The following text is from the Manchester Evening news - a recent interview with Judith Hackitt, Chair of the Health and Safety Executive. It is a refreshing and common sense approach that has long been mis-represented by some of the tabloid media.

We felt to just share this with you in full would be an enlightening read. Feel free to comment via Ask the Expert, giving your views or critique on the article.

Take a risk - it's good for your health - March 11, 2010

“There's a video on YouTube of a woman holding fistfuls of methane bubbles which are then ignited - a great tower of flame leaping from her hands. A group of schoolchildren look on.

Surely there are all kinds of health and safety rules about playing with fire in front of children?

But, no, the woman in the “flaming hands” clip is none other than Judith Hackitt, chair of the Health and Safety Executive. The idea is to show that spectacular science demonstrations should, with proper precautions, be taking place in schools.

While her job is to ensure the safety of every workplace, Hackitt's public role has also been to dispel the burgeoning myths about health and safety.

“It's one of the reasons I took on the job, because I was absolutely fed up with it,” she explains.

Soon after we sit down in the MediaCityUK marketing suite at Salford Quays she says warily: “You're going to ask me about conkers now, aren't you.”

I am..but not quite yet.

We're in a world of cranes, earth-movers and high-visibility jackets, and Hackitt is here to take a look at “one of the biggest construction sites in the country”.

She expects to find best practice here, and does, describing contractor Bovis Lend Lease's work at the 36-acre site as “truly impressive”.

But bad things still happen elsewhere every day.

“People continue to fall off things, whether it's ladders, platforms or whatever; people continue to have things dropped on them from a height, and the other is people getting knocked over and crushed by moving machinery,” she says.

In 2008/9, 180 workers were killed at work and 131,895 other injuries were reported.

Challenge

“There are some sectors that stand out as a continuing challenge. Construction is one – not so much large projects like this , but at the smaller business end,” says Hackitt, who worked for 25 years in the chemical industry. “Agriculture is an industry where there seems to be an alarming sense of 'That's just the way it is'. The fact is that one person a week dies in agriculture, still. It doesn't have to be dangerous any more than any other sector has to be dangerous.

“One area of growing concern for us is waste and recycling, from collection on streets to recycling facilities. Very often they are very primitive in terms of lots of conveyor belts, people sorting broken bottles and goodness knows what.”

It's not a boast we can often make these days, but Britain leads the world on health and safety, our accident statistics being the lowest, our safety strategies copied by many other nations.

And yet health and safety – or, more likely, “elf and safety” - is often seen as a byword for rule-bound, killjoy, nonsensical bureaucracy. The HSE's website has a long list of “elf and safety” myths: graduates told not to throw mortar boards, poles in fire stations banned, regulations meaning trapeze artists would have to wear hard hats, snowball-throwing deemed too dangerous and panto actors banned from throwing sweets into the audience.

Like conkers and goggles, these stories often have a grain of truth. A well-meaning but misguided headteacher did once tell pupils to wear safety goggles when playing conkers. The myth is that the HSE is behind such rules.

“The problem is this: people are afraid of being sued,” says Hackitt. “ They're afraid that if something happens, someone will make a claim against them, so they hide behind the excuse 'I can't do this because of health and safety'. The no win, no fee provision allows people to see whether there's anything in it for them.”

We have become a more risk-averse society, says Hackitt.

“The more you take the big risks out of society, the more people start worrying about things that really shouldn't matter,” she adds. “What we are starting to see, which worries me a great deal, is the extent to which over-protective parents in particular get the whole notion of risk out of proportion. They wrap their kids in cotton wool, and it's creating a bigger problem because you create some cosseted kid who thinks he's indestructible because he's never been exposed to risk. So when he comes up against risk, whether it's on a school trip or, worse still, when it comes to work, he looks around and says 'Who's looking after me, because that's not my job'.”

Hackitt's own two daughters, now aged 25 and 22, each took gap years before university, travelling alone to Mexico and Tanzania. They were given advice and some useful contact details, but otherwise the message was “You're on your own”.

“You reach a point where you have to let go,” she adds.

The HSE has been involved in producing a new, simplified risk assessment for school trips, aiming to reverse an increasing trend for schools to opt out of such activities.

“In some cases, it is because their local authority has handed them a risk assessment package which may be 40 or 50 pages long, and said 'You've got to fill this in for everything you do'. Our answer is, no, that's not what we want.”

The HSE's example of a risk assessment for a school trip runs to just three pages.

You wonder how much Hackitt blames the media for public antipathy towards “elf and safety”.

“The media has done what the media is paid to do – you pick up stories, ridiculous stories and print them,” she says. “The sad bit is that someone, somewhere has used health and safety as an excuse for can't be bothered, don't want to buy the insurance, just too lazy or whatever.”

You can view the original story and the comments and support received here