Ian Ritchie, Ms Hackitt’s counterpart at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, bears quoting: “It must be entirely inappropriate for the chair of the HSE to make such public comments on specific decisions reached at an event when you have absolutely no knowledge of the circumstances, or the reason for any decision made at the championships.
“It is further regrettable that you made no effort at all to discuss the facts with the c lub prior to your letter being publicly distributed.”
The verdict
Less than half of the “top ten” bizarre bans really stand up to scrutiny, although that hasn’t stopped the employment minister jumping on what is a very popular bandwagon.
It’s a shame the facts behind the HSE’s release aren’t stronger, because the executive does have a good point to make – that the legislation it enforces is rarely to blame for petty bureaucratic attempts to stop people having fun.
If Britain really does have a growing culture of obsession with health and safety, insurance companies may be a better target to lampoon than the government inspectors.
By Patrick Worrall
