We've all come across some of the increasingly ludicrous 'elf and safety rules that pop up now and again, but do they actually make us safer? Author, Tracey Brown argues that, for the most part, they're pretty useless.
Tracey Brown
In the interests of safety
Posted on: Thu 17-Jul-14 10:23:22
(24 comments )
Are you wearing steel toe-capped footwear and non-slip gloves? And protective headwear and safety goggles? Have you checked that it is not windy? Have you erected a scaffold tower? Yes? According to the instruction manual you are now ready to assemble the one-metre-high children’s Chestnut playhouse!
These are patently absurd safety precautions, but the idea that every conceivable danger has to be predicted and stopped is no longer so absurd. It is not just instructions and warnings but rules and regulations, designed to eliminate dangers many of us have never thought of. If you have tried taking more than two small children to a public pool, or left a shampoo bottle in your hand luggage when boarding a plane, used a mobile phone during a hospital stay or sent a 14-year-old to buy a box of Christmas crackers, you’ll have discovered that, in the interests of safety and security, you can’t.
Where did these safety measures come from? And is there any evidence that they are making us safer? Those were questions Michael Hanlon and I asked as we sought the evidence on everything from quarantining pets to switching off your mobile phone at the petrol station. What we discovered was that many things we are asked to do in the interests of safety are a waste of time and money and don't make us safer. Some rules, such as the restrictions on how many children an adult can take to the pool, actually introduce new dangers (not learning to swim). And many of the rules that are cited are not rules at all. The Health and Safety Executive spends a lot of time correcting this: "no, there is no rule against wearing a woolly hat while cleaning the underground".
The Health and Safety Executive spends a lot of time correcting this: "no, there is no rule against wearing a woolly hat while cleaning the underground".
So why are safety instructions proliferating? One reason is that people in authority are nervous about being held responsible. Teachers fill out a 30-page risk assessment form to take pupils to the beach for an art project, in case they should be accused of a failing. (Compare this to the one-page form required for workers on an oil rig.) Councils believe that they have to make playgrounds risk-free zones.
It is also because we are uncomfortable about challenging anything with a safety or security label, especially measures that purport to prevent things like terrorism or child abduction. We know that confiscating a yellow plastic gun from a screaming six-year-old at airport security is pointless - and you’d be right to be sceptical about the whole idea that terrorists are apprehended at check-in rather than by intelligence services - but making a fuss might get the response "are you trying to help the terrorists?"
We might worry that we're robbing our children of their childhood with all these safety fears, but who wants to be seen as against child protection? Many people feel like this. People like Dennis who had played Father Christmas for the children’s dance club run by his daughter and attended by his granddaughter, but was then asked to bow out because of new child safety rules he felt unable to question.
But we can question. Indeed we have to. Because when safety rules are determined by back covering and worst-case scenarios, we are at far greater risk.
In the Interest of Safety: The Absurd Rules That Blight our Lives and How We Can Change Them, by Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon, is published by Sphere and is available from Amazon.