Lifeboats, lost cats and Wellington boots

The tail end of Summer has seen a spate of stories about minor officials with an acute grasp of the regulations and no brain. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency would rather see a girl drown in compliance with the rules than save her by breaching them. Chichester Council declined to pick up rubbish in a four inch deep stream because they had no-one qualified to wear Wellington boots. And a Canterbury council official threatened a 13 year old boy with an ASBO and an £80 fine for putting up notices about his lost cat.

When Gordon Brown looks back over New Labour’s failures he will find that much of the hatred which he and Labour have inspired will derive from the uncontrolled zeal of stupid officials like this. Labour has created the context – an avalanche of petty regulation and armies of petty pen-pushers to enforce them. There is an economic cost to add to all the other economic costs – compliance amounts to an additional tax and all these dim little people have to be paid for – but the cost in popular support is greater.

BSI urges new trough for tree inspectors

One of the most despised features of the Blair-Brown years is the number of busybodies who get their noses into the trough by inciting new inspection regimes in areas which pose no significant risk. The latest is trees which, the British Standards Institution urge, should be subject to checking by a “trained person” every three years and to a full “expert inspection” by an arboriculturalist every five years. There will, of course, be hefty fees payable for this.

elf’n safety kills another grand national tradition

Another one of those nice little English traditions was killed off today at Aintree. The Grand National winner is usually led into the winner’s enclosure by mounted policemen in plumed hats (see photograph). This, we now learn, is incredibly dangerous, and some little pen-pusher with a small mind has banned it.

We have not seen the copious risk-assessment which was presumably filled out to reach this conclusion, so we do not know how many dead and injured there have been in past years. I imagine it was the usual story – someone with power to interfere did so just to show they could.

Banning tea, ladders and school outings

Three recent stories show us not only where the world is going but where our money is going.

An art student writes to the Times to say that he had gone into college to find that he was booked in for a two hour session on how to use a ladder.

An art teacher interviewed in the Times said that he cannot take children on a spontaneous visit to the art gallery across the road from the school because of the complex risk assessment forms he would have to fill out.

The School Food Trust suggests that children under 16 should not be allowed tea or coffee because it has minimal nutritional value and because of the health and safety implications.

The people responsible for this sort of nonsense have far greater power over our everyday life than Gordon Brown does. Who gave it to them? Why do we put up with it? What does it all cost, in pure cash terms, never mind the cultural and other losses?

Ladders are a particular obsession with the heath and safety pygmies. They are banned almost everywhere, so that scaffolding or expensive towers must be hired to change light bulbs or to perform similar simple tasks. The people who ordain this are themselves immune from considerations of expense or practicality – it is not their money and every new restriction (which generally need no consideration by Parliament) helps create more work for the expanding public service. In other words, it keeps the civil servants in jobs.

I have come across these school risk assessments or, rather, the parental forms which underlie them. One of my children was due to attend a lecture on philosophy at the Town Hall. The form we had to complete included a question as to his ability to swim, which I was invited to rate on a scale. I said that I thought his swimming ability was adequate for attendance at a philosophy lecture in the Town Hall, and I pictured some dim little “officer” at Oxfordshire County Council diligently typing it all into a computer. I consoled myself with the thought that at least they had the information now and could just look it up when the need next arose. Not a bit of it. Not long afterwards, my son had to do something similarly dangerous, and another blank copy of the same form appeared. The whole thing is a meaningless formality, an unnecessary burden on teachers and no more than a job creation exercise for council officials.

As to the tea, what is the School Food Trust? I think it was set up as a sop to Jamie Oliver after his campaign for proper food in schools (remember that? – the government rushed to announce that it had set money side for a new “initiative”, which proved to be money already budgeted for). Its nutrition director, one Dr Michael Nelson, said that children needed to be encouraged to choose water or more nutritious options such as fruit juice or milk. “If you want children to eat more healthily, then the range of choice in schools needs to be restricted to healthier options only”.

There was no suggestion that tea or coffee was unhealthy – indeed there is evidence to the contrary – nor any supporting evidence to support the alleged health and safety risk, but here you get some jumped-up little pen-pusher seeking to deny children a harmless drink on the grounds that they must be “encouraged” to have things which “they” thought better for them. It is all very New Labour, so very Caroline Flint-ish.

Why do we stand for it? There is more to all this than denial of choice – that choice which New Labour claims so loudly to promote. All these things create unnecessary jobs for people who would otherwise be unemployed, involve expense both to the state and to the end-user, and (as with the abandoned visits to the art gallery), deprive people of useful, educative, or just plain enjoyable things.

Home

Googling for Caroline Flint’s bits

Time for an update on the continuing saga of Caroline Flint’s body parts.

Regular readers will recall that I have a double interest in Caroline Flint (see the posts here). One was deliberate – as a libertarian smoker, I have a deep hatred of politicians and others who think they know better than I do what is right for me. She also gave me a model piece for testing theories about Google searching.

Risk adversity at the swimming pool

The point of a council swimming pool is to teach youngsters how to swim, from flapping around in arm-bands and their mothers’ arms, to jumping and and larking about as teenagers. In that safe environment, they can learn how to cope when they go to Marbella with their mates, or fall off a boat, jump into a quarry or get swept away in a fast-flowing river. The whole point is to replicate everything about the experience except the actual danger of the open water.

The worst thing they will find at a council swimming pool is a dreary-voiced functionary telling them what not to do. Three boys were thrown out of Harlow pool last week because they were wearing the long shorts which are fashionable at the moment. The drag of the material could hamper their swimming apparently. But if that is what they are going to wear in real life, then surely that is what they should swim in at the council pool. Many dangerous situations in fact arise when they are fully clothed.

HSE buries its towels slip

Despite its famously frank Chairman, the Health and Safety Executive seems very coy about its widely-derided research into bathroom slippages. We investigate the missing web site entry.

Poor Sir Bill Callaghan. The boss of the Health and Safety Commission (and through it the Health and Safety Executive) has tried very hard to distance himself and his organisation from the “jobsworth rulings that threaten seemingly innocent traditions and pastimes” that would “wrap kids in cotton wool and bind up businesses with red tape” as the Times’ Public Agenda put it last week in a sympathetic interview.

The HSC and HSE (soon to be merged, apparently) govern workplace safety, and are there to stop children being sent up chimneys or lathe operators from losing their fingers. The people who ban conker fights, chop down trees in case children climb them, condemn doormats as a trip hazard and hanging baskets in case they fall on us, are usually dim little ferret-faced men from local councils, with clip-boards where their brains should be and an exaggerated sense of their own importance.