[BITList] Health and safety rules should have a get-out clause | Barbara Ellen | Comment is free | The Observer

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Health and safety rules should have a get-out clause
The rules are there to keep us safe. But we also need a team of people who could give permission for them to be waived


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Barbara Ellen
The Observer, Sunday 20 November 2011			         
Article history
In 2008, Alison Hume, a 44-year-old lawyer and mother of two, fell down a disused mine shaft, suffering a collapsed lung and several broken bones. Although Strathclyde Fire and Rescue arrived swiftly, she was left for eight hours because the senior officer present refused to stray from guidelines, stating that they were only allowed to winch other fire personnel to safety. Finally pulled up by a mountain rescue team, Ms Hume suffered a heart attack bought on by hypothermia and died. Public fury would suggest that its not only Ms Hume's family who believe the fall alone wasn't responsible for her death, and that "health and safety" should be in the dock.

This isn't an isolated case: in 2007, 10-year-old Jordan Lyon drowned in a pond, watched by two police community officers, who said that regulations barred them from rescuing him. Earlier this year, Simon Burgess, 41, suffered a blackout and drowned in 3ft of water, because police, firemen and paramedics at the scene were instructed to wait for a specialised rescue team. Such incidents eat like a cancer into the trust the British public have for the emergency services. Horrible enough to lose a loved one, but how much worse to lose them because some jobsworth with a clipboard was following regulations? Still, as the nation rushes to burn health and safety at the stake, could we really do without it?

To my mind, it's dangerous nonsense to dismiss all health and safety as hot air and red tape. Its origins lie in the desire to protect vulnerable workforces – everyone from miners and builders to farm and factory workers, including children, who were exposed to mercury, asbestos and pesticides, or worked with machinery that maimed and killed. Many are still killed every year in work-related incidents, with even more left in unsatisfactory conditions. All this considered, I have more respect for the basic premise of health and safety, than for employers who endlessly whinge about how annoying and expensive it is to treat their workforce fairly. However, this does not excuse the stifling of our emergency services, or the deaths of Alison Hume, Jordan Lyon and Simon Burgess.

The public needs to believe in the emergency services, for what is the alternative? People losing faith and taking crises into their own hands – embarking on "vigilante" rescue missions, that are ill-considered and dangerous?

Saying that, it might be time to drop the unjust attitude that emergency services personnel are always in the wrong for not tearing up the rule book, and performing rescues regardless. These are real professional lives – not movies where the maverick hero breaks the rules and saves the day. It is unfair to place our emergency services in an ongoing moral maze, where they risk being sacked and/or sued for not following guidelines. No one could work like that.

Is it inconceivable to find a middle ground? Couldn't there be a division of 999 to deal with truly exceptional emergency situations: a hotline that firemen, police officers or paramedics could ring, explain the special circumstances, and receive instant official permission to proceed? Basically, a health and safety waiver, granted by a team of operatives, maybe including retired professionals and volunteer members of the public, who've been trained to quickly assess individual scenarios.

This wouldn't be the end of bad judgment calls, but it would at least remove the burden of sole responsibility from personnel at the scene. It would also take minutes, rather than the ghastly eight hours endured by a mother as she lay dying in a mine shaft. While human error will always be with us, Alison Hume's life could so easily have been saved. Health and safety isn't quite the bureaucratic bogeyman that it's widely painted to be, but maybe it's time to consider a back-up plan.

Characters, not glamour models, are what we need

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