Here's Melanie Phillips writing in that rag we try not to mention ...
Health ’n’ safety? It’ll kill you. Or so runs the long-standing joke. What was once thought of as black humour, however, now turns out to be all too horribly true.
A document that surfaced yesterday illustrated the almost unbelievable extent to which health and safety regulations are preventing our emergency services from saving lives. This was a three-page risk assessment questionnaire, which Metropolitan Police officers have to fill in before they can intervene in an emergency.
One might think that what matters in such cases is the risk to the public. But no — what is to be assessed is the risk to the police. The form lists no fewer than 238 possible hazards to officers planning any kind of operational activity, such as security at a football match, or mounting an operation to deal with an emergency, such as a bombing or a riot. The senior officer involved must tick the relevant boxes, fill in an inventory of ‘risk activities’, calculate levels of risk and submit their recommendation for the assessment to be confirmed and signed.
Such a form — which has its equivalent in other emergency services — is more than just a bureaucratic pain in the neck. It comes close to redefining the word ‘risk’ to encompass the whole of human life. For it is hard to think of any situation which it does not consider to pose a threat to an officer’s health or safety.
Its exhaustive list of dangers range from ‘gravity’, ‘friction’, ‘ejection’ or ‘slippery surfaces’ to the laugh-out-loud ‘uncomfortable seating’, ‘passive smoking’ and ‘sunburn’. You really do have to wonder about the faceless bureaucrats who dream up this kind of nonsense. Can they really do so with a straight face? Is there perhaps a fifth column of anarchists in Whitehall seeking revenge upon society by passing such ludicrous, lethal and self-defeating laws?
Can one imagine anything more ridiculous than having to fill in this form just after a terrorist bomb has gone off? The very fact that such ‘risks’ have to be weighed up threatens to paralyse the emergency services and lead to the deaths of victims if officers don’t have a comfy chair to sit on, for example, or if the sun is shining.
Yet, appallingly, such paralysis is precisely what did happen. At the inquest into the 7/7 London Tube and bus bombings, in which 52 people died, distressing evidence has surfaced that station staff and fire officers refused to enter the Tube tunnels to help the wounded and dying because of health and safety regulations.
At Liverpool Street station, none of the staff was sent down to the track for 25 minutes after the explosion, as a British Transport Police officer forbade them from going to investigate.
At Aldgate station, lion-hearted Tube employees ignored such safety concerns voiced by their superiors and rushed to help the bomb victims.
Yet one of the survivors, Michael Henning, told the inquest how, after he had stumbled to safety from the wreckage of the train, he pleaded in vain with a group of emergency workers to go underground and help the injured and dying passengers.
Shockingly, the firefighters on the station platform explained in embarrassment that they had been ordered to stay out of the tunnel because of safety protocols and fears of a second explosion.
During the 40 minutes it took for the rescue services to go in, victims died of their injuries with no one coming even to ease their pain. Had help come sooner, some lives might even have been saved.
This shameful revelation prompted former Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner David Gilbertson to write an impassioned cri de coeur about the way health and safety laws force the emergency services to do nothing while people die. Last June, he recalled, an ambulance crew in Cumbria was widely criticised for standing by for vital hours while the gunshot victims of taxi driver Derrick Bird bled to death.
The explanation given later was that the crew had been refused permission to advance by the police because of fears that Bird might open fire on them. He was already dead.
A generation of senior police, fire and ambulance officers, wrote Mr Gilbertson despairingly, has grown up in an environment where avoidance of risk and the fear of being sued are more important than public duty.
Recently, the former Conservative minister Lord Young produced a report aimed at addressing the ‘compensation culture’ by reforming health and safety laws. But this was mainly concerned with lessening these laws’ stifling effects upon businesses and curbing the excesses of lawyers and insurance companies. It referred only briefly to the emergency services, merely recommending that police and firefighters should not face prosecution if they put themselves at risk when committing a heroic act.
But what about acts that are not necessarily heroic but merely part of their normal duty as police officers or firefighters? And what about ambulance crews? Moreover, Lord Young blunted his own message by suggesting that public concern over health and safety measures had been largely whipped up by a sensational media.
Well, some individual stories may have been incorrect. But as the evidence at the 7/7 inquest or from Mr Gilbertson all too graphically demonstrates, the pernicious effects of health and safety protocols are emphatically not the product of fevered media imaginations.
Indeed, at another inquest in Kettering, Northamptonshire, only last Thursday, it was revealed that a passer-by who had jumped into an icy lake to help a drowning man had asked the fire crew on the scene to help tie a rope around him. They refused because their manager decided they only had ‘basic water awareness training’. As a result, the man drowned.
A more invidious and inappropriate application of health and safety rules than thwarting the life-saving work of the emergency services can hardly be imagined. Public protection necessarily entails risk and risk demands courage. And there is no shortage of selfless courage among police officers and firefighters. The terrible thing is the way health and safety laws are sapping the courage of officers whose natural instinct to put the lives of others first is being suppressed by orders from above. As Mr Gilbertson observed, the virtues of leadership, initiative, judgment and duty are thus being steadily destroyed.
Perhaps his most devastating observation of all was that when police bravery awards are annually announced, superior officers ‘visibly blanch’. Where others see heroes being decorated for acting without regard to their own safety, he wrote, these paper-shufflers see only potential lawsuits, insurance claims and breaches of force discipline.
How on earth has this nation of heroes and stoics arrived at such a point?
Part of the reason is the culture of entitlement, which makes people put themselves first and provides such rich pickings for lawyers and insurance companies which feed from this honeypot. Because people demand their entitlement from the state, this in turn gives the state power to meddle in their lives — which it uses to tell us how we should behave.
Accordingly, such rules are codified into laws to protect us — from ourselves. Such interference has dealt a lethal blow to professionalism, the very basis of which lies in unwritten codes based on duty and responsibility to the public. Health ’n’ safety is not a joke. It has become, in effect, a killer. It will take more than one rather bland and incoherent report to restore this enfeebled nation to real safety and health.
The GOS says: This morning Mrs.GOS gave me a large cardboard box to put in the recycling bin. I took it into the garden and stamped on it to fold it up. Unfortunately it was made of rather stern stuff, this cardboard box, so to crush it I had to actually stand on top of it and jump up and down.
You get the picture? 68-year-old man bouncing on large cardboard box on concrete patio, next to garden pond, wearing no safety helmet and having completed no risk assessment? The inevitable happened: I fell flat on my back. Well, my front, to be strictly accurate.
And do you know the most uncanny thing?
I wasn't hurt, not even a tiny bit. That'll teach me.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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