Longrider

Having some involvement with safety management, I was drawn in when I saw an interesting comment in the Telegraph yesterday regarding our current propensity for health and safety legislation and the enforcers; the Health and Safety Executive. This was prompted by a story about the fitting of streetlights in Cumbria.

“The lights may soon be going out in part of the Lake District after health and safety officers said workmen must not climb ladders to replace bulbs.In the past contractors have gone aloft to repair and maintain street lights in Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale.”

On the face of it, this sounds rather silly. What it is referring to (somewhat obliquely) is the regulations for working at height brought in late last year. This is a consequence of ongoing workplace accidents involving people falling from heights. There was a mini furore as people managed to misrepresent the legislation and decided that workers could no longer use ladders and window cleaners would go out of business and other such nonsense. The regulations do not say that workers cannot use ladders; merely that the risks be assessed and appropriate control measures put in place. So, returning to the streetlights saga:

“But now Amey, the company that carries out the work for South Lakeland district council, has ruled that its staff will no longer be using ladders on certain lampposts.”

The reason will be that whoever assessed the risk decided that the location of these lamp posts made the risk unacceptable. Given that risk assessment is always going to be subjective, another assessor might reach a different conclusion. Whatever; it does not meant that the bulbs cannot be replaced, simply that a different means of accessing them be used - and there are plenty of alternatives to a ladder. This is, frankly, a non-story whipped up to make a point. A point badly made, I feel, because it is such a silly and unsustainable story - the point, however, is one worth making.

In it’s opinion piece, the Telegraph has damning words for the HSE (Health and Safety Executive):

“The aggrandisement of the government inspector, and the accompanying ascendancy of the compensation culture, are making our businesses less enterprising, our people less responsible and our country less free.”

My own experience with this orgainsation was on the railways - here they operate as the HMRI (Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate) same organisation, same silliness. I recall an improvement notice being imposed on a level crossing because the white lines were not in accordance with the parliamentary order for that crossing. They were too short, I recall. Well, yes, they were. However, Railtrack didn’t paint the lines, the local authority did. And, more importantly, the effect on the safe operation of the crossing was zero, none, nil, nada, zilch - yet these people were prepared to close it down because it breached “safety rules”.

Meetings with these people were often fraught because they came with the attitude that we were guilty of a breach and were prepared to look for it - it was not unusual for a meeting to conclude with a threat of prosecution being issued somewhere in the proceedings. It was the HSE that decided permissive working (two trains in a platform) was so unsafe that we had to stop drivers at inbound signals to tell them that there was a train in the platform. The driver, naturally would respond by pointing out that the signal told them this - that’s how railway signalling works. Never mind lamp bulbs, I’ve got plenty of stories of HSE stupidity.

But. But. But. I don’t subscribe to the assertion that common law alone is the ultimate panacea.

In the wake of the Aberfan disaster, the Robens committee concluded (among other things) that there was too much law. The outcome was that much of this law was replaced by the Health & Safety at Work Etc, Act (1974). This act applies to all workplaces and work practices. In essence, it places a duty on the employer to assess the risk of the operation and who is likely to be affected and to put in place appropriate management and control measures. It is delightfully simple. Relying on common law alone did little for the victims of Aberfan. And, in the case of large corporations, the cost of litigation may be less than the cost of effective risk management. In such cases, it would be tempting for unscrupulous employers to opt for the minimum risk. Relying on them concluding that their reputation would be tarnished and effective safety systems is in their best interests is naive - and for some, fatal. After all, even with health and safety law, there are still employers who will take shortcuts and risk the safety of their employees. So, I steer a middle course. I believe the HASAWA combined with common law litigation is a pragmatic approach. Also, a successful prosecution will make subsequent civil actions more likely to succeed.

Unfortunately, some twenty years after the HASAWA entered the statute book, employers still didn’t get it. So we had the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (1992) as amended in (1999) and (2001) that specifically state the requirement for risk assessment. There were also other regulations such as Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (1992), (1999) and (2002), PPE, Display Screen Equipment and…. Oh, I could go on, but you get the gist. The problem is that they all say much the same thing; assess the risk and put in control measures.

HSC (Health and Safety Commission) guidance offers a control hierarchy that starts with removing the risk entirely through managing it, using guards and fences, for example, to personal Protective Equipment. Although some of the guidance provided with the regulations is useful to someone carrying out an assessment, common sense will see you though. After all, do you need guidance to tell you that you will look at the proximity to a casualty unit and the hours that the company is working when deciding how many first-aiders to appoint? It isn’t difficult. Do we really need a set of regulations and guidance notes to tell us this?

