smoking in the van: It's not a fair cop guv

Lots of press coverage about the case of a decorator from Aberystwyth pulled over by council officials and fined for smoking in his own van, see here .

Obviously the papers are doing their usual schtick about the world gone mad, but it's a straightforward contravention of the smoke-free regulations which say that a work vehicle constitutes a workplace and smoking is prohibited.

Except that the Regs (paragraph 4 (1) of the Smoke-free Premises etc. (Wales) Regulations 2007, since you ask) actually say that a vehicle shall be smoke free if it is "used for work purposes by more than one person (even if the persons who use it for such purposes do so at different times, or only intermittently)."

But Gordon Williams the decorator, says he only uses the van himself, so I'm not sure they had him to rights.

Meanwhile if you want to see an open and shut case of someone breaking the law on smoke-free vehicles, there's one here (she's in a hire car)

Another day, another compensation outrage

A householder in greater Leeds has received a compensation claim from a postal worker who slipped on his front steps delivering a letter (see here). The drift of these stories is always that there is a compensation culture gone mad, and fings aint what they used to be.

But is it so unreasonable for someone to take responsibility for the slip resistance of their front steps, especially when there are five of them). The fact that the homeowner says "no one's ever had a problem on them before in the 12 years we've lived here" might just be down to luck and doesn't mean they shouldn't have watched out for wear. Comes down to foreseeability i suppose. It's not that I think private individuals should be risk assessing every potential impace they or their goods could have ad-infinitum, i'm just irked (again) by the national press's assumption that they have a monopoly on common sense.

En standards below ... standard

I hear the HSE is going to challenge some of the European (EN) Standards applied to personal protective equipment (PPE) such as fall arrest equipment, on the basis that they are inadequate compared to the British Standards.

Apparently, in some of the major EU countries the way you get onto a standards-setting board is by paying to be on it. And if you pay enough, you get to chair the board. So they are stuffed with manufacturers who are not always interested in making the standards too demanding.

The downside of free cycles

An unintended consequence of the Velib scheme in Paris (which allows people to pick up one of 16000 bikes placed around the city and rise it for a nominal charge) has been a big hike in road accidents, see here.

Police are blaming it partly on the fact that the Velib riders are less likely to be wearing helmets and hi-vis vests, since it's often a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Presumably, many of them are also less likely to be regular cyclists (or they would have their own bikes) and negotiating Paris traffic is definitely an acquired art.

The two types of health and safety story

Sorry there's been a bit of a hiatus on the blog, we are a staff member down here and it's been a frantic time.

Anyway, just been thinking about two streams of health and safety stories that run in the national press. The first are the ones that exercise IOSH and the HSE so much, that pour scorn on H&S as a disipline for being over-nannying and proscriptive, banning hanging baskets, conker games and so on.

The other strand is the ones about Personal injury claims against employers for unusual accidents, as with the case in the past few days of the school caretaker who has won the right to pursue a claim for £50,000 against Hampshire County Council for not training him to use a stepladder, see here.

What they never seem to comment on is the causal link between the two trends (assuming the first one actually is a trend). There are plenty of references to the compensation culture and how we are becoming as litigious as the Americans, but nobody seems to be pointing up the fact that if employers keep shelling out, or rather their liability insurers do, of course they are going to be more risk averse and be restricting anything not essential to their core activities (whether its educating children or making diesel injectors) that would risk an increase in their insurance premia.

There's nothing unusual about the mainstream press having their cake and eating it, but the HSE, in concentrating on the individual cases, as in their myth of the month campaign, might be missing a chance to draw attention to the bigger picture.