"Small mindedness" threat to good work on safety
November 5th 2007

The Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has hit out at “small-minded bureaucracy” which is in danger of undermining the good work done in the name of health and safety.

In his report for RoSPA’s annual review Tom Mullarkey said that this could impede rather than improve people’s freedom to live healthy and happy lives.

Such an approach gave ammunition to those seeking to ridicule “elf and safety”, and the resulting criticism could lead to casual indifference to the value of accident prevention.

Accidents lead to 12,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of serious injuries and millions of visits to accidents and emergency departments throughout the UK each year. They cost the country billions of pounds and put a strain on the National Health Service.

The figures show the need for accident prevention work, but RoSPA believes things should be “as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible”. The aim is to stand up for safety, but to get the balance right. The safety charity is working to dispel fears about excessive safety measures sometimes promoted by over-zealous officials and organisations.

The Society wants an intelligent debate about the issues. It is concerned about the way health and safety is sometimes used as an excuse to ban things or cancel events by people applying guidance too literally or failing to use common sense.

Tom Mullarkey said RoSPA had shown the way forward by insisting that children should not be wrapped in cotton wool. “A skinned knee or a twisted ankle in a challenging and exciting play environment is not only acceptable, it is a positive necessity to educate our children and to prepare them for a complex, dangerous world in which healthy, robust activity is more a national need than ever before,” he said.

RoSPA was the only organisation working across the whole range of accident and injury prevention, in workplace, road, home, leisure and education safety. “It is the one organisation which everyone knows they can turn to for cogent and balanced advice and support,” he said.

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