A colleague of mine recently worked out that there are 11 million words of health and safety legislation on the UK statue book. I suggest that we are back to where Robens was in 1971 and that we have too much law. Consequently, I find myself broadly agreeing with the Telegraph’s conclusion:

“English common law, in particular contract and tort law, has always offered redress to an employee who has been injured because of his boss’s negligence.The difference is that the HSE does not need to prove injury or, indeed, negligence.

Since its powers were bolstered by John Prescott, the HSE has become perhaps the single greatest drag on our competitiveness.

Worse, it has infantilised us, teaching us to blame others rather than take responsibility for ourselves. Yet there is no evidence that it has made anyone healthier or safer.

It should be closed down.”

My own suggestion is that we keep the HASAWA and strip out all the delegated legislation. But that would be too simple.
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So Nick Griffin and Mark Collett walk free from Leeds Crown court.

“A jury at Leeds Crown Court has cleared BNP leader Nick Griffin of two racial hatred charges and BNP activist Mark Collett of four others.

The jury was discharged after failing to reach verdicts on the remaining charges - four against Mr Collett and two against Mr Griffin.”

I can’t say that I am over surprised - but, then, these charges should never have been brought.

“Mr Griffin said the verdicts were a “tremendous victory for freedom”.”

Well, well, well, I’d never have thought it, I agree with Mr Griffin. His views may be odious, but in a civilised and free society he should be free to voice them.

Hat tip to Nosemonkey

Further to the childish furore over the infamous Mohammed cartoons published last year by Jyllands-Posten, British Muslims are planning to protest outside the Danish Embassy later today. They claim that this is not a threat to freedom of speech.

“It was a “question of exercising good judgment”, said Inayat Bunglawala, from the Muslim Council of Britain.”

Quite. In a free, democratic society, they have every right to protest their displeasure. I do hope they appreciate the irony therein…
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The only fraud in the latest figures being touted by Andy Burnham today is in the figures themselves. As with the £1.3bn figure last year, this is obfuscation with which to try and foist the identity cards and the national identity register on an increasingly sceptical nation. Indeed, the figures appear to have been plucked out of the air and have nothing to do with identity theft at all. A couple of examples worth mentioning, though, as they provide a modicum of amusement among the depressing dross:

Telecoms£372m - Telecoms not included in 2002 study. The cost of identity-related fraud is a substantial component of the total fraud/revenue loss in the telecoms sector.

Meaning what, exactly? Oh, I know, telecoms is a growing sector and it sounds all technical, let’s include that this year.

DVLA£2.5m - Estimated cost of operational activity required to help prevent abuse of the driving licence in identity crime.

Do me a favour! The DVLA is as incompetent and negligent as the home office when it comes to data management. They can’t even get peoples’ driving licences right.

Department for Constitutional Affairs£29.9m - Unpaid fines due to tracking problems - this is due
to a number of reasons including false information being provided to the Police.

£5.9m - Unpaid fines due to identity problems i.e. many people issued with fines do not turn up at courts to verify their alleged name and address. Given this, courts find it difficult to enforce the payment of a fine because they are not certain the identity on the fine is a true identity (many fines get issued to fictitious identities or identities with inaccurate spellings).

Giving a false name to the police or not turning up to verify one’s address is not identity fraud - it is lying, plain and simple. There is nothing here to suggest that people are cloning identities (which is identity fraud) in order to avoid a parking fine.

However, all that aside, Burnham comes out with the usual claptrap that I’ve come to expect of a contemptible, lying shit trying to sell me a product I neither want nor need.

“Mr Burnham told Today there were “a range of things people can do to protect themselves” - but compulsory national identity cards would be “a major breakthrough”.”

Bollocks! They will be nothing of the sort. As is usual, this is a “solution” that desperately seeks a problem to fix - yet can’t actually fix anything. Unless you consider the option for the government to engage in mass surveillance of the UK population; then it makes remarkable sense.

When listening to any spokesperson from the home office and deciding whether what they have to say carries any credibility, it is as well to bear in mind that this is the same organisation that has just failed its audit following financial irregularities that would see anyone in a private sector orgnisation being sacked or even prosecuted. We are supposed to believe this twaddle?! From people who have comprehensively demonstrated their own incompetence?

Let’s look at Buffoon Burnham’s logic, shall we?

“We have all kinds of stand-in documents being called upon as identity documents - birth certificates, utility bills,” said the minister.”The truth is these do not prove identity.”

