© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
We often hear from clients ‘Is all this “Elf ‘n’ Safety” nonsense necessary, it’s only a residential property after all!’ Sadly “Elf ‘n’ Safety” makes the job of the professional advisors so difficult to put over the very real legal obligations that face our Clients.
The formula of exaggeration, half-truth, generalisation and myth-making has created a great British joke, the one about health and safety gone mad. It’s entered our social fabric, something to be shared and ‘tut-tutted’ at over breakfast tables, in bars and, worse, in workplaces across the country.
About five years ago, health and safety stories started to add to the media’s familiar warning cry of “What’s the world coming to?”
The cumulative danger is that our Clients will turn their back on health and safety, encouraged to see it as more an irritation than a necessity.
Lately, and more worryingly, health and safety has become a political punch bag too. This started with David Cameron’s call for an end to our “over-the-top” health and safety culture and for cuts in health and safety legislation.
Most readers can see health and safety scare stories are driven by gross exaggeration or an excuse for reluctant insurance companies or even someone’s personal daft decision. The above points will all be attributed to a perceived increase in compensation culture. This, itself, is a myth that has run rife for years – claim numbers have, overall, remained flat.
You wouldn’t know it from the media but Britain has seen an 81 per cent fall in workplace deaths and a 72 per cent fall in other reported workplace injuries over the past 35 years. We benefit from having one of the best safety records in Europe. And it isn’t just workers that profit from this – savings to the economy and to society from lives saved are substantial, with some large employers estimating their savings at millions of pounds. This success story, largely untold, is partly down to the unsung heroes of health and safety, those who work so the rest of us can go home unharmed at the end of the day. But theirs isn’t a sexy story. Done well, health and safety works silently to prevent the bad news story from happening. Good health and safety is not, by its very nature, news.
So public understanding, and the media’s portrayal of health and safety, is left to stagger between more obvious images – from accidents and catastrophes, to a caricature world of dreary jobs-worth’s and what Jeremy Paxman referred to as “pointless bureaucrats imposing ludicrous requests on people”.
Mark Twain once said “a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. It’s time to call in the big health and safety lie from its travels before it leads to tragedy and hurt. And it’s time to give truth a chance to put on its shoes.
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Colin Welch MSC, FIIRSM, DIPSM is General Manager at 4Site Consulting Limited