Health & Safety Gone Mad

I've read with interest the BBC's report into claims that companies and councils have used Health & Safety as an excuse for banning completely reasonable activities. And I've a suspicion that the companies doing it may have other reasons than H&S for these excuses. They may have thought of a way of making money, for example. Banning people from smoking breaks on Health & Safety grounds may give you grumpy smokers in the short term, but long term a healthier workforce that will hopefully be more productive. Although smokers are cheaper to provide pensions to long-term, so I would be interested to see if companies carrying a large final-salary pension liability would be keener on allowing smoking breaks than those that have money-purchase schemes.

Not so Councils. It has long been my belief that anyone of moderate talents with a love of pushing people about and a hatred of people should look for a job as a local goverment Environmental Officer. Here you can pass diktats to your heart's content, impose council facilities where you like, ban things you don't like. And blame health and safety for it all.

Or consider someone who was formerly rubbish at sports and moderate academically? A post awaits you on an LEA. Not that everyone who works in education is like this - as you can tell because if it were thus, marbles, conkers and running-about would be banned in every school in the country. Instead of which there is a light dusting of idiocy across the nation - enough to raise the blood pressure of Daily Mail readers but in fact merely sporadic, and reflecting the distribution of bureaucrats who weren't very good at games.

So Ponsonby Junior, now the Deputy Head of a middle school in the East of England, had a bad experience aged 10 when his little legs couldn't carry him all the way from the launch-board to the sandpit at long jump. Now aged 42 he takes it out on those rotters who laughed at him as he lay there with asphalt burns, by banning long jumping in case sand gets in the little one's eyes, or a cat has been using the sandpit. We all know it's rubbish, but Ponsonby blames H&S.

Little Cassandra was always rubbish at conkers - her over-protective mother always insisted she use an extra-long string because that would stop her losing an eye. Thirty years later she takes it out on the marbles-players - insisting the harmless game must be banned as a choking hazard.

During my time at the Matilda Smith-Williams school for the Daughters of Distressed Gentlefolk, I once had a tooth knocked out by a saucer, thrown through the air by someone whose parents were too poor to own a Frisbee. To this day, cups and saucers are banned for H&S reasons, which is one reason why we are the Beaker Folk.

People of Britain - this is at heart a theological matter. For what these town-hall numpties are doing is denying your human nature. Born in God's image, yet frail and fallible - what are we for if not to learn from our mistakes and to recognise that our fragility and fallibility is a pointer to the Strong Rock who is eternal and without flaw?

Next time somebody tells you that something is for H&S reasons, ask to see their Risk Assessment. And when they say you can't for Data Protection reasons, ask them, quietly and caringly, if that's because one dark day, in 1975, they forgot their kit and had to do PE in their pants. You may be surprised.