Tories to crack down on health and safety ‘zealots’

The Tories will use this week’s Conservative Party conference to announce measures to curb what are seen as the excesses of this country’s “compensation culture”.

Lord Young, Mrs Thatcher’s former trade secretary, has drawn up plans to limit laws and regulations that restrict activities on health and safety grounds.

Lord Young said he had uncovered extraordinary examples of unnecessary restrictions on everyday activities. In one instance, a restaurant had refused to give out toothpicks for fear of injury. Elsewhere, a council banned a pancake race because it was raining.

Under his proposals, which are described in today’s Daily Mail –

– Local authorities will pay compensation for wrongly blocking events on health and safety grounds
– Adverts encouraging personal injury claims on a no-win, no-fee basis will be restricted
– Red tape preventing children from going on school outings will be scrapped
– People performing first aid or good Samaritan acts would be exempted from being sued

“I want officials to think twice and make sure they have the authority,” said Lord Young.

And he blamed the Labour government for what he sees as such health and safety excesses. “This sort of nonsense has come from the last government trying to create a nanny state and trying to keep everybody in cotton wool.”

Health and safety - an excuse not to take risks?
On the canal at Camden Lock, north London today, 10 children were out in kayaks, health and safety certainly not hindering their afternoon, writes Channel 4 News reporter Katie Razzall. All had life jackets on of course - and as 13 year old Romany told me: "No running on boatside or you might fall in".

But they were capsizing away merrily, getting thoroughly wet and loving it, under the watchful eye of two instructors from the Pirate's Castle boat club.

Presumably the Conservatives want more of this. It's exactly the message of their tome of choice, The Dangerous Book for Boys, which outlines all the fun to be had when catapult-making and go-carting. Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he wants to get that culture into schools.

Lord Young's review into health and safety makes 40 recommendations to, in his words, get back to a "commonsense" approach for all of us. Councils that ban events will have to compensate if an ombudsmen rules there were no grounds. No-win, no-fee claim advertising will be cracked down on hard. There'll be less form-filling in for schools that want to take their children on trips. And people who act as good Samaritans will be exempted from lawsuits.

Lord Young says it's as much about an attitudinal change as a legislative one. Businesses, he believes, are so fearful of being sued, they over-react. Hence, he says, the example from a man who wrote to him having gone for an italian meal, asked for a zambuca to drink afterwards and been told that he must light it himself "for health and safety reasons".

Lawyers involved in the claims-side of the industry are unhappy with the Young recommendations, but some councils have already reacted positively.

Yet out on the canal, the instructor told Channel 4 News health and safety red tape doesn't ever hold him back. "As long as I'm doing my job, it should work out here. I've never had a problem with health and safety."

In other words, health and safety doesn't actually stop people taking risks. But it is an excuse not to.

In another signal that a reining back of the “nanny state” will form a theme of this year’s Conservative Party conference, Education Secretary Michael Gove announced in today’s Guardian that “no touch” rules discouraging teachers from restraining and comforting children are to be abolished.

“At the moment, if you want to become au fait with what this department thinks on how to keep order in class, you have to read the equivalent of War and Peace,” he said.

“I don’t believe you should be able to hit children, but I do believe that teachers need to know they can physically restrain children, they can interpose themselves between two children that may be causing trouble.”

Just before the general election the Labour government clarified guidance to teachers to say that they could use “reasonable force”. But the then schools secretary, Ed Balls, maintained it was a “myth” that some schools employed no-contact policies.