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.