Children and risk

I was at the House of Lords yesterday for the IOSH honorary vice presidents' lunch (apostrophe after the s because there's more than one honorary VP and in fact two new ones were appointed at the lunch: HSE chair Judith Hackitt and the tory peer Lord Brougham and Vaux).

Judith Hackitt gave a speech saying she really wants to draw attention to the worrying signs that there's a generation growing up who will be prevented from going on school trips because they are perceived as dangerous. She was talking about a Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme a couple of weeks back: Cotton Wool Kids, which featured parents explaining why they never let their children out to play with friends and followed one mother driving round town with her young daughter pointing out passers by who looked like kidnappers.

Hackitt says she's woried there'll be a whole load of people entering the workforce who are either "risk naive or risk paranoid".

I half agree and I'll post some thoughts on the other half another time.

On a purely trivial note, the Houses of Parliament are breathtaking, the most impressive of Victorian gothic bling you'll find anywhere in the UK, all intricately carved woodwork and stone and handblocked allpaper. But the tented area on the terrace beside the Thames, where they hold visitors lunches like the IOSH one, is a far cry. It was church-hall chairs and Argos chandeliers and the walls looked like curtain netting. Food was good though.