No sooner had David Cameron criticised the spread of health and safety legislation than he was accused of retelling myths, as if all those splendid examples of healthy trees being cut down in case they fell on someone, or children being forbidden to play conkers were, well, a load of hoary chestnuts.
The tragic thing is, they’re not all myths. We wish they were. I certainly wished they were the freezing night I stopped to help a van stuck on a patch of ice on a narrow lane, in remote countryside. Inside were eight strapping teenage girls on the way to a holiday for the socially disadvantaged; in the driver’s seat was a young woman social worker.
I could not manoeuvre my car into a position where I could tow the stranded vehicle, but with a small push — a metre or so — they would be on their way. Easy, I thought. The girls got out of the van and I marshalled them around the back. Just as she was about to engage the clutch, however, the social worker leant out of the window.
“The girls might get hurt,” she said. “Stand back, you lot. Don’t touch the van.”
And so it was that, closely observed by an audience of young women possessing the combined weight of the Welsh forward pack, I single-handedly tried to push a three-tonne Transit a few inches along a road. It was one of those embarrassing epiphanies: I can still see myself in the starlight, bent double, while the girls stood sniggering at the crazy woman who had appeared out of the night.
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Dignity lost, I organised a tow for them, but it was hours before they were on the move again, and I never fully resolved the incident in my own mind. Who was the bigger fool? Me, clearly. Whose risk assessment was the right one — mine or the social worker’s? How could one person’s learnt attitude to danger be so different to another’s? And, most crucially, what message did it reinforce in those girls: that their role was one of perpetual victim, rather than rescuer; that they must always rely on others?
What I came to realise, with some sadness, was that the prevailing safety culture closely resembles state censorship. It works most powerfully not in its actual application but in people’s anticipation of its application, which is much, much worse. Its sin is not to be deliberately obstructive; it is to encourage large numbers of people to disempower others needlessly in a myriad small ways.
For those middle managers in the public sector, already trained to think defensively, the safest position is always to be the one where they say no. Not so much cowardly, just a position where there is no comeback.
Hence the mission creep that has affected health and safety legislation so drastically, and given it such a risible reputation. Protecting people from harm is indeed a noble cause — both Mr Cameron and the trade union movement agree on that — and has saved many lives, but the concept of health and safety in the workplace has become fatally mixed up with the concept of public liability and spilt over into home, school and play.
When my mother got dementia, we sought home care from the council, as one is entitled to do in Scotland, but were turned down after a risk assessment by the local council’s health and safety officer decreed our private farm road was “too dangerous in icy or snowy conditions” for the carers to use. What was behind his decision? The reasoning, one presumes, that if a carer crashed (though no one else ever has) she could sue her employer. Big “if”, that one.
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But isn’t that the crux? That we have lost the art of judging “ifs”? Risk assessments have replaced personal judgment, and must be enforced by the shadowy threat of litigation, job loss and personal ruin. And yes, there may be ludicrous urban legends about conkers and scissors, born of antipathy to health and safety, but like all myths they carry a symbolic truth. Which is that the critical balance, the individual skill of taking a reasoned perspective, is being lost.
What saddens me, too, is that there has been a political land grab on health and safety. For years, the British population have been happily dealing with it by themselves, mumping and moaning in an Eeyorish, non-partisan way about its excesses. But a few months out from the general election, the politicians have moved on to our patch, stolen our ball.
What was a pleasant national pastime has suddenly been divided down intensely party political lines. If you criticise health and safety, you are now a heartless, exploitative Tory. If, on the other hand, you hold health and safety sacred on account of it saving thousands of workers from being maimed or killed, then you’re a left-wing grunt.
All this tribal stuff is a shame, because, as ever, it opens the door and allows the truth to escape. Health and safety legislation in the workplace is largely admirable, but it has bred a culture of overcaution that, unchecked, is damaging far more lives than it saves.