{"id":1206,"date":"2010-09-19T23:56:24","date_gmt":"2010-09-19T22:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2010-10-19T17:12:14","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T16:12:14","slug":"safety-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/?p=1206","title":{"rendered":"Safety Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of late various organisations, like Scouts, schools or local councils, have been stopping various activities due to \u2018health and safety\u2019. The more ridiculous examples of this has been schools stopping kids playing conkers<\/a> in the playground to the stopping of the centuries old tradition of cheese rolling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reasons for this rise in the \u2018health and safety\u2019 culture is twofold – stupidity and money!<\/p>\n

A lot of the problems come from people\u2019s stupidity. So for example, they will try to go walking in the wilder upland areas of, say The Lake District, Snowdonia or Ben Nevis, for example, without proper route planning or being properly equipped for the conditions. They then have a problem or the weather suddenly changes for the worse and they are stuck. So they have to call out the Mountain Rescue<\/a> service, which like the RNLI<\/a> on the sea, is run by volunteers, to sort them out.<\/p>\n

The money part comes from the culture that has grown up that if there is an accident that someone is to \u2018blame\u2019 and they must pay a financial penalty. Here it is the problem of the \u2018no win no fee\u2019 injury ambulance chasers, sorry, lawyers and their \u2018if there is blame, there is a claim\u2019 slogans.<\/p>\n

All this has ended up that youth organisations and schools are reluctant to run activities or trips in case something goes wrong and they get sued to bits.<\/p>\n

As a Scout on a camp, I cut my hand with a bow saw and needed some stiches. My parents were very understanding and after ensuring I was ok asked if I was going back to camp! I did. However, if it were now and not 1984, they could have turned to my Scout Leader and told him that he and \/ or the Group were going to be sued for compensation. Of course if that were that case, they wouldn\u2019t have got too far as it was my own fault as I hadn’t secured the wood properly as I was told!<\/p>\n

Now of course at this point I need to say I am all in favour in doing things correctly and safely and that with any risky activities all possible precautions are taken. But that is the point, that although risks are taken, the potential problems have been though about (so you have a safety rope when rock climbing then?) and measures are in place to prevent them or people know what to do if something goes wrong.<\/p>\n

With all this in mind, it\u2019s interesting to read that the Government have commissioned a report<\/a> into this and it\u2019s about to be published (it could be an interesting read!). The idea being to cut down on the \u2018no win no fee\u2019 litigation and remove some of the unnecessary legislation.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, when published, it will be acted upon and the fear of kids being injured while playing conkers in the playground (I never remember getting an injury while playing conkers, other than a sore knuckle from being hit by a conker!) and the school being sued can be removed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of late various organisations, like Scouts, schools or local councils, have been stopping various activities due to \u2018health and safety\u2019. The more ridiculous examples of this has been schools stopping kids playing conkers in the playground to the stopping of the centuries old tradition of cheese rolling. The reasons for this rise in the \u2018health … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Safety Culture”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-scouts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paTxP-js","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}