Health & Safety NOT Going Mad

Contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, health and safety is not going mad. It's one of the most ridiculous areas of self perpetuating mythology in the modern tabloid press, alongside its supposedly ever maddening little brother political correctness.

The mythology is so strong that the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) was motivated to keep a log of health and safety myths that had been reported as fact on numerous occasions by newspapers that really should know better if they weren't busy pedalling an agenda and unwilling to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

We've all heard the myths, everything from children being banned from playing conkers, office workers banned from putting up Christmas decorations, pin the tail on the donkey being banned, candy floss on a stick being outlawed, pantomime dames being banned from throwing sweets, pancake races being banned, adults being banned from putting plasters on kids etc. All of which totally untrue, but if the Daily Express and Daily Mail hadn't printed an of them they'd be reduced to a single sheet of A5 on most days.

Aberfan coal tip collapses onto a primary school in 1966 (Source: here)

Let's rewind a bit to understand why the concept of health and safety even came about. Following the industrial revolution, the rural poor got sucked into urban industrial jobs to escape the ever repeating cycle of famines and bad harvests for the promise of a captive source of income. The urban poor wasn't educated or particularly mobile, and so had to settle for whatever work was available to feed their families. At the time there was practically no legislation on workplace safety or public safety, meaning that unimaginably dangerous situations were allowed to exist at work and in public places causing deaths, often in hundreds at a time in a way that would be unthinkable today. In some cases, incredible lapses in basic safety were causing deaths in their hundreds well into recent years.

There were pit disasters with hundreds of deaths at a time, outbreaks of cholera due to appalling public sanitation, ships sinking without enough lifeboats for the number of people on board, gas explosions killing hundreds, mining waste piled high collapsing onto a school, there were fires in wooden stands and crushes in unsuitable stands at football matches, ferries that sank having set sail with their car doors open, tube station fires under rubbish filled escalators, fires in badly designed buildings made from flammable plastic, and so-on, all of which were preventable, and which caused from under a hundred to over a thousand deaths each.

Kids in mines with no safety gear (Source: socialstudieshelp.com)

Many famous buildings were built with an alarmingly high cost of human life to those workers building them. It is estimated that 30,000 people died building the Panama Canal and 500 died building Egypt's Aswan Dam, around a hundred workers died building the Hoover Dam and five workers died constructing the Empire State Building. Without some basic health and safety legislation in place, workers would still be dying in droves today, just like the estimated 900 construction deaths involved in building Quatar's World Cup venues. In the UK in 2013/2014 there were just two deaths per 100,000 workers, by contrast.

In many cases there was little or no legislation compelling companies to make sure their business wasn't profiting at the expense of hazard of death to the general public, The Health & Safety legislation that does now exist to deal with some of these glaring issues was brought in to deal with things like chemical hazards, the sale of dangerous goods, the use of things like lead and asbestos in construction, issuing of safety equipment to workers in dangerous conditions, and so on. You'll notice that there's precious little in there about conkers, Christmas decorations and pin the tail on the donkey.

The following HSE graph shows the decline in workplace deaths since 1974 from over 600 to fewer than 200 by 2014, as a direct result of better workplace safety. One can only imagine what the equivalent fatality figures were for Victorian times, where kids and adults alike worked dangerously long hours in dark, cramped conditions with heavy machinery and no safety gear:

Source: HSE stats on Workplace Deaths 1974 - 2014

If you want to point the finger at why some individual schools and business have chosen to put up a notice forbidding something relatively trivial on their premises, then look no further at the rise in litigious culture whereby parents will sue a business and seek compensation for an accident that befell their little Johnny. And that's the fault of societal greed and no-win-no-fee legal firms, not some left wing Health & Safety Gone Mad epidemic.