Quite right, they don’t. Neither does an identity card. Because, it is these very low level documents that will be used to populate the national identity register with its core information upon which to create the identity that the home office sees fit to bestow on us - the same incompetent home office that can’t manage its own accounts and has been criticized for its crime statistics. So, I guess, we will have to rely on those “background checks” the muddleheaded minister for mass surveillance wants to carry out. What will they be? And, given that there are something like 48 million adults, just how in-depth will they be and how long will it take? Crucially, will those checks be as thorough as the home office accounts and crime figures? And, given that biometrics won’t be a factor for Internet or cardholder not present transactions (which are not identity fraud anyway), how is it going to make any difference to them? The best way of securing our identities (apart from shredding sensitive documents) is to make sure that incompetent and corrupt government departments have absolutely nothing to do with them.

Paying the home office for an identity card will be like buying a used car from Arthur Daley or Del Boy Trotter. Indeed, I’d trust the accounting of those two over Burnham’s brigade any day.

Update: According to the government figures, the APACS losses are £504.8m and they give a breakdown. However, according to APACS only £36.9m is down to identity theft. The rest is just straightforward card fraud. Now, what was that about liars? So, as is usual, the home office is lying to us. Well, there’s a surprise. Anyone got Arthur Daley’s number, perchance?

I first heard about this story on Jeremy Vine’s radio show this afternoon. Mr and Mrs Cooper were interviewed about their recent experience when Mr Cooper was issued with a £50 fixed penalty notice for feeding the birds in Kiveton Park:

“George and Janine Cooper were secretly filmed for four days as they made their “seed run” around their village of Kiveton Park, near Rotherham, South Yorks.

They set off at 7am with five bags of bird food, which they make from bird seed, sultanas, sunflower seed, water and scraps of bread.

Mr and Mrs Cooper use five regular feeding points, including a bluebell wood and a paved area near the village library.

They were shocked when two wardens appeared from the shadows and gave them the £50 fixed penalty notice for dropping litter. The wardens said that CCTV cameras had been tracking their movements for days.”

So, clearly the wardens had nothing better to do for four days. As one caller pointed out, they could have been dealing with youths riding motorcycles on footpaths, or using the car park as a race track, or dog walkers who don’t clear up after their animals - real nuisances, rather than a couple going along with the RSPB’s recommendation to feed wild birds.

What a wretched, pathetic world we now inhabit; where mean, small minded officials representing even meaner, smaller minded borough councils have nothing better to do than harass innocent people who are doing nothing more than feeding birds. It is not littering. Mrs Cooper explained on Jeremy Vine’s show that they buy pre-prepared seed with raisins and nuts designed for wild birds. Wild birds that are in decline and that they felt would benefit from their actions.

Most reasonable people would concur with them. Who has not stopped for a moment to feed the birds? Certainly Mrs Longrider and I occasionally wander down to the river in Lodève and feed the ducks. The ducks like it and there is something tranquil about the experience. The excuse given by environmental officers and the councils is that such activity encourages vermin - rats and mice, for example. As Mrs Cooper pointed out, within an hour and a half, the birds have devoured the offerings leaving nothing for any rats or mice. The rats make the most of the real litter outside the local chippie, which, incidentally, she says the local environment officers have ignored…

In the meantime, Mr Cooper has been served with a notice from the council:

“Rotherham borough council has since posted the notice to them, demanding payment within 14 days, with the threat of a £2,500 fine or even jail unless they comply.”

There you go - that’s respect for you. You didn’t think it meant catching real criminals, did you?

I know it’s been mentioned elsewhere: here, here and here for example, but the commons vote on the religious hatred bill yesterday was, without doubt a good day for democracy.

It comes to something when a government with a sizeable majority is defeated so soundly and is an indication of just how bad this bill was. It was clear from early in the bill’s passage through parliament that it was a potentially dangerous piece of legislation; a flawed attempt to curry favour with the Muslim community. Indeed, so flawed was it, that it was transparent as such; a crass and cheap attempt to secure the votes of Muslims who felt that their religious beliefs should enjoy the same protection as Christianity does under the blasphemy laws. On that, I would agree with them; there should be an equal footing and repealing these outdated laws would be the best remedy.

We are told that in the name of tolerance that we should respect peoples’ religious beliefs. No. Absolutely not. We should respect peoples’ right to practice freely their religious rites and beliefs; without fear of reprisal. We should be tolerant of peoples’ right to believe whatever they want to believe. But there is no reason whatsoever why we should respect the belief system itself. A law as daft and dangerous as this one would not make me respect Islam - I despise it now and I will continue to despise it for the mediaeval, misogynist and intolerant belief system that it is. Laws cannot change what we think - even though the apparatchicks of the Neu Labour elite seem to think they can. Thought crime may be made a crime in the event of laws such as this passing onto the statue book - but those thoughts will simply be whispered in the shadows. Far better to air them in the open. And, far better for Islam to realise that in this country, we can and will criticize and ridicule religious belief as we see fit. If that’s a problem; too bad.
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