Health and Safety Overkill

As a Safety and Health Practitioner of many years i was fascinated to see the topic being debated this morning on Good Morning Britain with Ugo Monye and Amy Nickell but, to hear someone say that wherever a ball is being played with they would expect to be wearing safety goggles is why health and safety gets so much stick.

Ugo made a valid point in that sports are controlled more than ever with no tackling allowed in rugby until the child is a certain age, no heading allowed in football until the child is a certain age and, that the health and safety is controlled by qualified coaches to allow the children to still enjoy the sport in a controlled environment.

I personally feel that the real underpinning problems with health and safety are;

1. it is used as an excuse when an organisation doesn't feel comfortable in staging an event in case something goes wrong and they receive a claim.
2. there are way too many scare mongers making money out of frightening organisations in to costly protection whether it be an accreditation or insurance.

I believe that we should be able to do virtually everything with a robust risk assessment in place, qualified, competent coaches and, development of children's understanding to the dangers without expecting them to be protected from head to toe.

Schools, sports clubs and like-minded organisations should be allowed to put events on and encourage children to play sports for the good of their health and as long as they have someone who is competent, has considered the risks in an assessment then let them enjoy what children for decades have been doing. Unfortunately life is about taking knocks but, that is how we develop as human beings by learning what we are physically capable of doing and enjoying it. As for stopping children playing conkers well least said, look at the likelihood of something going wrong before jumping to banning the game.

We have the same issue whatever sector and age group such as construction in which yes we must, have robust systems in place, we must have robust risk assessments, people need to be supervised and they need training but, do they need to pay for lots of different accreditation which all ask for the same thing but make a lot of money because they have told a local authority or large organisation that unless contractors have their accreditation then they shouldn't use the contractor because they are not proven as safe despite the fact they may have already paid a lot of money achieving another accreditation exactly the same.

I would like to see health and safety as an whole looked at by the Government to see where the common sense element has been lost, look at reducing the number of accreditation companies need to jump through to get work and, stop no win, no fee advertising on radio and television because it has created a blame culture which now sees people moaning about how stupid health and safety has become but, as soon as something goes wrong blaming it on someone else.

Note, these views are my personal views and not connected to any organisation in anyway.