All this “elfansafety”
I spent five years as the national health & safety officer of a major British trade union, so I become very concerned when I hear the media alleging that we’ve become health & safety mad (as in this story from the “Daily Mail”) and some politicians insisting that expenditure of health & safety should be cut (as in this speech by David Cameron).
Often the media and the politicians will justify their argument with a case which is apparently an over-zealous application of safety rules or precautions – except that often these cases are simply apocryphal and totally untrue.
It’s got so bad that the Health and Safety Executive collates and publishes on its web site all these myths – see here.
December 5th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Do you remember when BT (as it was then) won an award because we went a whole year without an ‘accidental’ death in the business? Wonder what happened to the plaque.